Western producers are turning to the subcontinent as a cost-effective and skilful source of special effectsAlthough Danny Boyle's postapocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later is remembered for its live scenes of an eerily empty London, the sequel is likely to be noted for its shots of the British capital being hit with napalm at night. The complicated sequence for 28 Weeks Later, released yesterday by Fox Atomic, involved aerial shots of the city taken from a helicopter by day that were converted digitally into nighttime, with the destructive effects layered on top using 3D imaging and compositing. Nothing unusual so far, except that the shots were shuttled between graphic artists in London and Bombay in a collaborative effort that the producers suggest took postproduction offshoring to another level. Prime Focus, one of India's largest postproduction companies, handled the majority of the special effects for the film, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and starring Robert Carlyle, and split the work between its facilities in Soho and the subcontinent. The company has a presence in London after paying £4.7 million last year for a 55 per cent stake in VTR, a loss-making AIM-listed media company that specialises in back-end visual effects. It also bought Clear, a British digital effects and animation studio. A team of 25 artists in India and a team of 15 in London worked together on the project, implementing changes requested by the director right up until the delivery date. It is not the first time that an Indian postproduction house has worked on a Hollywood release - Spider-Man 2 and xXx: State of the Union also had Indian input - but Prime Focus believes that it has proved that an Indian enterprise can deliver high-quality creative work and is more than a destination for labour-intensive clean-up jobs. An English-speaking, nonunionised workforce and cost savings, compared with Europe and the United States, of between a third and two thirds - depending on the quality - are drawing film-makers to Indian postproduction facilities. An editing room costing $400 (£200) an hour in America costs $9 an hour in Bombay. The services of an Indian film editor can be secured for a month for $100 - the hourly rate for an American peer. Pressure to cut budgets - rarely adhered to because of inevitable shooting overruns - is causing more Western film producers to look overseas. The average cost of a Hollywood film rose this year for the first time in three years. "Hollywood studios cannot just go crazy spending money. They need to break the boundaries of imagination, but they have a business to run," Namit Malhotra, the managing director of Prime Focus, whose grandfather was the cinematographer on India's first colour film in the 1950s, said. "That is where India has an opportunity." The Indian market, led by Prime Focus, Adlabs and Prasad Group, is worth an estimated £13.5 million, according to a report this year by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy, and the Federation of Indian Commerce and Industry (Ficci). That is still tiny in the scheme of Bollywood's £2 billion film industry and Britain's £500 million postproduction sector, which includes Framestore, Moving Picture Company and Cinesite. The Indian animation market, which is more advanced than postproduction, is forecast to touch $1 billion by 2010. Yet the postproduction market is forecast to grow at more than 30 per cent a year as Hollywood exploits the potential and Bollywood, whose style is traditionally narrative, incorporates more special effects. A trade mission led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, to India in November is expected to create further links between Hollywood and Bollywood. Yet some US studios are already hedging their bets. In February, Sony Pictures Imageworks acquired a majority stake in FrameFlow, the Madras-based visual-effects and animation facility. It expects its new Indian unit to quadruple its workload in three years. Considerable doubts remain, however, about India's ability to deliver projects on schedule and to the requisite standard, although the technology employed in India rivals that of Europe and the US. Lack of experience is the main concern among overseas creative directors, who are fearful of losing editorial control. India as a primary postproduction destination still has a long way to go, analysts say. "I just came back from Paris, where I gave a presentation to 30 European companies, and many were not aware what was possible in India," Farokh Balsara, a media and entertainment consultant for Ernst & Young in India, said. "There is definitely a huge opportunity - the cost and efficiency benefits can no longer be ignored - but it will take two to three years before it becomes big business."