Projects —
the studios, the companies, the platform.

Founded in 2005, Ocher Studios turned Soundarya’s freelance design practice into a company. It specialised in visual effects and pre-production services for features, opening with Chandramukhi and growing to a team of around eighty within three years.

In 2008 the studio signed an agreement with Warner Bros. Entertainment to partner on producing and distributing Tamil films — at the time an unusual direct arrangement between a Hollywood studio and an independent Chennai house.

Ocher also developed Sultan: The Warrior, a 3D animated feature with Rajinikanth voicing the lead, in co-production with Adlabs Films and planned for release in multiple languages. A teaser was released and pre-production advanced; the film was ultimately dropped.

The production banner Soundarya founded and owns, and the vehicle for her debut as a producer: Goa, released in 2010.

The move mattered more than the single credit suggests. Producing a film is the point at which a designer stops being commissioned and starts commissioning — choosing which stories are worth the expense of telling, and on what terms.

Considered as a project rather than a film, Kochadaiiyaan was an infrastructure exercise. There was no photorealistic performance-capture pipeline in India in 2011, so one had to be assembled: capture at Pinewood Studios in London, animation distributed across studios in the United States, Hong Kong and China, and a post chain capable of delivering six language versions simultaneously.

The creative roster matched the ambition — A. R. Rahman on music, K. S. Ravikumar on screenplay, Resul Pookutty on sound design, Peter Hein on action and Neeta Lulla on costume, with Rajinikanth in a triple role and Deepika Padukone making her Tamil debut.

Reviews divided over the animation and the film did not recover its budget. The technical achievement was recognised separately, at the NDTV Indian of the Year awards.

Established on 3 September 2018 in Chennai, May6 Entertainment is a film and television content company working across the whole production chain: creative writing, storyline development and casting in pre-production; filming; and a post-production process the company describes as finishing a film frame by frame — motion graphics, sound engineering, visual effects and distribution strategy.

Its stated focus is independent films, original series and documentaries with character-driven narratives, and its stated vision is “to produce top notch quality content that resonates with regional and global audiences”.

Announced in March 2024, this was May6 Entertainment’s move into streaming: an original series for Prime Video, set in the 1970s and following a cartel, directed by Noah with a cast led by Ashok Selvan, Nimisha Sajayan and Nassar.

Soundarya is credited as creative producer — the design sensibility applied at the scale of an entire series rather than a single film.

Hoote Global Technologies was set up in March 2021; that October, Rajinikanth launched Hoote — a social platform built entirely around the human voice. Instead of text posts, users publish sixty-second voice notes.

It was announced as the first voice-based social networking platform launched from India, planned for availability in fifteen Indian and ten international languages, with the specific ambition of letting audiences hear a public figure speak in their own language rather than read a transcription of it.

The idea came from a voice note her father sent her while shooting Annaatthe. The name comes from the call of the owl — long read as a symbol of wisdom.

Soundarya founded Zion Films in 2025. Its first production, With Love, was launched in Chennai on 24 November 2025, made together with MRP Entertainment and produced by Soundarya Rajinikanth, Pasilian Nazerath and Magesh Raj Pasilian.

Directed by Madhan, the film gives Abishan Jeevinth — the director of Tourist Family — his first lead role, opposite Anaswara Rajan, with music by Sean Roldan and cinematography by Shreyaas Krishna. Rajinikanth released the title teaser.