Between the Headphones: Listening to the Practitioner 1527562999, 9781527562998
Sound is a new area of interest in the Arts and Humanities. The study of sound in cinema has only recently been establis
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Table of contents :
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
References
Part II
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part III
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
References
Biographies and Filmographies
Acknowledgements
Citation preview
Between the Headphones
Between the Headphones: Listening to the Practitioner By
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Between the Headphones: Listening to the Practitioner By Budhaditya Chattopadhyay This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6299-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6299-8
CONTENTS
Part I: Introduction Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................... 2 Studies of Film Sound in India Chapter 2 ..................................................................................................... 4 Drawing the Trajectories of Sound Production Chapter 3 ..................................................................................................... 6 Creative Intervention with Location “Sync” Sound Chapter 4 ..................................................................................................... 8 Use of Ambience as an Artistic Element Chapter 5 ................................................................................................... 10 Inter/intra-viewing and Auto-ethnography Chapter 6 ................................................................................................... 12 Co-listening with the Sound Practitioners References ................................................................................................. 15 Part II: Interviews Chapter 7 ................................................................................................... 20 Shyam Benegal Chapter 8 ................................................................................................... 33 Jyoti Chatterjee Chapter 9 ................................................................................................... 74 Anup Deb Chapter 10 ................................................................................................. 98 Anup Mukherjee
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Contents
Chapter 11 ............................................................................................... 131 Hitendra Ghosh Chapter 12 ............................................................................................... 149 Dileep Subramaniam Chapter 13 ............................................................................................... 172 Nakul Kamte Chapter 14 ............................................................................................... 194 Aloke Dey Chapter 15 ............................................................................................... 202 Resul Pookutty Chapter 16 ............................................................................................... 237 Ajith A. George Chapter 17 ............................................................................................... 259 Vikram Joglekar Chapter 18 ............................................................................................... 281 Baylon Fonseca Chapter 19 ............................................................................................... 309 Subash Sahoo Chapter 20 ............................................................................................... 331 Manas Choudhury and Bobby John Chapter 21 ............................................................................................... 354 Vinod Subramanian Chapter 22 ............................................................................................... 384 P M Satheesh Chapter 23 ............................................................................................... 423 Bishwadeep Chatterjee Chapter 24 ............................................................................................... 446 Kunal Sharma
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Chapter 25 ............................................................................................... 459 Gissy Michael Chapter 26 ............................................................................................... 482 Pramod Thomas Chapter 27 ............................................................................................... 502 Amala Popuri Chapter 28 ............................................................................................... 520 Dipankar Chaki Chapter 29 ............................................................................................... 545 Pritam Das Chapter 30 ............................................................................................... 561 Anish John Chapter 31 ............................................................................................... 591 Sukanta Majumdar Chapter 32 ............................................................................................... 613 Hitesh Chaurasia and Jayadevan Chakkadath Chapter 33 ............................................................................................... 641 Anil Radhakrishnan Chapter 34 ............................................................................................... 650 Nithin Lukose Part III: Listening Observations Chapter 35 ............................................................................................... 668 Summarization Chapter 36 ............................................................................................... 670 The Unraveling Histories of Sound Practice in India Chapter 37 ............................................................................................... 676 Sonification of Cinema and a Better Practice References ............................................................................................... 679
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Contents
Biographies and Filmographies ............................................................... 680 Acknowledgements ................................................................................. 692
PART I: INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 STUDIES OF FILM SOUND IN INDIA
Sound is a new area of interest particularly in the field of film and media studies (Altman 1992; Balázs 1985; Biancorosso 2009; Bloom 2014; Chion 1994, 2009; Lastra 2000). The study of sound in cinema has only recently been established in screen studies and film sound scholarship (Buhler, Neumeyer and Deemer 2010; Holman 1997; Kerins 2011; LoBrutto 1994; Sergi 2004; Sonnenschein 2001). And, so far, attention has focused on Hollywood and European cinema. Reading sound in other world cinemas, particularly Indian cinema, has remained underexplored even though India is currently the world’s largest producer of films with a formidable global presence. Efforts and attempts have been made to study the use of sound in Indian cinema, but much of this scholarship has been focused on the use of songs, voice, and background musical scores in popular Indian films (Booth 2013; Morcom 2016; Mukherjee 2007). Creative sound practices, particularly the use of components like ambience and sound effects, which are critical elements in film sound organization, are still underexplored. This book intends to fill this void by developing a practice-based understanding of the unique sound world of Indian films. It does so by drawing on extensive interviews and in-depth conversations with prominent sound professionals active in the Indian film industry over the last 90 years. Indian cinema is known for producing sound experiences that typically encourage an overwhelming use of “song and dance” sequences (Chattopadhyay 2017; Booth 2013; Morcom 2016). The careful incorporation and attentive organization of sounds are generally ignored in the narrative strategy (Ganti 2012; Gopalan 2002; Rajadhyaksha 2007). Indeed, many popular Indian films keep mindful sound design at bay, mostly creating a loud and high-pitch auditory setting (Chattopadhyay 2015, 2021) or miseen-sonore 1 providing a remote and imaginary cinematic landscape. Conversations with sound practitioners show that popular preconceptions of sound’s role in Indian cinema may be erroneous if we consider the historical trajectories of its production as opposed to exporting an essentialist typecast. The advent of digital technology indeed makes it
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possible to incorporate rich layers of sound components within the production scheme of contemporary Indian film sound organization. In this book, the historical trajectory of Indian cinema will be revealed through conversations with practitioners that concentrate on their creative use of sonic experiences. Open-ended interviews help to inform the reader about the nitty-gritty of film sound production with a particular focus on its historical development. A practice-based perspective attending to the methods and approaches undertaken by the practitioners provides empirical evidence to qualify observations and claims. Conducted over many years (Chattopadhyay 2012–2019), the interviews constitute the project’s primary source of real world knowledge. Going through Indian cinema’s sound production trajectories, the book examines how sounds have been variously rendered through different phases of production practices due to technological innovations. The entire “dubbing era” (1960s–1990s) exemplifies a period that underestimated sonic range and quality, giving more importance to typical narrative tropes. Latter phases such as the “digital era” (2001–) meanwhile render more “realistic” and concrete representations of sound. This uneven history will be outlined, unfolding through the lenses of sound practitioners themselves. Differing and concurrent practices, methodologies and approaches, as well as shifts in recording and organizing sound for the purpose of storytelling, are studied through illuminating dialogues with practitioners to reveal various sound practice phases. By tracing this trajectory, the book makes comprehensive, first of its kind, essential reading for filmgoers and is a valuable reference volume for Indian and international film researchers.
Notes 1
“Mise-en-sonore” is a concept established in The Auditory Setting (Chattopadhyay 2021), which relates to other film and media studies terminology. The term “film space” is defined as the space that the spectator or audience encounters, a space that is organized and constructed (e.g., the linking of shots through sound editing and sound design). The area in front of the camera and sound device’s recording field, on the other hand, is known as the “pro-filmic space”. Combining these two definitions, it can be argued that the choice and arrangement of pro-filmic space substantially affect the spatial dynamics of the mise-en-scène of sound. “Mise-ensonore” or the “auditory setting”—the actual sonorous environment, the spatial organization of sounds that the listener experiences—provides a setting that in turn influences the verisimilitude or believability of a film in the ears of the audience.
CHAPTER 2 DRAWING THE TRAJECTORIES OF SOUND PRODUCTION
Interviews were conducted with sound professionals from a wide age group: from the late veteran Jyoti Chatterjee, whose career encompassed the early talkies in optical direct sound (1930s), to Nithin Lukose, a young sound practitioner who started his practice with digital technology (2000s). First up is veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal, a foremost practitioner of sync sound in India.1 Such a wide timeframe is helpful when writing a comprehensive and inclusive trajectory of sound production in India from the unique perspective of practitioners, who are the direct stakeholders in this historical evolution. The diverse sound production practices in pan Indian cinema are traced with an interest in mapping the impact that historical sound technology developments have had on shifting aesthetics. A bottomup approach to tracing such developments in sound helps to locate significant and representative works that carry evidence of the shifts that have led to contemporary practices. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 28 leading sound practitioners working in the Indian music, film and media industries, including veterans like Anup Dev and Hitendra Ghosh, and contemporaries like Resul Pookutty and Anish John. They are based on semi-structured questions using a qualitative approach to provide evidence of hands-on production practice. Following the trajectories of sound production in India, the book aims to reveal that sounds have been inconstantly rendered through various phases of production practices, due to the effects of technological innovations and shifts. From the dubbing era’s narrative bias to the digital era’s more realistic representations of sound, technological developments have dominated key shifts (Altman 1992; Kassabian 2013; Kerins 2011, 2006; Lastra 2000); indeed, certain aesthetic choices made available by technological applications have shaped the historical evolution of Indian sound production practices. This history is outlined in order to understand the various differing and concurrent practices, methodologies and
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approaches, as well as shifts in recording and organizing sound. Drawing on practitioners’ perspectives and terminologies, the book divides these trajectories of sound into three prominent periods, namely: the optical “direct” recording era as it developed in the early talkies (1930s–1960s); the magnetic tape-based recording era that triggered dubbing practices (1960s–1990s); and the contemporary digital multi-track sync recording and surround sound era (2001–present). With this historical structure as its model, the book presents a dialogic and grounded understanding of Indian film sound on various levels, including historical, technological and aesthetic factors. This comprehensive mapping of sound production practices is contextualized within film and media production and sound studies discussing relevant film examples as case studies with the practitioners.
Notes 1 An abbreviation of synchronized sound, a recording made on location, revived from an earlier practice of direct sound in Indian cinema into contemporary digital recording practice.
CHAPTER 3 CREATIVE INTERVENTION WITH LOCATION “SYNC” SOUND This book investigates the processes of sound production in Indian cinema learning from the leading sound recordists, mixing engineers, production mixing specialists, sound editors and sound re-recordists working in the Indian film industry, both in Mumbai’s mainstream Hindi cinema and regional cinema produced in Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil among other languages. Within the inquiries about this sonic diversity, much attention is given to the digital sound system’s emergence and its effects on sound making. One particular element of this investigation is sync sound recording. Terms such as “location sync sound” or “live sound” are used in the film practitioner’s vocabulary when referring to the recording of sound, primarily the voice, on location in synchronization with the camera instead of re-recording the voice performed inside the studio in dubbing sessions at a later stage of post-production. The growing digitalization of post-1990s film technology represents a cinematic revival of observational techniques related to location-specific details, particularly in direct recording of voice, effects and ambience on site. An emergent fascination with authentic location and spatial evidence in the film image suggests a rediscovery and revival of cinema’s realist roots. In the past two decades, film sound experiences have undergone a massive transformation from analogue to digital. This has been regarded as a sea change in terms of work culture and reproduction formats. With the advent of digital technology in film sound, newer audio aesthetics have arisen, as noted by practitioners. Easily available and easily handled recording devices have brought fresh perspectives and new forms to film sound recording, design, spatialization, and reproduction. The technology has initiated in-depth methods of and scopes for reconstructing a film space through intricate processes of sound post-production. Location “sync” sound recording is a direct descendent of this trend. We learn from the practitioners that the new trend of location sync sound recording is a revival of direct sound techniques of pre-dubbing eras. It is characterized by on-location sound recording in synchronization with the camera. These
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“real” sound recordings, which correspond to the site, are used in postproduction without any asynchronous forms of sound making, such as the use of dubbing, Foley, and stock sound effects. On-location sync recording is supported by recent developments in technology, including hard disc recorders with multi-track options, dolly boom recording equipment with greater flexibility and locational reach, and application software like Pro Tools HD that offer precise control over each clip recorded on location. Multiple options for keeping different tracks of ambience, sync sound effects, and dialogue permit the recording of a larger number of sound elements and the processing of multilayered sound captured on location. The studio itself offers ample scope for digitally manipulating site-specific “real” sounds, which are treated as part of film mediation through which such sounds are re-contextualized in the film space. Regularly updated timeline-based applications can work with a virtually infinite number of audio tracks. A variety of plug-ins allow the processing of recorded sounds, involving them in cinematic depiction via sonic modulations restructuring their ambient characteristics in the diegetic narrative in spatial settings such as the expanded surround environment of Dolby Atmos.
