Prof. Ashish Jasuja of Parul University: From Visual Effects Studios to the Design Classroom

Most students entering visual effects believe the route in is a stack of software certificates. Professor Ashish Jasuja is a renowned FX Technical Director who now teaches at the Faculty of Design, Parul University. His own portfolio spans trending movies of Hollywood, Bollywood and global cinema such as Fast X, Brahmastra, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Bullet Train and Mickey 17. Over all these years, he has developed an epic craft of designing explosions, smoke, water and destruction that adds a wow factor to the movies. He also began his career through freelancing for 5,000 rupees a month.

Prof. Ashish Jasuja is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Design at Parul University and an experienced FX Technical Director in visual effects. Before moving into academia, he worked on award-winning films across Bollywood, Hollywood and international cinema.

The FX word in his title stands as a specific discipline because it’s one of the most trending, demanding and technically strong roles in the Visual Effects Industry. The FX Technical Director ideates and creates the phenomenon in a shot and ensures it’s in sync with the footage that was never shot with them!

• Fire, smoke and explosions: simulated combustion that behaves the way real combustion behaves.
• Destruction: buildings, vehicles and structures breaking apart under believable forces.
• Water and fluids: liquid simulation, from a splash to a flood.
• Particle effects: debris, sparks, dust and the thousands of small elements that make a shot feel real.

All of it has to integrate seamlessly with live-action footage and with computer-generated imagery. His stated credits, which span live-action features and animated series, describe a career built across both worlds.

• Live-action features: Fast X, Brahmastra, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Mickey 17, Bullet Train, Haunted Mansion, Devotion, Peter Pan, Skyforce, Ikkis, Thamma, Roar: The Tigers of the Sundarbans, Bilal, Survivor and Olympus.
• Animated series and features: Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight, The Croods: Family Tree, Fast and Furious: Spy Racers, Mighty Little Bheem and Kung Fu Dhamaka.

Work of that kind is never solitary. Across those projects, he coordinated with directors, visual effects supervisors, animators, and lighting and compositing departments, inside international studio pipelines running to tight deadlines. That combination, technical depth alongside the ability to work inside a large production machine, is exactly what he now tries to build in students.

“Every visual effect starts with imagination. The job is to drag it into something that looks real.”

Prof. Jasuja’s route into the industry is the part of his story students find hardest to believe, and the part he considers most instructive. He began with a Bachelor of Science in Animation, where an interest in animation, visual storytelling and digital content took hold, and followed it with a postgraduate specialisation in advanced 3D for visual effects at a specialist media school, which gave him production workflow and advanced techniques.

Then came the difficult years. He started out freelancing at five thousand rupees a month, doing work connected to characters such as Chhota Bheem and Kung Fu Panda. He was living in Mumbai on that income, balancing family commitments, social pressure and the ordinary financial reality of an unestablished creative career. He did not leave.

What he did instead is the lesson. Rather than waiting for opportunities to arrive, he pursued studios directly, built contacts with industry professionals, and took internships wherever they appeared. He spent his own time on research and development, working independently on experiments and projects that grew his portfolio. That persistence produced a first job as a Junior FX Artist at a production studio in Pune, and the work compounded from there into projects like Fast and Furious and Brahmastra.

He is candid that the path involved failure, financial strain and periods of self-doubt, and he tells students to expect all three. His position is that where a career starts matters far less than whether a person keeps going, and that difficulty is not evidence of being on the wrong path.

This is where Prof. Ashish Jasuja is most useful and most blunt. The common student belief is that learning a few software packages and collecting certificates leads to a job. In his account, that belief misreads the industry entirely.

Visual effects are a skill-driven industry. Expertise, creativity and problem-solving weigh far more heavily than the number of certificates a candidate holds or the number of courses they have taken. Studios and production houses, he says, decide primarily on two things.

• The quality of the portfolio: It demonstrates technical skill, creative thinking and an understanding of how production works, in a way a certificate cannot.
• Demonstrated problem-solving in production: Evidence of having solved real production problems, not of having completed coursework.

Employers, in his experience, consistently prefer candidates who can prove ability through finished projects over candidates who present certifications. The distinction is simple: a certificate records attendance, a portfolio records capability.

He also explains why studios are so careful, which students rarely consider. Hiring a fresher is expensive. A company invests in onboarding, infrastructure, production training, mentoring and the work of absorbing a new person into a professional system. Because that investment is substantial, candidates are assessed thoroughly, and most studios run a probation or training period of roughly three months to evaluate technical performance, adaptability, learning ability, discipline and professional attitude.

