Our film production services are built as a single production unit working out of India. A production that comes to us does not assemble a separate vendor for the shoot, another for the paperwork and a third for the money side. The same unit runs the line production on the floor, structures the rebate claim, holds the production accounting, and handles remake rights and adaptation where the project needs them. This page sets out what we actually do in India, organised as the service layers a feature, series, commercial or OTT production draws on, and how those layers fit together so a budget is executed and recovered as one piece of work rather than four.
India is where the unit is based and where the depth is. Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru and Delhi each carry their own crew, studio and equipment base, and a production routed through them can scale up or down without importing specialists. We keep the geography honest: a shoot is planned around the Indian hubs and locations that fit the script, and the international corridors a production might also use are served by their own dedicated pages rather than diluted into this one.
What the Production Unit Covers
Our film production services in India run as connected layers, each held by the same unit so they reinforce rather than duplicate one another:
- Line production: crew, studios, equipment, scheduling and on-floor budget control across India’s hubs.
- Film production: end-to-end execution for features, OTT series, commercials and documentaries, from pre-production through wrap.
- Remake rights and adaptation: chain of title, licence scope, and territory and language grants.
- Rebate and incentive engineering: structuring qualifying spend for the central India Cine Hub rebate and the state schemes.
- Production accounting and audit: segregated qualifying-spend records and the audited claim that turns the rebate into cash.
Line and Film Production Across India
The core of the service is execution: line production and full film production across India’s hubs. That means crew, studios, equipment, scheduling and budget control, run by an accountable producer rather than coordinated across loosely connected vendors. We build the crew to the format, book studio and backlot time against a busy calendar, consolidate camera, grip, lighting and transport through a coherent set of suppliers, and hold the schedule once the shoot is underway and changes begin to land. The day-to-day discipline of sequencing studio windows, cast availability and location days is where most of the cost on an Indian shoot is won or lost.
The unit works across formats. A studio-based feature, a multi-location OTT series, a fast-turnaround commercial and a documentary each demand a different crew shape, schedule and vendor mix, and the production is built to the format rather than forced through a single template. For international productions, the unit also carries the practical machinery that makes an Indian shoot run: equipment import under carnet, foreign-crew coordination, and the permit and clearance tracks that sit alongside the shoot.
India’s Production Hubs
The depth is spread across five hubs, and the unit draws on whichever the project needs. Mumbai holds the deepest crew, studio and post base in the country and is the default for OTT and feature work. Hyderabad brings Ramoji Film City and large-format studio capacity. Chennai anchors the southern crew and studio belt with strong port and carnet handling. Bengaluru carries one of India’s deepest VFX and post-production talent pools. Delhi and the NCR cover the north, with access to the capital’s institutional locations and the wider Rajasthan and Himalayan circuits. A production routed through these hubs scales without importing specialists, and the regional teams report into one budget and schedule rather than operating as separate vendors.
Because the unit covers the whole country, a production can run a multi-city schedule under one line of accountability: a Mumbai studio build, a Hyderabad backlot at Ramoji, a Rajasthan location leg and a Kerala unit can sit inside a single plan rather than a chain of handoffs. The full execution layer, from recce through wrap, is what our line producer India network delivers, with the regional teams feeding into one budget and one schedule.
Remake Rights and Adaptation
The first service layer beyond execution is IP. Indian and international producers increasingly come to India not only to shoot but to acquire and adapt stories, and remake rights are a distinct piece of work with its own legal and commercial mechanics. We handle the chain of title, the scope of the adaptation licence, the territory and language grants, and the structuring that keeps a remake clean to finance and distribute. Getting this right early matters: an adaptation built on an unclear rights position is expensive to fix in post and harder to clear for release.
Running rights and production inside one unit is the advantage. The team that will physically make the film is the same team that scoped the licence, so the adaptation is planned against what can actually be shot and budgeted in India rather than negotiated in the abstract. The detail of acquisition, options and adaptation licensing is set out on our dedicated remake rights India page, which this service layer feeds into.
The shape of the deal varies with the project. Some come in as a clean acquisition of an existing title for an Indian remake; others as an option while a script is developed, a single-language adaptation, or a cross-language remake that has to clear rights in more than one territory. Each has a different cost and risk profile, and matching the right structure to the production at the start keeps the financing and the eventual distribution clean.
Film Rebates and Incentive Engineering
The second layer is the money: India’s film rebates and incentives, engineered into the budget rather than chased after the shoot. A foreign film or official co-production can claim the central India Cine Hub rebate of 30% of qualifying Indian spend, plus up to 5% for Significant Indian Content and up to 5% for Indian manpower, capped at ₹30 crore, and layer a state subsidy on top where the shoot location offers one. Rajasthan pays up to 30% with a ₹3 crore feature cap, Madhya Pradesh runs slabs to ₹10 crore for international films, and the southern states each operate their own modest schemes. We identify which combination applies to a specific production before locations are locked, and structure qualifying spend so the production rebate is real.
The national mechanism, eligibility and stacking detail sits in our guide to the tax benefits filming in India, with the state-by-state picture in the Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh handbooks. As a service layer, rebate engineering is only as good as the documentation behind it, which is why it runs directly into production accounting rather than sitting in a separate silo.
Part of the engineering is knowing what does not qualify. Spend incurred outside India, fees paid to non-Indian cast and crew, capital and legal costs abroad, equipment carried in on a carnet rather than hired locally, and post-production completed overseas all fall outside the central claim, while spend routed through registered Indian entities counts. Designing the budget so the qualifying share is genuinely high, rather than discovering after the shoot that a large slice never qualified, is the difference between a headline rate and a real one.
Production Accounting and Audit
The layer that makes the rebate real is accounting. A rebate is paid against audited accounts of qualifying spend, so the recovery is set not by the headline percentage but by how cleanly the production’s expenditure is segregated, evidenced and reconciled during the shoot. We hold the production accounting as part of the unit: qualifying versus non-qualifying spend tracked from the first day of pre-production, vendor and GST records kept against the eligibility conditions, manpower percentages documented across the schedule, and the audit prepared so the claim is filed against numbers that stand up rather than reconstructed from raw invoices afterward. Our full approach to finance and audit in Indian film production sets out how the accounting is structured to survive a rebate audit.
This is the layer most productions underestimate. Crews that treat incentive accounting as a post-production task consistently leave money unrecovered, either because qualifying transactions cannot be verified or because the manpower and content conditions were not evidenced as the shoot ran. By holding the accounting inside the same unit that runs the line production, the documentation is built as the spend happens, which is the difference between recovering the headline figure and a fraction of it.
One Production Unit, From India
The reason to run all of this through one unit is that the layers depend on each other. The line producer who sequences the studio window is also protecting the qualifying-spend split that the rebate depends on. The accountant evidencing manpower percentages is working to conditions the production team has to hit on the floor. The rights position scoped at the start determines what can be shot and where the spend lands. Split across separate vendors, those dependencies break, and the cost shows up as lost recovery and stalled schedules.
What we offer, then, is not a menu of disconnected services but a production unit based in India that executes the shoot, structures the rights, engineers the rebate and holds the accounting as a single piece of work. The international corridors a production might also use are real, but they are served by their own teams and pages; this unit is built to make a film in India and to recover everything the production is entitled to while doing it. We are glad to scope a specific project, in any format, against the layers it actually needs.