CHAPTER 4 USE OF AMBIENCE AS AN ARTISTIC ELEMENT
The focus of this investigation is on the processes of sonifying a film through cinematic devices and sonic tools available to the sound practitioner. I have noted in my article “Reconstructing Atmospheres: Ambient Sound in Film and Media Production” (Chattopadhyay 2017) that among these tools, “ambience” or ambient sound broadly denotes the background sounds that are present in a scene or location: wind, water, birds, room-tone, office rumbles, traffic, forest murmurs, waves from the seashore, neighborhood mutters, etc. Ambience is a standard term used by sound practitioners to denote the site-specific environmental sounds that provide characteristic atmosphere and spatial information in a media production. The book’s interviews and in-depth conversations focus on critically listening to those methods used in Indian cinema to record and produce sonic environments that incorporate ambience. Analysis examines how ambience is used as a site-specific element to compose the auditory setting (Chattopadhyay 2021) by rendering spatial awareness in the production of film. In this book, the practitioners shed light on the unnoticed importance of ambient sound. They inform about specific methods and creative strategies involved in constructing or evoking a relatively convincing presence of a location within the mediated environment of a film by means of various forms and formats of sound recording and spatial organization of recorded ambient sounds. The practitioners elaborate how they choose to use certain layers of ambient sound among a multitude of other recorded sound components, incorporating them into the strategy of narration in such a way that they produce a spatial realization of presence of the site in the diegetic world. The absence or relative inclusion of ambient sound in the sound organization determines the qualitative degrees and intensities of the story’s believability (Chattopadhyay 2017). We learn why ambient sound is most effective when the practitioner is intent on sculpting a spatial sensation and an embodied experience of “being there”, more so than other layers of sound such as voice, music, and sound effects. Among these layers, the voice includes dialogue between characters, thus relaying the primary narrative information
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(Bordwell 2009). Voice in cinema, however, is simply less “spatial” in nature, making it more creatively limited as a sound component when compared to ambient sound. The post-synchronized voice, produced by dubbing or similar practices, is “disengaged from its ‘proper’ space (the space conveyed by the visual image) and the credibility of that voice depends upon the technician’s ability to return it to the site of its origin” (Doane 1985: 164). This return to the original site can be achieved by the technician’s creative and innovative use of ambient sound. Film music tracks and sound effects “establish a particular mood” (Doane 1985: 55) instead of providing a sense of space. Sound effects are also important for the narration and for creating feelings of, for example, romance and suspense. In the mixing stages, the hierarchy of different sound components usually follows specific conventions, as American film sound scholar Mary Ann Doane notes when discussing Hollywood conventions: “Sound effects and music are subservient to dialogue and it is, above all, the intelligibility of the dialogue which is at stake, together with its nuances of tone” (ibid) – many of these conventions are exercised in Indian cinema too. In this hierarchy of sonic elements, ambient sound remains fluid and malleable. Equally, ambient sound can provide the specific atmosphere of a site in the production of a diegetic reality inside the film space. To sound practitioners, ambient sound injects life and substance not only to what we see on the screen but also to the off-screen diegetic space. We are made aware in this book of how practitioners use layers of ambient sound to construct the perceptual experience of reality by artistic means. As the most creative element in film sound production, ambience helps to ground the sense of a specific place in a way no other layer of sound can. These practical considerations and creative perspectives of the practitioners underscore the spatial capacities of ambient sound as compared to other film sound components.
CHAPTER 5 INTER/INTRA-VIEWING1 AND AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY
Interviewing film sound practitioners provides convincing evidence to qualify this book’s inquiry and research. Extensive conversations form its essential body of empirical research resulting in a comprehensive historical understanding of sound practice in Indian cinema. The interviews are based on a set of questions to generate real-world knowledge about sound production practices. My role in this research is not only as interviewer but also as an active participant in the conversation. This intervention is significant for two reasons. Firstly, as a sound practitioner myself, I am able to offer novel insights into the debate. Secondly, I am also a scholar and researcher: my input during interviews can develop discourse through self-reflection and the auto-ethnography of myself and practitioners, making them thoughtful and contemplative, which in turn helps generate new knowledge from the conversation. This provocation always enables a more profound discourse. Auto-ethnography is a form of qualitative research in which selfreflection is encouraged to generate new knowledge in a particular area of scholarship by exploring anecdotal and personal experiences and connecting this autobiographical narrative to uncover wider cultural meanings and social understandings. The sonic auto-ethnography in this book excavates personal listening experiences (Connor 1997; LaBelle 2010; Voegelin 2010) and self-narrative (Findlay-Walsh 2017) or the introspective recollection of a practitioner’s own developments to comprehend and conceptualize their craft and artistry. This autoethnographic approach is considered a key contextual, design, and compositional element for gauging the sound practitioner’s contributions to the making of Indian films. An understanding of sound production processes in Indian cinema is developed through mutual listening and reciprocity via in-depth conversations rather than using a more direct interviewing approach from an objective outsider’s position. The revealing thread of practical knowledge is often found by letting the practitioner
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speak freely. Equally, the position of the practitioner in the production chain is a crucial parameter for these conversations to be revealing. As some of the practitioners I talked to were my peers or immediate seniors from the FTII and the SRFTI, two of India’s national film schools, it was also easier to access and engage with them on this level, almost like an extended model of film school debate.
Notes 1
Intra-view is my coinage invented to relate to the idea of speaking with oneself, focusing on the aural. Self-talk is a common thing, but not so much discussed in the scholarly discourses in the arts and humanties. In the interviews with the sound practitioners, there has always been an element of soliloquy reminiscing about their past works. This revealatory approach is underscored in this coinage, which has been previously used in my two recent publications from a series of intraview/-auditions: Chattopadhyay, B. (2020). “Howl Redux: On Noisific(a)tion”. In Mandic, M (ed.), Law and the Senses: Hear. London: University of Westminster Press (forthcoming). Chattopadhyay, B. (2017). “Autolistening”. In Francis, Richard (ed.), Exercises in Listening issue 3. Auckland, New Zealand: End of the Alphabet Records.
CHAPTER 6 CO-LISTENING WITH THE SOUND PRACTITIONERS
The interviews and conversations are based on a specific set of semistructured and open-ended questions about handling sound from recording to design and how technology impacts these processes. According to Jody Miller and Barry Glassner, scholars of qualitative research in the social sciences, semi-structured and open-ended interviews solicit “authentic accounts of subjective experience” (Miller and Glassner 2011: 131). The friendly and open-ended approach with which I have conducted interviews over the years in familiar work environments such as sound studios has helped practitioners “to speak in their own voices about their art and craft” (LoBrutto 1994: 1). Sound Studies scholar Mark Grimshaw asserts that a questionnaire-based qualitative approach involving semi-structured interviews “allows the interviewer a certain level of control which directs the interviewee down particular paths. Equally it allows the interviewee to expand on themes outside the limits of the questions, which can reveal unexpected information” (Grimshaw 2011: 54). The dialectics between the top-down approach of reflective analyses and the bottom-up approach of ethnographic interviewing thus form the backbone of this book, ensuring that “even the more abstract notions about filmmaking and film sound remain grounded in real-world practices” (Kerins 2011: 10). Interviews with well-known sound designers Subash Sahoo and Aloke Dey focus on various modifications and alterations within re-recording and mixing practices during the shift from analogue to digital. The interviews with on-location production mixing engineer Anil Radhakrishnan and Anish John, two of the younger generation of sound practitioners primarily working with digital technology, focus on the nitty-gritty of location recording with multi-track digital sync technology, involving innovative methods and approaches. The interview with veteran sound and music mixing engineer Anup Deb explores the practical differences between the analogue and digital domains of sound recording and mixing. Anup Mukherjee, another veteran sound mixing engineer and sound
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designer working primarily in the Bengali film industry of Kolkata in Eastern India, talks about the arrival of digital sound in Indian cinema and its impact on filmmaking: the way sound technicians have upgraded their skills, approaches, and methods. Other veteran sound practitioners such as Hitendra Ghosh provide insights into this change through personal anecdotes. The late octogenarian Jyoti Chatterjee, sound mixer for many of Satyajit Ray’s films, talks about early sound recording and mixing in the pre-dubbing era and the introduction of dubbing to Indian cinema; his interview provides valuable insights into Ray’s use of monaural mixing. And Shyam Benegal, one of the pioneers of independent Indian cinema, talks at length about the necessity of ambience in film. Practitioners from the younger generation of sound designers such as Bishwadeep Chatterjee, Dileep Subramaniam, Dipankar Chaki, Manas Choudhury, Bobby John, P. M. Satheesh, Pramod Thomas, Vinod Subramanian and Kunal Sharma talk of their various methods of working with sound in cinema after the introduction of digital technology. They also speak of the roles that ambient sound and sound design have in creating site-specific atmospheres. They discuss the introduction of digital synchronized sound in Indian cinema, technically known as sync sound. The conversations with sync sound pioneers in Indian cinema Nakul Kamte (Lagaan 2001) and Subash Sahoo (Kaminey 2009) are particularly insightful as they discuss real world mechanisms and professional ploys of recording sound on location to (re)produce an authentic and realistic tone and texture of the site. In a longer conversation, Oscar-winning sound designer Resul Pookutty (Slumdog Millionaire 2008) speaks of the various practical struggles in sustaining a sync sound practice, working with surround sound formats like Dolby Atmos, and the ensuing changes in the philosophy of sound production practices. My contemporaries—such as Pritam Das, Sukanta Majumdar, Hitesh Chaurasia and Jayadevan Chakkadath—are particularly assiduous when talking about the role of ambient sound in transforming film towards an embodied experience. They inform us about multi-channel sound systems like Dolby Atmos and Auro 3D, and the enormous possibilities these systems open up for narrating the story with intricate details about the site. Sound practitioners inject this book with practical insights based on the rudimentary elements of real world sound production. The interviews also shed light on India’s normative modes of cinematic sound practice. For example, according to the sound practitioners, one reason for not using sync sound earlier has been the feudal working structure within Indian film based on certain industry stars and inflexible hierarchies. Sync sound requires the glorified actor’s
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Chapter 6
complete participation on the film set, on a par with the location sound technician, who has long held a lower status in the film crew’s hierarchy. According to the interviewees, the introduction of digital technology has opened up scope for a more creative sound practice that not only has substantially changed the sonic experience but also realigned the hierarchy of film crews, making the sound practitioner’s role more significant. These interviews are reproduced in this book in their original form, transcribed directly from the audio recordings made during the ethnographic fieldwork, with any grammatical issues this may entail.
REFERENCES
Altman, Rick, ed. 1992. Sound theory/Sound practice. New York: Routledge. Balázs, Béla. 1985. “Theory of the film: Sound”. In Film sound: Theory and practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 116 - 125. New York: Columbia University Press. Biancorosso, Giorgio. 2009. “Sound”. In The Routledge companion to philosophy and film, edited by Carl R. Plantinga and Paisley Livingston, 260-267. London: Routledge. Bloom, Peter J. 2014. “Sound Theory”. In The Routledge encyclopedia of film theory, edited by Warren Buckland and Edward Branigan. London: Routledge. Booth, Gregory D. and Shope, Bradley. eds. 2013. More Than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Bordwell, David. 2009. “Cognitive theory”. In The Routledge companion to philosophy and film, edited by Carl R. Plantinga and Paisley Livingston, 356-365. London: Routledge. Buhler, James, Neumeyer, David, and Deemer, Rob. 2010. Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. New York: Oxford University Press. Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. 2021. The Auditory Setting: Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (in press). Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. 2017. “Reconstructing Atmospheres: Ambient Sound in Film and Media Production”. Communication and the Public 2 (4): 352-364. London: SAGE Publication. Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. 2015. „The Auditory Spectacle: designing sound for the ‘dubbing era’ of Indian cinema“. The New Soundtrack 5 (1): 55–68. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-vision: Sound on screen, translated and edited by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Chion, Michel. 2009. Film, a sound art. New York: Columbia University Press. Connor, Steven. 1997. “The Modern Auditory I”. In Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Roy Porter. London: Routledge.
