31/10/2025
Baahubali Re-Release = Re-Happy Firefly!
We were happy and proud back in 2015. It's a bit different now: we feel happy and better in 2025.
During our early pre-production tenure in Baahubali, we had created and pitched a methodology to pivot the movie into an entirely larger creative & business scale. Some of us called it Design Methodology. Or Visual Design. Or The World of Baahubali. Though we could only express it in unfamiliar terms to the filmmakers, Director SS Rajamouli Sir sensed something vital in it and took a giant leap-of-faith in us. THANK YOU SIR!
And as the methodology unfolded, as we wrestled with it over nine super-charged months, as the jigsaw pieces began to fit together... the movie went into filming, and upon its two-part release, became a milestone in Indian cinema.
We were happy and proud that we had contributed something of such fundamental importance to the movie. But the real impact of our contribution was still a claim, a possibility yet to be tested by the future.
Ten years on, Baahubali is still smashing it! Driven by Producer Shobu Yarlagadda Sir's adoption and advocacy of our method - THANK YOU SIR! - the movies themselves continue to immerse audiences and evolve into other media. What we did not label clearly is now called "World Building" and several other filmmakers are attempting it successfully. What we had proposed intensely and nervously in 2013 or so, seems to have become an aspirational method to bring creative and business scale to movies.
Which is why we feel a bit different now: Happy and better. Grateful to the filmmakers for the faith in us, for the acknowledgement. Happy for all the illustrators who worked with us during those intense months. We hope you too have imbibed some of our "how to work without references" creative spirit!
Here's wishing Baahubali a great re-release! It's only getting bigger from hereon!
The Baahubali Bible is the foundation of the franchise's detailed universe. Producer Shobu Yarlagadda, in an exclusive interview with India Today, talked about the world building, the massive bible that governs the franchise.
