Aamir Khan in his Mangal Pandey look

Three years, Rs 100 crore, a twirl and a trim of a moustache later, 1857: The Rising has finally landed up where it was supposed to have camped for months: Calcutta.

Now with a new title, Ketan Mehta?s magnum opus The Rising: Legend of Mangal Pandey is all set to breeze through town for some ?pick-up images for the film?.

With Mangal Pandey ready on the edit table and special effects being incorporated, the Rising crew is here to capture outside shots of British Raj locations, ?like the Fort William and National Library?.

Confirming the shoot, producer Bobby Bedi told Metro on Tuesday: ?Yes, we are very much shooting in Calcutta for the next couple of days. We are canning some historical exteriors to establish the period that the film is set in.?

While the main cast of Aamir Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Amisha Patel and Tobey Stephens will be missing in action, the shots will feature foreigners and armymen of that period. ?Around seven foreigners will be needed for the shoot,? said Jikesh Shah, who is coordinating the cast in Calcutta. ?Initially, the shots were to be canned in the Indian Museum too, but now it will only be at Fort William and National Library.?

The Calcutta shots will be added at the start of the period piece, which is ?an epic tale of friendship, love, loss and betrayal? set against the backdrop of the 1857 Mutiny.

?Although the editing is complete, those images will help give a flavour of the period,? said the film?s award-winning editor Sreekar Prasad.

Ironically, the film's extensive research work about rifles, cartridges, costumes and Bengal's topography had started at the National Library and the Fort William, apart from the Victoria Memorial and the Geological Survey of India.

Arguably the costliest film to come out of India, The Rising was initially slated for a June release but with all this added action, it is now aiming for an August Friday to be unleashed internationally.

Initially, a major part of the film was to be shot in Barrackpore where Mangal Pandey had revolted one March afternoon in 1857, sparking the first war of independence.

But finally it was the Barrackpore recreated by award-winning art director Nitin Desai's sets and Mehta's fancy special effects company Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics that provided the picture-perfect setting.

'The original Barrackpore setting was not only congested but also not appealing enough cinematically. So we chose to shoot in specially-created sets in places like Satara, Kolapur, Pune, Panchgani and Mahabaleshwar,' said Dibyendu Bhattacharyya, who plays Kripashankar Singh, one of Mangal Pandey's five allies.