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References
Doane, Mary Ann. 1985. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space”. In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton. New York: Columbia University Press. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press. Gopalan, Lalitha. 2002. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Grimshaw, Mark. 2011. Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments. Hershey: Information Science Reference, IGI Global. Holman, Tomlinson. 1997. Sound for film and television. Boston: Focal Press. Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. “The End of Diegesis As We Know It?” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by John Richardson, Carol Vernallis, and Claudia Gorbman. Oxford: Oxford University Press Kerins, Mark. 2011. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the digital sound age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. LaBelle, Brandon. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum. Lastra, James. 2000. Sound technology and the American cinema: Perception, representation, modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. LoBrutto, Vincent. 1994. Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. Westport: Praeger. Miller, Jody and Glassner Barry. 2011. “The “Inside” and the “Outside”: Finding Realities in Interviews”. In Qualitative Research: Issues of Theory, Method and practice, edited by David Silverman, 125 – 139. London: Sage. Morcom, Anna. 2016. Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2007. “Early Indian Talkies: Voice, Performance and Aura”. Journal of the Moving Image 6: 39-61. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2007. “An aesthetic for film sound in India?” Journal of the Moving Image 6. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press. Sergi, Gianluca. 2004. The Dolby era: Film sound in contemporary Hollywood. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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Sonnenschein, David. 2001. Sound design: The expressive power of music, voice, and sound effects in cinema. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Voegelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Findlay-Walsh, Iain. 2018. “Sonic Autoethnographies: Personal listening as compositional context”. Organised Sound 23 (1): 121-130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PART II: INTERVIEWS
CHAPTER 7 SHYAM BENEGAL1
S: You want to know about sync sound work. Well, you see, sync sound work started not very recently in the Indian cinema. In fact, all sound films used to be shot in studio circumstances as soon as the silent era was over. For instance, if you think of Alam Ara2 and so on, you’ll find that they actually had sync sound. That was the old methodology. They used to have these studio cameras - the big very unwieldy things and they were properly sound insulated. So, the machine sound couldn’t be heard. They used to have mics and the sound recordist usually used to sit at the corner of the recording studio and you had to keep absolute silence. The studios that were made for silent cinema had to be, again, insulated. Despite that, once in a while you’d have pigeons coming in and I have experience of that. Jyoti studios, where I used to have my office, was the first sound studio in Bombay. It started in 1931. Prithviraj Kapoor3 and everybody started their careers there. It was called the Imperial studios in those days. Later on it was called the Jyoti studios. Now, you see, that was the methodology of recording. They used to record on 35 mm. In fact, there was another system also at that time where you could record optically on the film itself. But that wasn’t so popular because if you made a mistake, you know, it was pretty costly to get it re-done. So, this was an easier option which Hollywood had adopted and which we started to do. But one of the innovative practices of the time, particularly with Prabhat, was that they actually recorded songs outdoors. If you see some of those films - if you go to FTII4 you should have a look at some of the films made in the 30’s in Prabhat studios - they used to have a sound recordist with a boom mic. When it was being shot, the sound recordist would be recording sitting on a “Thela” (hand drawn cart) and the instruments also had to be playing. You couldn’t have any elaborate kind of group. So you had to have a harmonium and a tabla - two-three instruments, which were carried along. You had the camera on a trolley in front, and then you had this thela for the music to be played, which was being recorded simultaneously as the girl or boy, whoever was singing. So this used to be done. That was the system. There was no playback during those days. That’s how it started. It
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was very interesting. But it certainly restricted the acting style because the people couldn’t take their heads away from where the microphones were. Q: Hm. S: So, it was somewhat tied up in, you know, they were kind of imprisoned because of the placement of the mic and they had to be facing the mic all the time. The demand on the actor was quite enormous. Firstly, the person had to sing, had to be in tune, instruments were to be played in tune. While doing all this, even the slightest shifting this way or that way meant that the recording would go bad. We had such kind of problems, but it was very fascinating and very interesting. When I made my film Bhumika5, some of these particular things I had brought into that film. The beginning of sound in Indian cinema was a fascinating one. It was usually done in the studios. They had to be closed up so that you would’t get exterior sounds. When they were shooting, everybody had to keep absolutely silent. Even now you have to, but it was much more particular at that time. Then when they had to go outdoors with sound, the first way of doing that was to the songs. It would be later when equipment became less problematic that you would do the dramatic scenes outdoors. But you did have for a long period of time - way into the 50’s and even into the early 60’s - they used to have a soundtrack with the recording equipments when they were shooting exteriors. The person with the boom mic had to be really very expert because the cameras were powerful than the mics today. So they had … they were directional mics. So you had to be very careful about how you record the sound. They used to do these kinds of recordings and the camera of course was a studio camera - Mitchell. Even in the 70’s, when I heard about how they used to do it – because afterwards when camera equipment became much lighter and smaller you had these Arri’s. When Arri [Arriflex cameras] started coming into the market, then you had a cover for an Arri, but it used to be very… I mean, it wasn’t pleasant while shooting, very low. It restricted your movement to a great deal, which a Mitchell did not. There used to be a Japanese equivalent of that camera called Seiki. When I shot Ankur6 in 1973, I used a Seiki camera and it was entirely sync sound. I was among the first people to shoot a sync sound film in its entirety with a Seki camera. I did have a studio Mitchell, which I’d taken from the studio. It wasn’t working that well. So, I took the Seiki instead and I took the cameraman who was absolutely wonderful. He had experience going back to the 1920’s. I took a sound recordist who also had started his career in the 1930’s. So I had two people who had immense experience with this kind of work and I shot the entire film with a Seiki camera, not on Arri. Everybody used to take Arris in those days. It had already started from late 60’s - people were
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shooting on Arriflex and just took a pilot track. Then they used to dub their sounds in a studio. I refused to take a pilot track because at that time I was kind of fanatical about getting the right and exact sound. I was very much impressed with the idea, which was very current in Europe at that time – the use of direct sound. The whole idea was that you had a sense of reality that you got with it (direct sound) – impossible to get in the postsync - the emotion, the performance. The performance was not broken into two parts - the visual performance and the sound performance. It was an integrated performance. I was absolutely the biggest advocate for that. When I made my film in 1973, I was among the very first people to do an entire sync sound film without taking recourse to any person dubbing. Not a single dialogue that you hear in Ankur was post recorded. Everything was done on the location where we shot the film, with natural sounds and all. Then we emphasized the soundtracks, had other tracks to add to the environmental sound and everything else. But there was nothing - no dialogue was ever post-sync recorded. It was all recorded at that time. Now, this is very important for me. It has always remained the most important thing when I make a film. I’ve always believed, and continue to believe, that performance has integrity – it’s sound and visual together. You cannot separate them without losing out on the quality of the performance, you know. What they do on the set is what you have approved onto film. You cannot have something else, another element coming and replacing the sound part. You will never have the same quality. But what happened in Indian cinema - and exactly at the 30’s what used to happen - in the 40’s same thing was happening. But now they take things outdoors, with the equipment getting better. They had those big studio Mitchells. They used to carry them outside and shoot. If you look carefully at films of that period compared with that of early period and so on, one of the things you may have noticed is that in the 1920’s, there’s so much dynamism in the style of shooting, the movements of the camera and particularly the outdoor movements, you know. In the 30’s, we suddenly find a certain static quality because it was restricted by the equipment they were using. Then you moved into the 40’s where sound became the thing, which most people were shooting inside studios anyway, and there were hardly any speech work that was being done outside of the studio. All the dramatic scenes were being done in the studio, including everything else like travelling cars and all that. Then it became very easy when playback came because you separated the two elements. Particularly for songs, you could shoot song all over the place and do the playback. You could sync the two and use it later. So, this was the pattern. All the way through the 40’s and the 50’s, our directors in India were recording dialogue like it
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would happen in a studio. The studio system started to collapse around the late 1950’s and early 60’s or so. Then, you had portable cameras. Then they started everything - both sync and dubbing. So the tracks that were being recorded were pilots and they did the actual dialogues and so on and so forth recorded in a studio at studio quality. This is a very interesting thing - some of the consequences of that in the cinema itself. It has made and broken careers of people. Take somebody like Amitabh Bachchan!7 He is known for his voice. The timbre of his voice is absolutely so important. But to maintain that timbre of the voice and get that quality, he had to do post-sync dubbing. You see that post-sync dubbing was an important feature in all of this. And this kind of thing that people were paying attention to the capability of an actor of much greater expression in his speech and manner of his speaking and all of that and the sound quality which Amitabh Bachchan has because of his rich baritone voice. I mean, the moment you hear that voice, you can see him. That quality could only come when it was recorded like that – it had to be post-sync dubbed. So, whatever he actually did in his performance, like many of the stars of that time - in their performance they did not worry too much about getting the right timber of voice for visual performance - they were saving their voices for the post-sync dubbing. They were not presenting their voice fully when they were performing. Unlike, take for instance, I made a film called Manthan8 where Naseeruddin Shah9 has a very big and powerful scene towards the end where he is screaming and shouting. It was the climactic position. Q: Hm. S: That was direct sound on location. I was not getting it right. Eventually, he did something like 18 takes before I got everything absolutely right sound and picture together. One part of it hadn’t worked out really well because his voice gave way. He lost it. So we had to wait until his voice came back over the next 3 to 4 days, before he could do it again. Now, I would have had a much easier option of filming without his voice and instead do a post-sync dubbing. But I didn’t want to do that and I still don’t believe it’s a thing for myself. A lot of people may disagree, but that’s not important to me. I found that the best performance I see of an actor is his body language, speech, expressions, everything as one. It is not separated in two different elements, which is why I gave Nasir so much trouble. I got into “do it repeatedly” until he actually lost his voice and couldn’t do it anymore until the next three-four days till his voice came back. The systems that are in operation in our industry, even to this day, continue to be what it used to be in 1970’s. Even today, a lot of them go for post-sync dubbing because the stars often insist on that. Why do stars
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insist on that? They feel they can concentrate on their voices when they see themselves perform visually, only then they can get the right nuances and all that. I profoundly disagree with this practice. As I said, a performance is to be seen in its entirety and not as separate elements being put together. It’s not a puppet, you know. It’s ridiculous that it is treated like a puppet. Q: LG. S: That kind of thing doesn’t make sense. That makes sense for the whole world, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. So, therefore the use of sound, the manner in which we use sound… Basically there are three elements, one is speech; the others are the creation of the environment, and the placement of a figure in a particular environment so that the environment is also alive - it’s not dead. That aliveness has to be controlled by you because the person who’s watching your film is totally being taken over by what he sees in a closed hall. The difference is that everything else, which he’d otherwise keep his eardrums open to, you know, and then select what he wants to hear and what he doesn’t want to hear. Say, for instance, we are in this room. If you listen very carefully, silently, there are several elements of sound that you can hear. You can hear the traffic from outside. In this room itself there are sounds. There is the sound of this room, the hum, the ambience or room tone, which you can hear. Then the very soft sound of the fan as well. Q: Hm. S: Now when we are speaking, we don’t hear these sounds. But they exist. Since they exist, you can make use of them for different kinds of purposes. You can use them for dramatic purposes, for other contemplative purposes, for meditational purposes and so many things. The second element is to explain the interiority of a person. The first element, of course, is voice or speech. Then there is a third element, which is music. Music or noise, whichever way you’ll like to use it. When you’re using music, you’re giving a certain kind of emotional character to that particular scene or a dramatic character to that particular scene. You are underlining, you know. A lot of people use background music in order to keep the audiences form falling asleep. I’ve always considered that to be a weakness if you’re unable to hold your audience and you try to do that through music or through big loud sounds. You hear that kinds of sounds going on - when somebody’s angry with you and you’ll have to kill him, when that is expressed through some musical device. Now, either you feel these things are necessary or not necessary. I, for one, don’t feel it’s necessary. You can do the same thing in so many different ways because
