When Gandhi met Generative AI

Stills from the ad film

In Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), Rajkumar Hirani cast Dilip Prabhavalkar to play Mahatma Gandhi. Two decades later, he has gone a step further - he cast Gandhi himself. Teaming up with Studio Blo, Hirani set out to unite multiple generations of the Bajaj family in a single narrative - 100 Years Of Bajaj - as a tribute to Jamnalal Bajaj. The nine-minute film blend performance capture, voice and facial cloning, theatre performances, and AI-generated visuals.

Rajkumar Hirani

For the studio, the project doubled as a masterclass in filmmaking. "We only pick up projects that challenge us to evolve the tech and our craft. Hirani's discipline as an editor and a director was the biggest learning for us. The meticulous detail with which he plans his shots and the attention to every single frame is what we learnt the most," said Rishabh Suri, co-founder of Studio Blo.

(L-R) Joel James, Rishabh Suri, and Dipankar Mukherjee

The studio transposed real performances onto AI clones to recreate historical figures. Dipankar Mukherjee, co-founder, shares that actors underwent rigorous workshops "to pick up the individual mannerisms of the people they were playing". "Raju sir is an incredibly progressive, innovative and fearless filmmaker. He had a clear vision of how he wanted the final shot to look like, which made it easy for us to achieve the final output."

A still from ‘Eye of the Storm'; (right) A still from ‘Warlord'

Hirani wanted to bring the same sensitivity and attention to detail that audiences have come to associate with his portrayal of Gandhi in Lage Raho Munna Bhai. "This is the second time we were cloning the Mahatma and his voice," shares co-founder Joel James. While challenging, he says they fell in love with how the director "humanised Gandhiji". "He gave him a sense of humour and made him loveable. Besides the look, Raju sir paid attention to how the actor portrayed him, laughed, and joked."

Shekhar Kapur