Akshay Kumar along with Vidya Balan, Taapsee Pannu, Sonakshi Sinha, Nithya Menen and Kirti Kulhari are set to recreate the iconic team, who executed Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) of November 2013, in their upcoming film, Mission Mangal. Directed by Jagan Shakti, the film is based on an inspiring real incident, but the script has taken a few liberties for the sake of drama. It is positioned as a fictional story, and all the characters and their names have been changed. Interestingly, for the film's shoot, Jagan had to recreate ISRO at a Mumbai studio and it apparently took production designer Sandeep Sharad Ravade - of Baby and Parmanu fame, two-and-a-half-months to replicate ISRO at Film City.
Talking about the challenges he faced despite having a team of 100 people, Sandeep told a leading daily, "We could not enter ISRO. A day before our visit, the appointment was cancelled. But our director had visited ISRO multiple times with his production team, and based on their conversation, books and Google research we built the set at Film City." Revealing that creating satellites was the biggest task, he added, "It wasn’t only about replicating the original 1.5 metres satellite but also previous models like Rohini for display in the lobby. No CGI was used."
Furthermore, Sandeep disclosed that ninety per cent of what the audience will see on screen is created by the design team. "We had to create ISRO and not NASA, so the brief was to keep it simple, yet real." Last but not the least, he gave us an insight into they recreated rockets and said, "We didn’t have a studio big enough to house the original 145-feet rocket so we built a 27-feet nose and an 18-feet tail, the rest is visual effects."
Mission Mangal is set to release on August 15.
(Source: Mumbai Mirror)
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