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what you are creating is the (cinematic) world. You’ll have to create a universe with the whole environment of that universe and the people within it and you have to give them dimensions and dimensionality. Q: LG. S: Say, a person is standing at the distance and somebody is close. How do you shift your attention from one to the other? Through sounds, through visual means, all of this - this kind of thinking according to me is absolutely essential. You have to pay attention to them. Lots of filmmakers do not pay attention. If they themselves don’t pay any attention to it, the audience will not get it at all. When you’re offering a film experience, you are coming closest to a real experience of life. However arbitrary it might be, that’s not of any consequence because you’re playing God. You are offering a particular universe. But that universe has to vibrate with your real experiences, with human beings’ real experiences. Otherwise, what’s the point? Somewhere, you say this is true, this is right, maybe not consciously or unconsciously. That is the quality you have to offer in whatever you do. And you have these elements with you - one is the visual and the other is sound - to create that universe for yourself. Sound is not only speech or music. It is much more than that. With these two elements, you have to create the universe the way you want to. In the visual thing you have the manner in which you’ll take the audience with you. There, lenses become very important. How do you shoot something to give the right perspective to a given situation that you shoot; what are the lenses that you’ll use and how you’ll change perspective. See, where the camera is moving with the characters, this is one aspect. Then there is another aspect, which is of the sound itself. What is the proportion? Then, how do you use sound in any narrative? I’ll give you a wonderful example. If you remember that picture of Satyajit Ray’s, where he (the character) is in a village. What is that film, I can’t remember. One of his films, it’s one of my favorite scenes. You see there is this chap, was it in Mahanagar? The sister, she becomes a prostitute, that film. Q: Is it in Jana Aranya? S: No, not Jana Aranya, something else. Anyway. There’s an aspect, there’s a particular manner in which he recovered that for you, a certain memory of his in which he leaves from this little village. Q: Pratidwandi.10 S: Yes, Pratidwandi. In this little village somewhere outside northern Bengal, he is in this little boarding house. He is there, and suddenly he can hear a woodpecker – or a particular kind of bird. He hears that and the
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recovery is of that same bird - he recovers his entire background through that single sound. This is something that all of us can make use of. I had used the woodpecker in my film Ankur. Ray’s was totally unconnected. He did it in a film before what I had made. But it’s a similar kind of thing. Mine was to do with, you know, he asks his maid, “Do you know what is that sound?” She says, “That’s a woodpecker.” Then, when his wife comes to the village, she asks the same question and the entire emotional character of the scene changes because he recovers the old feeling of that relationship which has now gone sour, you see. Those kinds of things, they are not devices like speech or other forms of dramatisation. But to explain the interiority of people’s feelings and thinking and stuff like that - sound has a very important part to play, you know. That dimension of sound has not been explored enough. We don’t think that it’s important in our country. Look at most of Indian cinema - they don’t pay attention to it. Personally I feel this is one of the most important narrative tools that we have, and by and large we don’t make use of it. That’s either because they do not know about it or they don’t have a certain situation in which they can do this. It’s a question of how you can just use sound - simple speech and background music. You don’t think in terms of the environment in which we live. All of these qualities that you have, the sounds that you hear, and how do you associate. Different sounds have different associations that each one of us has. All of those are a part of the sound and visual language or vocabulary that we use. This is, to me, what cinema is today. Q: You said about the interior of a character. I am curious to know about how it is represented in sound. I would also like to know about the exterior, the environment. S: The environment that you see, you see it. The environment that you do not see which extends beyond your frame, Q: Yes, the off-screen space. S: Off-screen space - that needs to be expressed. How will you express that? Q: Ambience. S: Yes. That is the point. Suppose you are sitting here. He leaves the room. I see him leave the room. You know that he has gone out of this room and from here, I hear a sound - his sound. So you see he leaves the room. Now, he speaks from there. You can hear him - I can hear him. So, he’s setting out a certain geography to the scene even though I, as an audience, have not seen it. He can say what he’s seen, what is out there which I have not seen. But you know what it is and because you know that and what he has
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done, my curiosity is aroused. Or, there is a certain character, a certain apprehension about what he has done. See, these are some of the devices that we use all the time. We often don’t think about these devices, but we experience them in life. When you’re doing it in the film, you’ve to analyze all of that, different elements of that which you can. Q: Does ambience play major role in your film? S: Ambience plays a major role in my films. This is something that I can say I learnt directly from Mr. Satyajit Ray. He was among the very first Indian filmmakers to make use of ambient sounds. I was most impressed when I saw Pather Panchali11 for the first time, way back in 1956 or 1957, when I was in college. I mentioned it to him when I met him later. I told him that not many filmmakers I know, except may be a few people in India, have used the ambient sounds the way he had used them. When Jean Renoir came to Calcutta, he made use of some of these kinds of sounds but in a very rudimentary way. Their use became much more sophisticated in the hands of Satyajit Ray. After I had seen Renoir’s The River, I could sense the river when I heard certain kinds of sounds - Hooghly. The boatmen’s sounds and all such things were very much a Hooghly scene. When Ray would use sounds, it was not just the geographical association. There was a geographical association, you could have an intellectual association, you could have a historical association or an emotional one. You could explore so many dimensions by using ambient sound alone. This is something that has always fascinated me. I have been very interested in it. A lot of people don’t pay any attention to it. It’s a very important area according to me. When you make cinema, you must simply remember that there are two things - there’s the visual and there’s the sound. Through that, you have to do everything including aural things that you might feel that you can smell, like, an atmosphere that you can smell as it were - small references. One of the interesting things is when you see Ritwik Ghatak’s film - the one with the car. Q: Ajantrik.12 S: Yes. In Ajantrik, you will find that the film itself is such that you can actually smell that car. The smoke and the vapors that are coming out of that, you know. I remember when I did an interview with Ritwik Ghatak when he was Vice Principal at the Film & Television Institute (Pune, India) for that one year. He was in Bombay and I was just helping with a film magazine that used to come out in Bombay in those days. I had interviewed him for that. When I told him about this, he said, “See, I’m very interested in this.” That’s what he said. That “I am very interested in these areas of film. Even small things like breeze, I may be able to record
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and use that because of the kind of mics.” He made a film, Komol Gandhar13, where there is a scene where there’s great Bengal landscape, you know, there’s the river. You don’t hear it, but you can sense it, you can sense the breeze. Things like this, these are the elements that you have to create through visual and sound means. But they have to be palpable they must be felt. It’s not your explanation that’s going to do it. It has to be experienced. See, one of the problems of the late 60’s to the early 70’s, particularly FTII, that is post Ritwik Ghatak - after he was there for a year - there was a generation of filmmakers at that time who would always used to intellectualize their films. They used to often give long explanations about what you’re supposed to be seeing and listening. It was never selfevident. With cinema, it has to be self-evident. It has to be evident. May be you do not have the vocabulary to hold, or your experience of vocabulary may not be there to hold that experience, but it is there. It has to be there. It does not need you to explain it. This is the point that they never got from Mr. Ghatak. Mr. Ghatak never created a situation in which he needed to explain to me what he was doing, you know. But the so-called chelas (followers) of his did exactly that and reversed the whole thing. It had no meaning at all. What Ritwik did and what they did was completely different, you know, which was a travesty of what he did. These are the things that you have to be careful about, and understand. But these two elements are the most important because these are the only two things that you have to create the whole universe – the world of cinema, apart from drama, narrative and all of which it shares with the novel, the short story, the poetry, and everything else. This is that additional thing. Why is it called the tenth muse? It is only for that reason. It adds a certain element to it, which makes the experience. It takes from all the other muses, but it creates a muse that is a combination of all of these things. You have two things here - the visual and sound. Others have other ways of codification. Writing is a kind of codification– you will give life to it by reading. Poetry and music are similar too - the notes that are being played and create a new entity. You won’t like that. So I don’t think I have anything more to say, LG. Q: When you do sync sound, do you prefer to add more ambiences to the ambient sounds that are recorded in the sync process? Or do you want to keep it that way? S: Yes, if it’s needed. See, locational sound automatically has an ambience. But that ambience may not be useful to you. You hear the location itself in a particular way. What has been recorded may not be exactly that. So, you have to add to it, you have to record it in order to add the track, which you have to do. It’s very essential. It is, to me at least.
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Some people don’t think it’s important, but I think it’s very important. I always tell my sound recordist, “Just record the ambience where I am shooting and then let me get on with it.” Q: Do you experience some sort of shift when recording media changes from analogue to digital? S: Analogue to digital, you see, that’s one of those problems. Since it’s digital, it’s a series of digits that come together and create a whole. Analogue is where one thing leads into another. Photography through the use of chemicals is an analogous image. But you can have an electronically created image also. Video is a digital image. Cinema is an analog image. Our eyes always prefer analogue - because our eyes respond much more comfortably to an analogue image than to a digital image because human eyes are such that it will record images that move one to the other, so it gives a harmonized quality. That harmonized quality doesn’t exist for the digital image. But, digital means have come here to stay. There is a method to get a sense of analogue in it, which is known as dirtying the image, which you can. People do. Lots of people make the image dirty. They don’t allow the digital image to remain the way it is. The sharp edges will start to disappear. Q: Sound-wise, from recording to the design, digital allows for multiple channels. If you want to add more ambiences - you can. S: What I was telling you were the fundamentals. Digital and analogue are details of the manner if you record something. Solutions for those problems depend on your own predilection and preference. How will you prefer it is up to you. There are two methodologies - one methodology is chemically done, the other one is electronically done. Between the two of them, it’s up to you as to what you prefer. But if I go by natural process, natural processes are usually analogous. They are not digital. You see, the fact is that between analogue and digital there’s a question of preference. My preference for analogue image is because that is how it’s in nature, not for any other reason. Not that it’s superior or anything, it’s not superior just because it’s more in nature. But when you select digital, which is the new system of creating images, and seen as an advanced technology. In fact, it is. It allows you much greater range and all of that. But you lose a little bit of the earlier one. So in order that you don’t you have to what is called dirtying the image. Q: I’ll not take much of your time. I will just ask two remaining questions. One is: how do you see surround sound? S: Surround sound is one of the great innovations. Well everything, all the innovations by themselves, have been interesting and enormous. The only
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thing that has a certain limitation to it is 3-D. It has a limitation more than anything else but it is an interesting thing to do at certain times for certain kinds of subjects. But surround sound is to create the entire aural environment. It opens up your image area beyond what you see. I’ll give you a simple example. I see a train going from left to right. What would happen normally in the older days was that I would start to hear the sound when I’m seeing it and it would disappear when I stop seeing it. But it doesn’t disappear like that in reality. In reality the distance makes the difference. So, what happens in nature is it goes beyond what you see. That is what it adds. You can hear the train’s coming - you can see it’s going, you can hear it tailing off and going far. In surround sound I can do it in a much more effective way because you have to see it from that point of view. But that again is my way of looking at it. There are people who do surround sound very differently. If I have to use surround sound, I’ll do it with this kind of conceptualization. I can see it as extending my visual world through the sound that is available to me. So I create the environment as fully as I can possibly do, in comparison with the real world. Q: Could not it be created like that in mono? S: No. There was an arbitrariness that was determined entirely by the frame. Even then, there were people who went well beyond that. We should look at Orson Welles, for instance. Or, consider the mithaiwala sequence that has been used in Pather Panchali walking on the paddy fields. You can hear him even when you stop seeing him going. Ray’s ability to use sounds apart from the visual aspect was a very great one. He was rarely been appreciated so much in that aspect. But everybody who records it for themselves, they know. He was one of the few people whose work you can recall almost immediately because he could create the whole cinematic world in this very incredible way. He was one of the earliest people who were doing it not just nationally, but internationally. Q: How do you place Ray in the history of Indian cinema? S: I locate Indian cinema as before Ray and after Ray. Q: Okay. S: It’s very simple for me. Cinema was of a particular kind before Ray came. After Ray, it was something else in terms of looking at cinema itself. I’m not talking about popular cinema - that is different. But, when sound came, that was the first dramatic change that took place in Indian cinema. The second dramatic change in Indian cinema was the coming of Satyajit Ray. Q: LG.
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S: Then it changed again. His was the time of watershed mark, you know. It’s not going to be the same. Before that, you heard sound differently, you saw images differently. Post Ray, it’s changed entirely and quite dramatically. If you look at Regional cinema more than Hindi mainstream cinema, you will find what the impact of Ray has been. The greatest impact of Ray has been in those areas. There’s Malayalam cinema, there’s Kannada cinema, Oriya cinema and to some extent Tamil. In Tamil and Hindi not so much. Then you look at the other areas - Punjabi cinema, Marathi cinema. Marathi of course had its strong tradition also. They had got into the realistic mode of filmmaking way back in the 30’s. If you look at early Prabhat films, you’ll find that they had so many innovative practices in filmmaking even at that time. I gave you some example. The rest of India was way behind at that time. A: How do you record in sync sound, both boom and lapel? S: When I make films I do both - I use both. I use a boom and a body mic. We use a combination of sounds – we use both the tracks. Depending on your requirement, you move from one track to another. If I restricted it to this, I’d not have perspective. By having a boom, I have the advantage of perspective. You understand? A: Are you using this as a kind of perspectives, like a lensing? S: Yeah. I use both body mics as well as boom for different situations. If circumstances are such that no boom can be used - like, say, we are here and we are talking. No boom can be used in this little space and the camera may be over here there, and probably it is moving all over the place. I have to get the speech properly. So I have no opportunity to use a boom mic. I have to make do with this. Later on, when I am mixing – I can correct it later, but the problem is the visual. Visuals can’t be corrected the way sounds can be once they are done.
Notes 1
Duration: 00:59:28 Name Abbreviations: Shyam Benegal– S; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG; A - Jayadevan Chakkadath. 2 Alam Ara (The Ornament of the World, Ardeshir Irani, 1931) – is India’s first sound film, or talkie. 3 Prithviraj Kapoor was a pioneer of Indian theatre and of the Hindi (Bombay) film industry, one of the figures who spearheaded Indian cinema’s transition from silent era to the talkies. Kapoor played a supporting role in India's first talkie, Alam Ara (1931).
