Locomotive shells on trucks, 500 ft long station, Shiv Rawail details ‘The Railway Men’ production design

Mumbai: Shiv Rawail, who is currently receiving a lot of positive response to his directorial debut ‘The Railway Men’, has detailed the production design of his series which tells the story of the courage of the railway employees at the Bhopal junction in the face of the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak.

The director shared that the Bhopal junction which is shown in the series was actually built at a ground in Mumbai University. The area of the station built was around 500 metres and it had everything moving just like a normal railway station.

Elaborating on the same, he told IANS: “The railway station was predominantly a big set and there was no other way than to build a station as it gave us the flexibility in terms of blocking and marking. We took a big ground near Kalina area of Mumbai in the Mumbai university. We flattened the ground out, built a runway and built a station 500 feet long with 2 platforms.”

The real magic were, however, that the trains and the locomotives which were built in a similar fashion to what auteur Christopher Nolan did in ‘Inception’, mounting locomotive shells over trucks.

The director further mentioned: “The cherry on top was that the trains used to move on the station. We built locomotive shells over trucks and had people driving those trucks. Just to be there and experience the set and witness the brilliance of the art department was truly magical.”

When asked about the role of VFX in his series, Shiv furnished a very thoughtful answer: “VFX is a tool in filmmaking which is used in addition to what is there in terms of production. Making everything on VFX isn’t cost-effective. We relied on the old-school filmmaking of practical effects to render an authenticity to the story. It makes the work so much easier for actors also as opposed to them acting against a green screen.”

‘The Railway Men’, produced by YRF, is streaming on Netflix.

–IANS