They say movies are magic and much of that magic is being woven quietly in studios you’ve never heard of. In Bengaluru’s Whitefield, a modest apartment transformed into a battleground of digital effects as VFX artists stitched together explosive scenes, disappearing cities, and missile arcs all for a blockbuster thousands of miles away. No grand studio. No red carpet. Just passion, pixels, and persistence.

Take Mayank Tiwari, for instance once a mining engineer in Ranchi, now a compositor for Hollywood. “I sat in my shorts, sipping chai, compositing the explosions,” he laughs, recalling how high stakes visuals were crafted from a simple swivel chair. This kind of remote, talent-driven model is becoming the backbone of global film production. But as these “invisible VFX armies” expand, new threats emerge from above namely, tariffs and the looming shadow of AI. 

The question posed in the Times of India: Can tariffs be the kiss of death? The simple answer, for now, is: probably not at least not yet. Indian VFX houses argue their work is largely service-based, digital, and borderless. Tariffs on physical goods rarely map well onto intellectual and creative services. 

Still, lurking in the background is a far more existential rival: artificial intelligence. Many VFX professionals worry that AI tools could supplant human artists by automating effects, compositing, or background generation. Where a team once spent weeks stitching frames, generative tools might offer crisper results in hours. 

The resilience of India’s VFX sector is rooted in flexibility, cost advantages, and creative strength. Tariffs may disrupt, but not obliterate. Yet AI could rewrite the rules entirely turning painstaking human craft into scalable algorithmic output.

So while the tariff threat makes headlines, the silent revolution may be happening in code, not customs. Behind every blockbuster shot, there’s a network of artists, often spread across continents, collaborating in the shadows. Their future, though, may not rest on trade policies but on whether human imagination can continue to outask the machines.

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