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Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, one of India’s two premier statesponsored film schools; the other one is SRFTI, Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata. This author (Budhaditya Chattopadhyay) was a graduate (2007) and alumnus of SRFTI. 5 Bhumika (Role, Shyam Benegal, 1977) 6 Ankur (The Seedling, Shyam Benegal, 1974) 7 Amitabh Bachchan is an Indian film actor, active in Indian cinema since the 1970s, appearing in over 200 Indian films in a career spanning more than five decades, well known for his distinct voice. 8 Manthan (Churning, Shyam Benegal, 1976) 9 Naseeruddin Shah or Nasir is an Indian film and stage actor, notable for his contribution to Indian parallel cinema. He has won numerous awards in his career, including three National Film Awards, three Filmfare Awards and an award at the Venice Film Festival. 10 Pratidwandi (The Adversary, Satyajit Ray, 1970) 11 Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, Satyajit Ray, 1955) 12 Ajantrik (Ritwik Ghatak, 1958) 13 Komal Gandhar (A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale, Ritwik Ghatak, 1961)
CHAPTER 8 JYOTI CHATTERJEE1
Q: How was sound produced in the earlier analogue days when you were working? J: When the ballet of Uday Shankar2 happened, Ananda Shankar and Alla Rakha were present. Ravi Shankar was present. That ballet took place on a huge scale for almost seven days. A play called Shamanya Khushi (Small Happiness) was staged. The time I am talking about is 1958, when India film’s New Theatres 1 had made a new scoring theater. We had 6 channel (inputs) mixers and used six microphones at that time. Before this, we used only two channels. It was there - the 1958 model. Whatever it was, it was used for Pather Panchali3, Aparajito4 and many other famous films, and a film by Rajen Tarafdar. So, the work used to happen with two mics at that time. Song recording, especially with so many hands around, was very difficult with two mics. It’s very difficult if there are about 15 to 20 hands. We had to manage somehow. But some loopholes still remained. If the song’s lyrics were overlapping on a particular instrument, it had to be recorded separately by the artist. Q: Did you solely do music recording? J: No, music recording and song recording, and dubbing as well. Q: Okay. J: There used to be a lot of noise already in the outdoors in those days. So we did it in the form of loop cycles. Do you know how loop cycles used to work? Q: Yes. J: Like that. Say, there are two shots in one scene. We would loop both the shots and each shot would become a separate loop. In those days, there were about seven to eight takes for each shot. Say, the first part of take one is okay, the third part of take three is good and the middle part is from another take. We had to judge it that way and use them accordingly. It was thus very difficult. Post that period when we had the six-channel mixer, we didn’t yet have “Rock and Roll” at NFDC (National Film Development
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Corporation) then.5 We had a studio in Behala where we used to work. One advantage we had was if we got a full day in hand at the studio, the work would be complete. It is generally not possible in one day. We had to face difficulty to do it. Q: All of it was magnetic recording. Right? J: Yes, everything was magnetic. Q: Was RCA also magnetic - the RCA machine? J: RCA magnetic machine was there, but I have not seen it in a fullfledged manner, didn’t get it for use in my work. We had portable recorders. Q: What about Kinevox? J: Kinevox was there. Q: Pather Panchali was recorded on it. J: Yes, I know. It wasn’t entirely on Kinevox - some portions. Q: My question is about the sound that was recorded on location. There was a pilot track recorded on location. Right? J: Yes. Q: The dubbing happened later, in the 1960s and 1970s? J: Yes. Q: Did Satyajit Ray use dubbing? J: No. He used to do straight dubbing, but he didn’t prefer the loop dubbing. Q: Why? J: He didn’t, because the acting would fail if he did. Q: The acting would fail? J: Yes. Lip synchronization could happen, but the acting would not be very good. Q: Yes, acting might not be good. So, what did he want then? J: What he used to do was he would write down what is required for each shot. He would do shot division and do the dubbing according to that. He would do straight dubbing. He used to break down the dialogues and the artists followed that. He did straight dubbing. Q: Straight dubbing, okay. J: Straight dubbing means you record a couple of takes and cut them and do the necessary synchronization. Okay? At that time, the boom microphone was used at the Moviewallah studio floor just as it would be used in case of a film shoot on location, and the straight dubbing happened this way. If
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it was a mid-shot, the microphone will be placed accordingly. If it was a close shot, then it would be different. It was different for a long shot. So that was the process of doing it. That’s how Ray used to do it. Q: Then what happened to the sounds that were recorded at the location? J: The incidental sounds like birds calling, crickets calling, etc. used to be recorded directly from the location. They were mixed separately post dubbing. Q: Did you do straight dubbing for the voice? J: Yes. Dubbing used to happen in this way. The incidental sounds came after the dubbing. They were equally important. Say, the scene is happening around this time. So the kinds of nature sound that should be present have to be put that way. We had to do a lot of physical labour at that time. It has become very easy now in the age of the computers. But people today will be astonished to see the techniques we used to work with. They wouldn’t believe that it actually happened. Q: But dubbing means the actors have to enact again. Right? J: Why? Q: In straight dubbing the actor had to say his or her dialogues again afresh. Isn’t it? J: Yes. The original outdoor song has to be removed first, then it has to be played back on Moviewallah and the artist has to be shown the style of performance done at the location. Then the actor should decide how to reenact that. There were senior artists who were very experienced. It was not a problem for them. Q: What about the non-actors? Say, Chunibala Debi from Pather Panchali? J: They all used to do straight dubbing. The dialogues were broken up and recorded in separate takes. Q: It all happened at the location. Isn’t that right? J: Yes, at the location. Not all the dubbing happened at the location. Q: No, I mean, say, was Chunibala Debi’s voice from Pather Panchali her dubbed voice? J: Some portions which are good and don’t have a lot of out-noise are original from the location. That was the process. The locations fixed by him (Satyajit Ray) were generally all quiet and secluded. Naturally, there were not many people to form a crowd in those times. Nowadays, thousands of people gather to see if there is a shoot happening. This wasn’t much in those times. Despite everything, some people used to come to watch the shoot. What else do you want to ask?
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Q: I want to know about a lot of things. What is called ambience now, used to be called noise in those days - the sounds that are present at the location, like a bird’s call or a cow or a cat suddenly calls. J: Yes, these sounds are all recorded. They all are recorded separately and synchronized later. It happened that way, all right? There was no lack of that in the film. Q: But when it was direct recording format, the ambience was there. Once the studio era started with focus on loop dubbing inside studios, location sounds were generally ignored. Isn’t it? J: Yes. Q: I am saying this because we have seen in earlier films, say, during 1940’s, 1950’s… J: No, it wasn’t so modernised at that time. We always tried to keep the original sound from the location. If the dialogue was absolutely inaudible, then we had to dub, that too often via straight dubbing. Q: Did this become the trend? I mean, was it the same for the films during the 1970’s or 1980’s? J: Yes, we have seen this in some films surely. Q: You did the mixing, right? J: Yes. Q: Final mixing and re-recording too? J: Yes. During the shoot of Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha6… have you seen that film? Q: Yes, I have. J: I have worked for that film. I did its dubbing, ambience and all other sounds. I did re-recording too. Q: Did you record ambience at the location? J: Not much at the location. We were mostly permanent staff at the studios at that time. It was extremely troublesome at the location. Firstly, the crowd management was a huge trouble. Who would know if someone made some kind of a noise! So we had to fetch clear sounds from there. Q: The location sound recordist of Subarnarekha used to give you all the tracks that he recorded from the location and you used to edit and put them. Right? J: These tracks used to be recorded on his recorder that was transferred at the studio, okay? After the transfer, the tracks used to be synchronized with the picture. We used to look at which sounds were good and which
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would not work and the dubbing was done according to what was required. If we realized that some portion of straight dubbing and some portion of location sounds were not going well together, we would then dub the whole film. Q: The whole film would be dubbed? J: Yes, the whole film. When I joined NFDC, I worked for a film by Goutam Ghose. It’s a film on Bangladesh called Padma Nadir Majhi. 7 There the boat sounds, boithar awaaj (the sound of the water), kaada (footsteps on muck) - we created all these sounds by ourselves at the studio floor. Q: Meaning Foley? J: Yes. We used flour to create kaada (muck) and then record the sound. Q: In Padma Nadir Majhi? J: Yes, Padma Nadir Majhi. There were a lot of sounds used in that film, so much of extra sounds other than the dialogues. Q: Did you create all those sounds? J: Yes, we created most of them. Q: None of them were recorded on the location? J: Only some of them. They recorded some sounds of ripples of water. We punched those with the created sounds and mixed it by punching the indoor and outdoor sounds. Q: What is the difference between straight dubbing and dubbing? J: Straight dubbing means without picture. Q: Okay. J: No problem was there as such. When we brought the artists to the Moviewallah studios, we used to show them the acting. Otherwise they couldn’t enact. Q: So you did dubbing by only looking at the picture? J: Straight dubbing means re-recording parts of the dialogue using the boom without picture. But Loop dubbing was done with the picture. Q: You mentioned earlier that Satyajit Ray used to prefer straight dubbing. J: Yes. But he did loop dubbing for Ghare Baire8, one of his last films. Q: Okay. J: The whole film is loop dubbed in the studio. We also worked for that recording. Soumitra Chatterjee9 was giving lectures at certain places at that time. So he would very fluently deliver one to three pages of dialogues. You
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had to give rehearsals to fix on the acting style and other stuff in loop dubbing. Then the final recording used to happen. Soumitra Chatterjee is an ace actor and is exceptionally well with dubbing. He maintains his acting while dubbing. We used to record it at the monitor while the rehearsals were monitored and then we used to listen to the takes to check their quality. He then used to say, “This is okay. You can keep it.” So we recorded some shots in that way. It was extremely satisfactory to work with Ray because he used to think how different sounds could be recreated. For instance, when Goopy and Bagha are sitting in the forest and they are being attacked by mosquitoes in Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen10, he wanted to use the sound of the mosquitoes. Now that was an impossible task! Isn’t it? So what we did was - there is a kind of flower called Krishnakoli that’s available here. We cut out the front portion of that flower and produced the sound by blowing through that hole. We went to the India Film Recording echo chamber with that flower and two artists created that sound. When one person went out of breath, the other person started and so on. It was kind of a loop cycle and that was used in loop form to make the noise of the mosquitoes. So, there are certain kinds of sounds for which we need to think and figure out how to recreate them at the recording. Q: Have you worked with Mrinal Sen as well? J: Yes. Q: Which films? J: The first film I worked for him was Calcutta 71.11 Q: Okay. Re-recording? J: Completely. Dubbing, re-recording, effects - everything. Then I worked for another film where this famous actress from Bombay had acted. She passed away. I don’t remember it now after so many days. It’s because I am ageing. Naturally, I won’t remember. Q: Simi Garewal? J: No, not her. Someone before her. Q: Suhashini Mulay? J: No, she came much later. I am talking about way before. She passed away as well. Q: Is it in Mrinal Sen’s film? J: Yes. Q: So he used to record a lot on locations, right? Post that, would he go for dubbing?
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J: Yes. Q: In all of his films? J: Yes, no one worked without dubbing. There was so much of outdoor noise, it was very difficult to eliminate all of that. Q: Nowadays all sounds are recorded on location for films. J: That is because it’s digital now. Q: Yes, digital. Now most of the films are going for sync recording, recorded in sync with the camera on location. J: So the outdoor noise is not coming? Q: Firstly, the production team has been increased - they are controlling the location. Secondly, the actors are throwing their voice according to that. J: Even if they are throwing their voice, they have to balance it according to the kind of dialogue because it is not a “Jatra” (play)! LG. Q: Yes, but the actors are also co-operating. J: Yes, they could. Q: Thirdly, technology. Three mics – say a lapel, a boom and a directional microphone - are being mixed together. The voice is being recorded in sync in this way. J: What help will that do? After the shooting is over, you’ll have to go for dubbing. Q: No, dubbing is not required then. J: Okay. Q: The expenses of the dubbing are saved. J: A noise gate comes in the sound from the machine. There’s always a “hiss,” like an out-noise. That has to be eliminated. It is possible to do that, but only to a certain percentage. It doesn’t work if you do it beyond the percentage. So, whatever you do, that noise can’t be eliminated. We have done it to some extent at that time. But what you are saying about the new pattern, it’s not possible if it is not shot in a quiet place. Say, if you are shooting at Dharmatolla today, will you be able to keep that sound? Q: You’d require a big production team for that. Machines are also quieter now. J: However big your production team is, they wouldn’t be able to stop the noise. So you have to dub certain portions if you are shooting outdoors. If there is a shooting at Dharmatolla, will you be able to keep that sound? No, you cannot. You have to dub that.
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Q: But that won’t be naturalistic. Say, if someone has to shoot at Dharmatolla crossing and that sound is dubbed later and mixed with the ambience - it won’t be naturalistic. J: It will be. You can make it that way. Q: How? J: The ambience should be recorded during the time while the shooting is taking place. Okay? You put that as a filler continuously. It will surely be possible. Why not? Say, a car passes by suddenly. Then you have to synchronize the sound with the sequence. Q: A lot of people don’t like dubbing anymore. J: That is true. Then how is sound happening for foreign films? You think all the sounds are original? Q: In most of the European films it is the original location recording. J: Then the location noises would be less I guess. Previously the Tollygunje studios in Kolkata used to be a quiet location. Nowadays if you go there to shoot, there will be crackers bursting. The numbers of cars have also increased now. The studios aren’t so perfectly noise-proof as well. So, problems will be there. You have to figure it out within that. Q: Have you mixed many Uttam-Suchitra films?12 J: Yes, many of them. Q: I have seen your name in quite a lot of those film-credits. J: Almost 90% of the films during that time were done by me. There was no day and night for me - I left home for shoot at 7 in the morning and some days I used to come by back 1:30 at night, or 2 or even the early morning of the next day on some days. Someone would wait for me at home with food. It was not even the era of mobile phones that you could easily call home and inform that you’ll not come back. Q: You have been working for many of these studios, right? J: Yes. Q: New Theatres, NFDC. J: Yes, the sound studio of NFDC and Technicians’ studio also. And Calcutta Movietone - the one, which was called Radha Films Studio before Doordarshan. Then East India. There were many others. Q: What I want to ask you is that: has there been any change in the pattern or trend in sound designing work - like the use of ambience - say, within the 50’s to 60’s, 60’s to 70’s, 70’s to 80’s and 80’s to 90’s?
