Artists at work at Filaments visual effects studio. Telegraph picture

Patna, Aug. 29: Quick quiz question. Which Indian city connects Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol, I Robot 3D, The Legend of Zorro, The Happening, Titanic 3D, Battleship, Piranha 3D, Immortals, Spy Kid 4, Pirates of the Caribbean and Water for Elephants?

If you answered Patna, take a bow.

A dusty road in Kidwaipuri locality leads to a small, nondescript building which is the rather unlikely address for Filaments Visual Effects studio. Inside the building, crack techies give finishing touches to Hollywood movies, many of which, like Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol, have gone on to become blockbusters.

The Patna studio specialises in rotoscoping, digital painting (wire-rig-removal /clean plating), 3D matchmoving and has worked on major Hollywood productions, including the Tom Cruise film and The Legend of Zorro.

Headquartered in California, Filaments’ production facility was started in the Bihar capital in 2004 by Amit Dhawal, a Patna boy now based in Los Angeles.

“We started the studio in Patna as a team of four members after I gained some experience while working as animator with some Hollywood production houses. I saw that many visual effects artists working in the country and abroad are from Bihar, so I thought why not tap them there, in their homeland. This is how it started,” Dhawal, 35, told The Telegraph over phone from the US.

“Initially we mainly focused on the right talent with lots of planning. We started to do the research and development and experimented with the workflow. We struggled for about a year to hand-train a few very good people. Once we had a strong team and started delivering consistent, A-grade work, we began carefully hiring and training more people,” he said.