As a child, Vinay Sastha R found his imagination fired by films like The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series.
India is a relatively cheap place to create such artwork and the adoption of cloud computing has made it easy for Indian workers to contribute to projects based overseas. Nevertheless he is confident the market will recover. And the next challenge for the Indian industry could be finding enough staff.
"The child who has taken up this course should be motivated by well know people in the industry, so VFX and animation becomes popular, and parents are not reluctant to let children pick this field," he says. So it might not be easy to find the money for visual effects courses and the expensive hardware and software needed for training.
It has already "changed the way films are made" according to Keitan Yadav a VFX producer and chief operating officer at Mumbai-based Red Chillies Entertainment.