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J: Yes, changes have come. For ambience in the earlier days, whatever sounds were recorded from the location were kept. When I see those old films on TV now, I realize how much of noise has remained. Then later those recorded sounds were synchronized at the studio. I have recorded numerous effect-sounds like tram sounds, train sounds, etc with my tape recorder. Q: Have you done all these sounds yourself? J: Yes, all by myself. Then I also had the sound of a snake gulping down a frog (he enacts). This was one of the most impossible things. Q: Did you record on tape, as in reel? J: Yes, reel. Wire machine. Q: Did you always give importance to dubbing solely? J: I don’t give importance to dubbing if the location recorded sound is good. Why should it go for dubbing in that case? But we find that dubbing is ultimately necessary because the noise level has increased much now compared to before. There are new ways of controlling noise, like the Noise Gate and others. Still there is a percentage up to which you can do. Say, you can cut within 10 – 15% - not any more. Q: You can only cut the rumble out. J: Yes, the rumble can be cut out. Along with the rumble, the hissing noise is also there. Q: Which films of Satyajit Ray did you work for? J: I have worked since the last phase of Pather Panchali, when he was doing the re-recording. Q: Okay. Did you do the re-recording for Aparajito too? J: No, I didn’t do re-recording. Satyen Chatterjee was the location sound recordist. He did it. But I had assisted in all these films. I have worked with Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Rajen Tarafdar and other famous directors. Q: After seeing some portions of his films, I have often wondered how he did it. For instance, when Indir Thakrun is dying in Pather Panchali, there – whether you call it incidental noise or ambience whatever – he used the sound of a tree grazing against another tree. Do you remember? J: Yes. Q: Was that recorded separately? J: Yes, separately. Otherwise it would be difficult to establish it. Imagine the shoot is happening here and that sound is happening at a distance and
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it’s audible. But the audience has to be given a certain feel, right? So this was recorded separately and later put into a separate channel. Q: Okay. So he understood the requirement of that sound for the film after going to the location. Isn’t it? J: He used to observe that the sound is happening and he knew that it had to be recorded and reused. How to do that? It could be done with different trees. It wasn’t necessary to do it with that tree only. Q: There are a lot of location sounds present in a lot of Satyajit Ray’s films. J: Meaning? Q: I mean there is a great use of ambience in his films. J: Yes, it’s there. Q: They sound like they are recorded from location. I mean, whatever he got on sync. J: There were no portable recorders when Pather Panchali was being shot. So we had to carry those huge Kinevox machines and record. It was very difficult to make it move. Naturally, once the Nagra came we used to carry it easily and record. It’s easier now. You carry a recorder, record your sounds and come back. It is inconvenient if it is not there. The recording machines are improving with time. Contemporary recordists will be amazed to hear about the difficulty with which we recorded sound during our times. We had to struggle a lot during work. Back then it would take time to do what you can do now in a minute at the press of a button. Soumitra Chatterjee is a well-known dubbing artist. It was not difficult for him. You had earlier asked about Chunibala - she couldn’t do it. Many others, like Tulsi Chakraborty could never do dubbing. So that’s how it was done - we had to do straight dubbing with Chakraborty and we cut and added portions from different takes. Q: So straight dubbing means you cut different portions from what you have recorded on location and join them. Right? J: No. Q: Then? J: We brought the artists to our studio floor and showed them all of their shots on the Moviewallah machine, and then went for the straight dubbing. They were shown the acting style. Then we stopped the playback on Moviewallah and recorded the dialogues on boom mic. Q: How did you sync them? J: Syncing would then happen on the Moviewallah, by cutting and joining. We would break one shot in three to four different takes. Then the
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different parts of these different takes were joined together and they generally matched well. But, if by chance the take was not matching at all, then we would go for another recording. Q: Where did this happen? On the floor? J: Yes, at the floor. Q: And loop dubbing was done inside the studio, isn’t it? J: Yes. The projector was there where the film would be playing and the artists would look at the film and deliver their dialogues. We kept two to four takes for variation - say, first part of take one and third part of take three would be later joined together. Q: Take Kanu Bandyopadhyay for example. If you look at his sequences, you can easily understand that it is dubbed. There is a stark difference between the physical acting and the delivered dialogue. J: Yes, that happens. Unlike a few artists, most of the actors were not accustomed to dubbing. Q: It is impossible to dub Tulsi Chakraborty. J: Yes, impossible. Q: He is a natural actor. J: Like it is very difficult for the comedians to dub. Q: Yes, it is. So what happened with them? J: A similar process like the others, e.g. straight dubbing. People are more accustomed with dubbing after much practice. Q: Generally how many takes would be recorded during dubbing? J: Two to four takes generally. But there have been times when as many as seven to eight whole thousand feet tapes have been used fully. Q: Why did you omit dubbed takes? Is it because there would be no lipsync or because the acting wasn’t happening? J: Both acting and lip sync. Q: Till now, have you ever gone to the location and recorded yourself? J: Yes, I have. We had a machine called Stencil Hoffman at the technicians’ studio. It had two large boxes. LG. Once we had fallen in trouble while shooting by the Ganges. We couldn’t establish contact with the machine because of the wind. Ultimately, we had to use the screwdriver to tighten it and then it worked. We also had to keep a check on the cycles. If there was any problem with the cycle, we had to correct it. So we had a lot of trouble recording in those days.
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Q: Yes. This straight dubbing used to happen right after the shoot or on the next day? J: No. It used to happen after the edit was done. Q: Okay. So the actors were called again, and the film was played at the studio? J: Yes. Some days after the whole shoot was over, it was joined and projected to check if there is anything missing. Once we checked and found everything was alright, we used to call for the dates of actors for dubbing. Q: Was this process followed for Satyajit Ray’s films as well? J: Yes. Q: So the sound that is heard with the rush, is that direct? J: Yes, direct. Q: Were these sounds removed? J: As I said, the good sounds were kept, the rest straight dubbed in boom mic once again. Q: Will it not be possible to get any of those now? If anyone wants to listen to them, are there any tapes that have those direct-recorded sounds? J: The editor might have them, if at all. Q: Okay. J: But I doubt if you will get them. Q: Okay, I wouldn’t. In Aranyer Din Ratri13, For instance, I heard that it was entirely direct recording and that it didn’t have any dubbing. Isn’t it? J: I am not sure about that. Part of the indoor shooting of that film happened at the Indrapuri studio. I’m not entirely sure whether the original sound was kept or it was dubbed. Q: It is very essential to understand that there was a difference in quality between the films, which used direct recording without dubbing and the films that were dubbed. J: Quality difference will surely be there. The boom operation, which was present at outdoor location shootings, might turn off at times if they didn’t have proper mics. Say, a character is walking down the road. With his movement, the mic’s position will also change. Naturally, the recording of the sound will not be smooth. Then it had to be dubbed to bring uniformity. Q: I am really astonished to know that all of Chunibala Debi’s dialogues were dubbed! They sounded very naturalistic in Pather Panchali. There
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are many such instances. Such as in Aparajito, the old man who played the role of the grand uncle was also a non-actor. Right? J: Yes. Q: His voice also didn’t sound like it was dubbed. It sounded like it was from the original location take. But you’re saying they were all straight dubbed. I am trying to understand this properly. Even if it was straight dubbing, it was done very well. J: That is because the sequences were played multiple times to the actors to show them the acting and what was required from them. It has to be done this way. The artist too has to understand it clearly. Else it wouldn’t happen. Q: Till now we’ve spoken just about the voice. There are many other films, like Chowringhee 14 for instance. The shooting of Chowringhee happened at Maidan and Dharmatolla in Kolkata. J: Yes. Q: If you notice, you wouldn’t hear any sounds of Chowringhee or Dharmatolla in that film. Why do you think they didn’t use it? J: That was probably done by the mixing engineer. He might have kept it if the director had said that the ambience was necessary there. Q: Has it ever happened that some other location’s ambience was used? J: No one would figure that out. Q: Okay. Some films use stock sounds from the sound-library. J: No, not those. The sounds were recorded on a different location. Say, the shoot happened at this location. So the ambience was recorded from another location at a distance. That is possible. Q: Sounds from a completely different location were never used, right? J: No. Q: It can very clearly be understood in the film Kanchenjungha by Satyajit Ray. There is only one location, but different areas or zones in it. Every zone has its own unique sounds. For example, where Anil Chatterjee speaks is a different zone, where Ashok Mukhopadhyay speaks is a different zone, and where Chhabi Biswas and others are going out for a walk near their house is another zone. The texture and quality of each of those sounds were different. So if you used one location’s sound for another in the post, it would be sounding very odd. Isn’t it? J: Yes. It was done in a specific way. Suppose, if you concentrate and listen when the shoot is happening at the Darjeeling Mall, you’ll hear the
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faint sound of the nearby waterfall. But that wouldn’t be audible among the other noises there. So, the recording had to be done accordingly. Usually it was done at night. The shooting was over during the day, but the sound recording had to happen at night because we had to utilize the sound well. Q: How will it match if you are shooting the sounds of the day in the night? Ambient sound is different in the day than in the night. Wouldn’t that be a problem? J: We used to make loop of some sounds like the sounds of the cricket, the foxes in the distance and use them in portions where they were not present. But the audience wouldn’t realize that. Q: So the sound recording was done with proper concentration and care in Satyajit Ray’s films. But what about other filmmakers like Rajen Tarafdar? J: He was very particular too. He made a film called Ganga.15 We had kept some of the original location sounds and some had to be dubbed. Q: But the ones, which were location sounds and the ones, which were dubbed were different in quality. How did he mix them together? I mean, the dubbing of the voice happened on a floor. Isn’t it? J: The ambient sound from that location was laid over the dubbed voice. Otherwise the mistake would be noticed. Q: Can I get some of the sounds from location recordings of the film Ganga? Will anyone have them? Is there anyone who will have location sound recordings of those old shootings? J: If you want to find Ganga’s sounds, then there is an editor called Aurobindo Bhattacharya. All the sounds were usually kept with them. If you visit Rupayan you might be able to meet him there. See if you can manage anything from him. The tapes become sticky if they are too old. That’s why they are discarded. The stripe tapes which we used there were for use-and-throw purpose, okay? Q: Which Indian manufactured tape was used? J: Lacquer used to be applied on celluloid and perforations were made later. When first we started getting tapes, then the bulk order used to come from Singapore. Three to four track tapes. Okay? Q: Okay. J: We have heard music from those tapes - it sounds extremely good in quality. So, naturally, they were used extensively. Post that time, they were manufactured here.
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Q: Have you used Nagra? J: Yes. Q: But that is portable Nagra, isn’t it? J: Yes, portable Nagra. Q: The magnetic machine that you used at the studio to mix - was it RCA’s? J: Yes. We had RCA as well as Magnetek. Q: Is that Magnetek’s “Rock and Roll”? J: Yes. Q: That is a huge-sized machine! J: Yes, it is very big. Q: How was your experience of working with Ritwik Ghatak? Was he very particular too? J: He always had everything inside his head. Somebody else would keep thinking what should happen. “I will keep my thought in my mind”. I had done the dubbing and background music for his film Subarnarekha. The way he designed the sound for that scene with “Kaali” – he used bronze utensils and created the sound by throwing them on the floor from a height. After that, these sounds were transferred. Then the points where the peak modulations had happened were marked. He cut the sounds with scissors and put reverb there. The characters are chatting and coming across the highway. It was done in such a way that the sound would suddenly strike your heart almost. I mean, it was meant to strike the expectation of the audience. So this thought process as to how it should be executed was a crucial thing. It was not possible to do this only with magnetic. This has to be transferred into film. The positive has to be done. Q: That means he would do the recording at the studio and then transfer that on film? J: Yes. Q: And then he reversed the optical? J: Yes. Q: But optical has a single track, isn’t it? J: Yes. How would it sound if the sound is reversed? It will sound exactly reversed. If you wanted to reverse it, then something called glaze emulsion was applied. So the sound would naturally be audible over the glaze. Q: Are all the films of Mrinal Sen dubbed?