“A certificate records attendance. A portfolio records capability. Studios are buying the second one.”

Internships, in his framing, are the bridge between academic learning and industry practice. They put a student inside a production environment, with real workflows, real clients and real deadlines. But he is careful to add that an internship alone guarantees nothing. What employers respond to is sincerity, professionalism, initiative, a willingness to take responsibility, and contribution to research and development without being asked. That is the same argument made by design students who found industry experience early, discussed in the Parul Institute of Design internship profile, and it is why industry readiness at Parul University is treated as a curriculum concern rather than a final-year afterthought.

Asked what most commonly separates students from the industry they want to enter, Prof. Ashish Jasuja identifies a single deficiency: production-level training.

Students frequently arrive with sound theoretical knowledge and genuine software ability. What they lack is an understanding of how a production pipeline runs inside a professional studio, which is a different kind of knowledge entirely. The industry runs on teamwork, communication, problem-solving, deadline management, and the discipline of fitting creative ideas into a production process that has its own constraints.

His conclusion follows directly, and it is a challenge to educators rather than to students. Institutions cannot stop at the theoretical part of a concept; they have to give students production-level experience while they are still studying. A graduate who has only ever worked alone, to their own deadline, on their own idea, has not yet done the job they are applying for.

His teaching follows from his diagnosis. The stated aim is not academic success but industry readiness: graduates who can meet the requirements of actual production. That produces a method that is deliberately practical.

• Production-oriented tasks: Work is structured the way studio work is structured, not the way assignments usually are.
• Lab work and professional software: Hands-on time with the tools the industry runs on, including Houdini, Maya and Nuke.
• Problem-solving over instruction: Students find their own routes to a solution rather than receiving one.
• Research and development beyond the syllabus: Experimenting with techniques and technologies that no curriculum has caught up with yet.

He asks students to think and work like professionals from the first day rather than from the final year. Software skills are necessary, but he treats understanding the whole production process, from planning through to delivery, as equally important, because that is what a studio actually needs a new hire to understand.

Teamwork carries the same weight. No individual makes a feature film or completes a visual effects project alone; every successful project depends on coordination between departments and specialists. So he pushes students to collaborate, support colleagues, accept feedback and contribute to shared work, and he is explicit that this is also how people become Team Leads, Technical Directors and Supervisors later. Collaboration is not only a better practice, but it is the path upward. And to follow the same direction, you can enrol in the B.Sc in Animation and VFX program to get end-to-end guidance from professors & industry experts.

Alongside that, he wants independent learners. His view is that creativity does not live in the software; it lives in observation, imagination and experiment. Software will change, and technology will keep moving, but the underlying principles hold, which is why he insists students master fundamentals before advanced techniques. That approach fits a Faculty of Design at Parul University built around practical studios and facilities, including a film and journalism studio, where students work with professional tools rather than only reading about them.

Prof. Jasuja describes Parul University as one of the fastest-growing universities in India, and points to its NAAC A++ accreditation, its facilities, and above all its focus on industry-based education as what drew him. Parul University is accredited with an A++ grade by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council with a CGPA of 3.55, and holds recognition from the University Grants Commission, with programmes aligned to the National Education Policy 2020 published by the Ministry of Education.

What he says he wanted was an environment where he could help produce genuinely skilled students. His aim is specific rather than sentimental: that his students leave fluent in 3D software, familiar with the production process, and able to meet the standards professional studios expect. That is a measurable objective, and it is the same one his industry career equipped him to judge.

The wider context is favourable. India’s animation, visual effects, gaming and comics sector is a recognised growth area, supported at the national level through the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and demand for trained visual effects professionals continues to grow with it. A faculty member with international production credits is a direct line between a classroom in Vadodara and the studios doing that work.

His counsel to students is consistent with everything above and worth stating plainly.

Underneath the specifics sits a simpler claim about scope. In his view, visual effects imposes no fixed ceiling or predetermined career path: once a professional establishes themselves through good work, consistency and reliability, they can move toward greater responsibility and more complex projects. Growth is governed by talent, work and determination rather than by a rigid ladder.

He also insists that imagination alone produces nothing. In his account, a good result comes only through constant reviewing, revising and improving, iterating on an effect until it reads as real. Discipline, professionalism and time management are what let an artist hold quality and deadline together, which he calls one of the most valuable skills a new visual effects artist can develop.

Seeing his work on a cinema screen, appreciated by audiences worldwide, is what he describes as the reward that keeps him learning. His message to students is that success is not determined by where a person starts, but by persistence, humility, curiosity and a genuine love of the craft.