Deconstructing the Director's Aesthetic
When legendary filmmaker and composer Sanjay Leela Bhansali curated his debut independent ghazal album, Sukoon, the expectations for its visual presentation were exceptionally high. Known for his rigid, majestic, and deeply intricate art direction, Bhansali's team demanded that the digital assets evoke the same grand, poetic weight as his films.
Working internally at Saregama, I received the melancholic track "Siva Tere" long before the final album structure or other tracks were locked. The core mandate from the creative team at Sanjay Leela Bhansali (SLB) Productions was precise yet challenging: there must be constant, meaningful motion within the frame at any given point. This was an extension of the visual philosophy that I would have to execute during the lyrical campaigns for Gangubai Kathiawadi.
The project arrived with high pressure. A separate internal team had already pitched multiple production cuts, all of which were rejected by the filmmaker's team. My department head tasked me with developing alternate directions.
Pitching the Vision
Initially, my manager instructed me to compile three separate short variations based on traditional design guidelines to send for corporate feedback. Recognizing the underlying intent of the brief that SLB Productions did not want arbitrary animation, but rather a cohesive spatial narrative where motion felt intentional. I asked for an autonomous runway to develop a fourth concept.
I requested a trial run over just two lines of lyrics. Operating within standard timeline pressures, I rapidly built a concept pitch in After Effects' default 3D space, arranging 2D plane cutouts of coffee cups and discarded papers to create the spatial illusion of a writer's desk. The typography mapped across these moving elements.
While the production house turned down the three corporate pitches, they immediately greenlit my experimental 3D demo.
3D Environment Design & Material Architecture
With the concept officially approved, I transitioned the project from flat 2D layers into an intricate, full 3D pipeline. Having never utilized Element 3D before this project, I adopted it aggressively to bridge the gap between heavy 3D assets and After Effects' native animation workflow.
Asset Curation & Mesh Optimization:Blender Integration.
Sourced authentic, royalty-free 3D assets from specialized libraries like Sketchfab and BlenderKit. Imported objects into Blender to strip away excess polygons, simplify complex meshes, and optimize data loads before exporting clean .fbx geometry.
Scene Composition & Layout:Element 3D Engine.
Reconstructed the entire environment inside After Effects using Element 3D. Art directed a complex "Writer’s Desk" scene, arranging thematic components including vintage typewriters, scattered books, folder structures, pens, and coffee cups to reflect the track's poetic isolation.
Color Grading & Atmospheric Lighting:High-Contrast Mono.
Stripped away all raw material color maps, shifting the entire 3D landscape into an absolute black-and-white colorspace. Dialed in moody, high-contrast spotlighting and digital shadows to accentuate textures and capture the track's melancholic mood.
Typographic Tracking:AE Native 3D Space.
Mapped the lyric typography and virtual camera movements using After Effects' native 3D system. Projected text layers directly over the contours of the 3D objects, allowing the lens to sweep seamlessly through a unified workspace.
Design Takeaway: By isolating the 3D object properties inside Element 3D while anchoring the camera and typography to After Effects' global 3D space, I achieved deep spatial parallax without sacrificing absolute control over text synchronization.
The Results
The calculated gamble to ignore safe design conventions paid off, delivering a distinct visual companion to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s non-film musical debut.
Platform Deployment: Published as the official lyrical feature on the main Saregama Music YouTube channel.
Audience Reach: Secured a permanent digital footprint, accumulating over 290K+ views on the official upload.
Workflow Legacy: Proven case study demonstrating how utilizing external 3D libraries with intelligent mesh optimization can yield high-end, studio-approved cinematic content under standard timeline constraints.