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J: Yes. I don’t exactly remember the name of the film. Probably Ekdin Protidin.16 Q: How will you do it now, if you are working with the digital system? J: I will have to learn it from the scratch. LG. That’s why I didn’t continue to work. Some time back, someone called Anup Mukhopadhyay joined the NFDC. You know him I guess? Q: Yes. J: He had joined the NFDC along with me. He is now working fine with the digital technology. I am sure with a try I would have learnt it too. We have spent most of our lives with two-channel recorders. Then we saw “Rock and Roll” where we used twelve channels. I might have learnt, but it would have taken much time. There is no point in trying at this old age. LG. Q: Which is your last work? J: My last work was Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire. Q: Really? J: Yes, he fell sick after that. His son was looking after him then. There were quite a few small budget films after that. But they were not worth remembering after so long. LG. Q: All your final mixes used to be mono. Right? J: Yes, all were mono. There wasn’t any other option. Q: Yes. The first Dolby stereo film was Dekha17 by Goutam Ghose. J: Yes. That was shot in Madras. Anup Mukhopadhyay did the sound. Q: How did you mix all the number of tracks into one when you mixed on mono? How did you do re-recording while mixing? J: I used a mixer to do that. Q: Did you apply any standard compressor on the final mastering? J: No, we didn’t use compressor then. It was used right before going to the optical, not before. Q: 1:2 or 1:3? J: That you have to decide after looking at the quality of the sound. It doesn’t have a constant flow. It changes. Q: In a studio at Chennai, I have seen that they apply 1:2 ratio for all films. J: It’s possible. Q: Didn’t you apply reverb? J: I used it wherever it was essential.
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Q: So the films would finally release at the theater. Have you ever applied reverb thinking of the theater? J: Depending on what was present in that particular scene. Say someone is giving a lecture from a big dais. So only that portion will have, not the rest. Q: Okay. Did you apply any overall standard…? J: No, nothing of that sort. Q: There is something called the “look” of the soundtrack, an even J: No, that wouldn’t be good. At least that’s what our theory used to tell. I am not sure about today’s theory. But sound should be done just like it is in a location. That way you provide relief for the ears. If you put loud noises everywhere in the background, it doesn’t work out and the quality of the acoustics is not good in some cinema halls. Q: So, the vital point is that someone would be present to do the complete pilot track recording at the location during Satyajit Ray’s film shoots. The rush was viewed after that. J: Yes. Q: After seeing the rush it was decided how much straight dubbing was necessary and where and how much amount of original direct sound recordings are kept? J: Yes. But in most cases straight dubbing would anyway happen. So it was crucial to achieve the exact acting and emoting as is in the picture. Q: Then the dubbing dates were fixed. J: Yes. Q: Would the music recording start separately after the dubbing was over? J: After dubbing, the matching was done. Then it was projected and the sound quality was checked for any errors. If there were any problems anywhere, that portion would be re-dubbed. Q: Okay. That means, it was like we have the visual, then voice dubbing is done and then it will be the effects. At what stage did effects happen? J: Effects should be done towards the end only. Once the straight dubbing is done with the actors, that part is over. What happened earlier was, a loop was played and the effects recording happened along with that, whether it was footsteps or something else. Q: This is what I am curious about. These effects from the location - for instance the sound of footsteps or the sound of glass or dragging a chair were they recorded at the location or later as effects?
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J: All were done later as effects. Q: None of it was recorded on location? J: None. How will you do it at the location? The out-noise would also be heard in the recording. It could not be eliminated. Q: Okay. So, effects are done that way. Now ambience. How much of ambience would be recorded and of what kinds? Who would decide that? Was it the director himself or was it the sound mixer, like you? J: Say, there is scene 1, shot 1 and the duration of this shot is one and a half minute. Okay? So, for this one and a half minute I have to necessarily get that ambience of that location. That’s how it would be decided and we would move from scene to scene. When a car is passing by in the city, the ambience of the city can stay. When the same car starts approaching the highway, then the ambience will slowly change. That’s how it would happen. Q: Did all filmmakers think about this with equal importance? J: No. A lot of people would actually, but some didn’t. Q: I have observed it for many films, say for most of Uttam-Suchitra’s, films which are very popular and viewed many times - they had little use of ambience. J: They didn’t. Q: There is little use of ambience in Saptapadi.18 J: The director used to take this machine and record the sound himself. Q: Did he record himself? J: Yes. After that he transferred that to us, we had to do the transfer. Q: I was watching a film by Nabyendu Chattopadhyay. J: Yes. Q: I don’t know in which year it was recorded. But while I was watching it on television, I noticed that the location sound is so rich, so good in quality. I don’t know where he recorded it or who recorded the sound. Do you know? J: I don’t know who the recordist was. I can’t say. Q: Each director has a unique sense of hearing. Some of them don’t give any importance to ambience. J: The thing is, though I shouldn’t be commenting on it, what the directors decide is what finally happens. If someone else says, “Sir, this is a mistake or it is not working”, he would say, “You keep quiet.”
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Q: Really? J: So then they kept quiet Q: How did Satyajit Ray work? J: He was very good. He made an effort to listen. There were some sound effects of the tram in Mahanagar.19 They were created by rubbing two files against each other. Q: Foley? J: We had used these sounds. Q: These were recorded later? J: Yes. They were created later. Every sound will not be similar sounding. There has to be variations in them. Q: I have studied film sound production. I find what you just mentioned about this sound effect of the tram when it moves intriguing. J: Yes, when the wheel turns around. Q: Why didn’t he record it at that time when the wheel was clashing? Why did he create that in the studio with files? J: Could he use that sound if he had recorded? Was that possible? Q: If the recording was done at night? J: That doesn’t happen. We had tried doing that a lot, it didn’t work. Q: Okay. J: It was not possible with outdoor locations. That sound couldn’t be used. Q: But the noise level has increased from before. Say, there was more noise in 1970’s than in 1950’s. Right? Industrial development has happened, many factories have been built and many residential apartments have been raised. J: The human population has increased. Q: Yes, people with different languages have come here in Kolkata, like the Marwari’s have come; many people from Bangladesh have come. So, there is a lot of noise. J: Yes. Q: So what do you think about the usage of location sound earlier and the way they were used later with the number of sound effects going up and more dubbing is happening? Has the usage of dubbing increased? J: Yes, dubbing has definitely increased. Q: Has Foley increased too?
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J: The thing is, use of dubbing has increased. At present there isn’t any option other than dubbing. Say you are making a film now. You won’t have any option other than dubbing. So the thought process should naturally be based on that understanding. Okay? I have quite a few old quarter-inch tapes - two or three bags full. Q: Really? J: Yes. There are lots of sounds in those. We had recorded those on wire machines. I have a wire machine as well. Q: What will you do with them? J: They will slowly go bad, what else? Q: Were they all recorded on location? J: Yes. Q: Recorded on the streets? Really? J: Yes. Once, there was a scene where rain sounds were required in Aparna Sen’s father Chidananda Dasgupta’s film Bilet Pherot. 20 He wanted the sound of real rain and not artificial rain. How would it be done? So we hired a car, followed the dark clouds and went towards Basirhaat. We had almost reached when we realized that it wouldn’t rain! Only the breeze remained for some time. So we stopped the car at a place at that time and saw that a snake gulping down a frog and making a sound. We recorded that. Q: Which microphone did you use? J: It was the wire machine. It was good for recording effects. In the mean time, it was around 1:30 or 2 in the night. Suddenly we heard boot-steps from a distance on the tar road, followed by big flashlights. The police came and asked us what we were doing there. We honestly replied that we have come from a sound studio to record some sound effects. The cop eagerly asked us to show what we had recorded, and we did. After listening and being convinced, he told us the reason why he was asking us the questions. He said, “Just sometime back a robbery happened here. That’s why we came here.” Then they asked if we needed some help. We replied in the negative. We said we would be leaving soon. This is how we used to record sound. Q: Where did you finally get the rain sound? J: That didn’t happen. So we went to a studio, took a plain sheet of tin and fit it inside an echo chamber and then sugar cubes were poured from above. Q: Okay.
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J: It sounded exactly like rain. We had to keep that - we couldn’t do anything else. So you have to really work your brain, and figure out ways to create these sound effects. Q: You have done all of these in magnetic recording, but your career started with optical recording. Right? J: Yes. Q: Was it direct recording when you did start with optical recording? Did you use to go there? J: Yes, it was direct recording at the shoot. Q: Then? J: There used to be a sound booth called a Van where the sound was recorded on the recorder through microphones. In the meanwhile, some loopholes during the shoots would be there either in the camera or the sound. Re-takes were done in those cases. The re-takes were taken cautiously and when the sound was taken, the proper shot number and take number would be written on the clapstick. There are proper divisions - in a scene, there are, say, 6 shots. How they would be shot was decided by the director. That’s how the acting was guided. Q: Okay. So, were only those sounds that were taken during direct recording were used during mixing? J: No. That sound would have some out-noise remaining because there are a lot of structures around the old studios now. Big buses also pass by and they’ll blow horn loudly while passing. That’s why that sound can’t be kept. Q: So, if this was shot on location - like this is an instance where recording has happened on a set - what if it happened outside the set on a location? J: Then the same problem remains. Q: What is the harm if a bus passes by? Isn’t it a real situation? J: We are not seeing the bus pass by visually, we are only able to hear the sound of it passing by. If we have to establish that the bus is passing by, we have to show a shot of the same as well. Okay? Q: Okay. That’s why most of the sounds, particularly ambient sounds that you had from the direct recording were discarded. Isn’t it? J: Yes, most of them were discarded. There used to be out-noise as well. The sound proof studios were not so good. Some or the other out-noise would somehow seep in. Q: Hm.
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J: That’s why those sounds get discarded and were recorded afresh. Q: Then what was the need of recording? J: Because it is a guideline. A guideline in the sense that – suppose the dubbing would happen after four days and it would be difficult to remember the exact emotion during the dialogue delivery for that long. Q: Okay. So, while recording any location generally, the location will have its own ambience. If you discard that ambience, it has to be recreated again. Right? J: Yes, it has to be re-created. Q: What was used to create that ambience? J: That was taken from the location, at a given level. The dialogues would sound odd if it was an outdoor shot. So there should be ambience sounds in the background. Say, we are sitting inside four walls and it’s almost soundless. If some vehicles are passing by this place, it has to be established in a certain way. Q: What sound was used there? J: The ambience of the same location was recorded and used. Q: But was it audible? J: Yes, of course. Q: I am asking this because when I am watching on television or listening through my headphones, I don’t hear anything. There is no ambience, only the sound of the camera rolling. J: That means it was shot with direct recording. Q: Okay. J: That’s how the sound of the camera is there. Q: Wasn’t it discarded? J: No. At times, the level of out-noise is very low in the ambience. Q: Okay. J: If suddenly some loud out-noise enters and is heard that cannot be matched with the kind of sound that is required for that sequence, then it will be discarded. Q: So, when the ambient sounds were recreated, were the sounds taken from the sound-bank? J: No. When we just had the dialogues and nothing else, at times after the dubbing of the film got over, you felt that some filling is necessary there.
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Say, the shoot is on the road. So there has to be horn blowing sounds or a motorcycle passing by soon after that. So, these are recorded softly. Q: You record them, right? J: Yes. Q: Then they are put back in the same place? J: Yes. Q: Which time period is it that you are talking about - 1950’s to 1970’s? J: Yes. Q: Did everything happen directly before that, say around 1935? J: Yes, direct sound. The trend of dialogue dubbing was not in vogue at that time, the use was less. Q: When did dubbing start then? J: I recorded sound effects. Say, foxes can be heard distantly in a night sequence. Crickets are calling. These sounds would have to be established. During shoot, there is a big crowd of people who come to watch the shoot at the location. Naturally, those sounds with the noises cannot be kept. So we would discard those sounds and recreate the ambience when we needed to create those effects. I had to go out iat night and record those sounds. Suppose there was a sequence, which was being shot somewhere outstation on the road. There would be different kinds of sounds, like sounds of crickets, dogs barking. We would record whatever came across our ears and while recording, we had to be careful about the clarity. After the dubbed dialogues were matched and placed, we would lay those ambience sounds in the background. We applied a filling level on them. Q: Filling? Is that a soundtrack? J: Yes. Q: What can you hear from that? J: These are the ones, which are from the recorder - the sounds that are recorded in the night. That’s what gives the filling level. Q: Okay. Is that also called ambience? J: Yes. Q: Are ambience and “fillings” similar things? J: Ambience is of course a background sound of a location. Q: Are you calling that “filling”? J: Yes. Q: Okay. So it used to be called “filling” in film terminology as well?
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J: It is filler level. Q: That means you have to visit the location again to record those fillers afresh. J: Yes. Q: But this process – say, I am going to a village and recording sounds from there and later I discard them J: Then you have to check the quality of the sounds. You have to be cautious while recording. You can do it later as well. If it’s a village, it should have a certain soundscape like dogs barking, crickets calling, ‘pheu’ calling, etc. You have to understand the requirement and put them in places. Q: Those sounds have to be recorded as well. Isn’t it? J: Yes. I have some of those sound effects with me on tapes. You have to play them one by one and listen and after listening, you have to record it on another tape. Q: Hm. I have got a machine with me, with which you can convert sound from analog medium to digital medium and record it on the computer. But you can’t use this without a player. J: What kind of player? Q: Spool player. J: Oh! That isn’t there. Q: I have one from Atari 334, but not here. J: Yes, 334. Q: I will come with it in January and we can play the tapes and see what recordings are there. J: Okay. Q: What was the procedure in optical recording when everything was done directly and dubbing wasn’t yet used? J: You had to check the quality of the outdoor sound. If you could keep that sound, you needed to do a close treatment on it. Q: You mean to record with the mic closer to the face? J: Yes. If the mic was placed at a distance of 10 to 15 feet, the distance was naturally more. Q: Have you worked with optical in direct recording? J: Yes.
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Q: What was the difference when dubbing came slowly replacing the direct sound by optical recording method? J: The only difference was you could avoid the out-noise. Q: Okay. J: You had to record the sound so that you could maintain uniformity throughout. Q: But dubbing is magnetic recording, right? J: Optical is optical. Q: Hm. But all the dubbing was done as magnetic recording, isn’t it? J: Yes. That was all magnetic recording. Q: In which year did magnetic recording start? Do you remember? J: No, I don’t remember the exact time. Q: Did Satyajit Ray use magnetic recording first? J: No, it was used even before Pather Panchali was made. Q: Magnetic recording? J: Yes. Earlier, the sound was louder in dubbing. If it weren’t a silent camera, its sound would enter. It couldn’t be avoided. It was fine if it was a Blimp camera. Else, it should be a silent camera. There’d be a constant noise otherwise. Q: Like it’s all silent in Debdas by Pramathesh Barua, 1935. J: That was not dubbing. That was all direct recording. Q: When did dubbing start then? J: As far as I remember, there was an editor called Bhagawandas. The gentleman was Oriya. He was quite a famous editor and used to work in Kolkata. One day, he suddenly cut a few shots in loop form, joined them and it was played. Then a mark was given to it - say, at one’s end and at the others’ beginning - there was a gap given at the point they were joining. Q: Hm. J: It differed from 3 to 5 frames. There was a sync mark provided there in the shape of a cross. That was played parallel to the camera and sound. That track would play in the loop form. It might not work for the first two shots, but in the third shot it would be correct. So that’s how the loop was used. Q: What was the usefulness of the loop-form? That you can record those tracks later and sync with it?
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J: Yes, that’s what it was. Q: Okay. J: After you get the loop form, you had to interlock it and record. The recorder and the loop should be interlocked and then the recording should happen. After recording, you could find that only take 4 was okay out of the others. Q: Do you remember the names of any film where this was done under Bhagawandas? Daktar, Mukti – were these films all direct recording? J: No, even before. These sounds couldn’t be kept only for cases where the camera noise or a loud noise of a bus passing by had entered because the out-noise would be louder than the dialogue. Naturally, that sound couldn’t be kept. When the first print of the rush was viewed with both picture and sound, we came to know which shots were okay sound-wise and which ones had loud noises. Q: Was this rush made of direct recording? J: Yes. Rush was where you discarded the sounds and synced the dialogues and used it. Q: I am trying to figure out the time when dubbing started. J: I’ll tell you what happened before. Say, there are some sounds where the amount of out-noise is tremendous. Only those portions were dubbed and the outdoor noise was added later according to the “filling”. At times, it would sound a little unmatched. So it would then be decided if the whole film would be dubbed. Then it could be done just the way we desired. You could add the sound of bus here, a rickshaw honking somewhere else, etc. This would add to the feel of sequence and it would be nice to watch the film. Q: Did this change bring any inconvenience to your work? For instance, you said that work would be less in direct recording. J: Yes, it’s true that the amount of work was less. Once direct recording was done during the shoot and that would be all. Now there are other steps involved. Then there would be dubbing, then adding filler sounds in the background. We had to monitor the whole film properly while adding these sounds. If dubbing was chosen, then the whole film would be dubbed. Ambience would be added later in the post. Q: Didn’t Satyajit Ray shoot most of his early films on location? J: Yes. Q: Were all of them dubbed later, like you mentioned?
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J: Some sounds would be there, which you would have to absolutely discard and then go for straight dubbing and add a “filling” sound in the post. Q: When you see Aranyer Din Raatri, for instance, you will figure out that it is direct recording. J: Yes, it happened for some films then. But in those cases, the level of the out-noise was slightly more than that of the dialogues and the layering of the ambience was well-measured. Q: What does that mean? J: Well measured in the sense that no sound would appear suddenly very loud. Everything was in control. Q: Was Satyajit Ray’s working process any different from other filmmakers? J: Not entirely. Q: Then how are his films so rich in sound? Whenever you listen to his film soundtracks, you can figure that it’s different. How did it sound different then? J: For his early films, he never did dubbing for the whole film. He would usually straight dub one scene/sequence. Then we would match the fillers in the post and prepare the final tracks. I am forgetting the name of the film for which he chose dubbing first. I have not been in touch since a long time. I retired in 2002. Q: Was it Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen? J: No, that was much later. Q: Are you talking about a film, which was made earlier and the whole film was dubbed? J: Yes. Q: Was it Charulata?21 J: Yes. Q: Are you sure about this? Whole of Charulata is dubbed? J: Yes. Q: Okay. J: Charulata was done by us at NFDC. Mr. Dulal Dutta, his editor, was very particular about sound. He would mention where the sound was not so good and something needed to be done. Then his opinion would be sought and he would say that the level of ambience should go higher or lower at places. He would also suggest addition of some sounds at places.
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Q: Did Satyajit Ray ponder upon the use of sound? J: Nothing of that sort, but later he realized that he should have thought more about sound design. The kind of locations he chose for shoot, there were generally no loud out-noises there, only natural ambience. Q: He mostly shot his films on location - Joy Baba Felunath22 was shot in Benaras, Sonar Kella23 was shot in Rajasthan - both at real locations. Was it not possible for him to go for totally direct recording at these locations? J: Well, that used to depend on the dialogues. It was done according to that and later placed properly in the post. Q: Did you work on the digital platform before you retired in 2002? J: No. I heard that the digital technology was about to arrive but we did not get the opportunity. Q: Which system did you use primarily for all your films? J: We used two separate machines - one for sound and another camera. The clap-stick was used back then for shoots. The scene details were mentioned on it. For example, scene 34, shot number 1. That was the process. Q: Was everything recorded on a Nagra? J: Yes, Nagra was used mainly for all the outdoor location shoots. Q: You received all the tapes with the sounds. Didn’t you work at the studio? J: Yes. Q: Then you would discard the unusable ambient sounds and arrange for filler sounds and match the ambience as per your reference after the dubbing was over. Isn’t it? J: Yes. Since the shoot was happening in Rajasthan, the out-noise in the film needed to give the same feel. Q: Okay. How would you get that? J: That would be recorded separately. One take would be about 5 to 6 minutes long. They were recorded at a stretch. Q: This was ambience, right? J: Yes, ambience. When dubbing happened, these sounds would be added to give the feeling. Q: Did this happen after the dubbing was done? J: No. This was called re-recording. Q: So you did re-recording as well?
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J: Yes. Q: When it comes to hearing, magnetic recording sounds clearer than optical direct recording. Isn’t it? J: Yes, magnetic definitely is clearer. Q: The dynamic range is higher. J: Yes. Q: If ambience and fillers were not given then what might have happened? What is the need of fillers or ambiences? What purpose does it serve? J: First you have to know where the location is. It is a must to know that. Q: Hm. What if the location is inside a set, indoor? J: Yes. Say, the kind of sound that is present here is itself creating an ambience with the out-noises. This room is not sound proof. Q: Hm. J: There are places abroad where the exterior sounds don’t enter at all. Q: Yes, they are soundproof. Do you mean to say that the ambience is there to provide information regarding the space? J: Yes. Q: But who would decide that how much volume or depth or level should be given to the ambiences? J: Our ears will decide that. Q: Okay. J: The entire audience has been given the feel of the sound of whatever is being projected on the screen. Naturally, it will be done accordingly, whether it’s 5% or 2% or 3%. Q: So, were the levels given to optical recordings and the levels given to magnetic recording different? When the final mix is done with optical tracks, it’s direct optical recording. Married print is also done on optical. If recording is done on magnetic media and so is dubbing, and then rerecording is done on optical – is there any difference in the levels of these two platforms? J: Not really. You have to keep hundred percent volume for the dialogues. After this stage, you will naturally have to decide about the percentage of the other sounds to be added. Q: If the dialogue level was hundred percent, how much would be allotted to the effects?
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J: That depends. Say, a bus comes from a distance and passes from close by. So when the bus is the closest to the subject, its volume would be hundred percent. You have to build it this way. It has to be created in such a way that there are no dialogues there. It should be off during dialogues. Q: Okay. So when the dialogues are at hundred percent level and you have to add ambience to that (which would not sound like happening nearby) what percentage would you give? J: If the foxes are calling from a far-away distance, the volume would be low but it has to reach the ears. Again if it’s a mid-shot or a long-shot, the volume will vary accordingly. Q: Did you do Foley recording or effects, which were recorded at the studios? J: Yes, of course. Q: Why wouldn’t this happen at the location? J: It wouldn’t happen while dubbing was done at the location. Otherwise you have to see the picture in front and synchronize properly right there. Say, a footstep for instance. A person is walking from a distance and coming closer. So we have to see the film and sync accordingly. Q: But that footstep could have been recorded at the location. Isn’t it? J: Suppose that person is starting from quite a distance. He is walking and coming closer. So, the sound should carry the same effect. Or suppose two people are coming from a distance and chatting while you are eagerly waiting with the recorder at night. The sound of their footsteps will be quite loud and clear. Similarly, the level of that sound will vary from low to high. Q: Are you aware that most of the films happening now are going for sync sound recording, as in direct recording in your terms? It’s just the same as before. Nowadays it is called location sync sound or live sound. Most of the films in Mumbai now are doing sync sound by digital recording. J: Yes, I am sure they have well equipped studios. If the studios are towards the main road then it will be disturbing. Q: Did you do dubbing yourself? J: Yes. Q: Did you not feel there were qualitative differences between direct recording and dubbed recording? J: Yes, a slight mismatch would happen because the artist who is performing automatically becomes more conscious while he is dubbing. We had to tell them when it was not matching. That’s how it was done.
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Some artists like Santu Mukherjee - even now they just see the film and enact exactly the same. Even while performing in a shoot they were aware that these portions would later get dubbed. It’s an expertise they gain with experience. Earlier this was difficult. Earlier they would give their hearts’ best while performing in the shoot, but faced difficulty while emoting the same during dubbing. The minute fumblings were especially difficult to recreate. The way Anup Kumar delivered his extempore or dialogues would always be missing in the dubbing. Q: The performances of the artists were better for capturing during direct recording, isn’t it? J: Yes. Q: I’ve also felt that there is a difference between the dynamic range of the optical medium and the magnetic medium. J: Yes. Q: Do you think magnetic recording is of better quality than optical recording? J: Yes. See, dubbing is definitely better in the sense that at times while shooting, the microphones are not properly set for the dialogues, but while dubbing they are. Okay? Q: Hm. J: We have to decide how much distance to keep. At times the sound becomes hollow. Q: What does that mean? J: Well, this happens when dialogues are recorded in an empty room. The dialogues will then resonate. Q: Hm. How would you avoid this in dubbing? J: We always took care of that while dubbing. The mics were always placed at close distance. Q: Did you like doing dubbing yourself? J: My job during dubbing was only to record the sound properly. The acting was taken care of by the director. We didn’t have any say regarding that. Q: Hm. How was the quality? J: Dubbing quality was definitely good. Q: You were talking about the “fillers” which were added later. Couldn’t some of them, which were recorded while shooting at the location, be used after cleaning?
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J: Suppose there’s a dialogue, and there’s a gap in between. Some or the other sound will enter there. Okay? The same thing will happen as many times as you repeat that loop. Q: Hm. J: So the solution would be to discard the whole recording and dub this as you want it to be. Do you understand what I mean? Q: Yes. It’s better to create a new track rather than using that loop. But why is that loop coming? J: Suppose we have a sound - like a footstep coming closer to the camera from a distance, which we cannot match somehow. Q: Hm. J: Then we keep that sound there and reduce the volume so that the level of out-noise goes down. But this is not a good way of doing it. Q: While mixing you only did mono mixes. No stereo mixes happened back then. J: No. Q: For the mono mix you had to keep everything like ambience, voice, effects and background music through one speaker. Did you keep all of them in one mix? Didn’t it become unclean? J: No. Q: How did you achieve this? J: If there’s a dialogue between two people, the voice will get a 100% preference and the sounds which will be in the background, like the fillers, the levels of those will be adjusted accordingly. Wherever the filler sound level has to be increased, it was done according to the requirement. That was the process. Q: Would you apply a filler when there was no voice or dialogue in a scene? J: Yes. Q: Was the level increased there? J: No, not like that. There was a uniform level. Suppose both of us are speaking here and some sound is happening at a distance. Q: Let’s say it’s a generator. The generator sound will be kept constantly then. Right? J: Yes, the level would depend on the distance.
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Q: In Jalshaghar 24 , for instance, there is a generator sound. Can you remember? That generator sound is there constantly for 3 sequences. Was that sound recorded later and added in the background? J: Yes. Q: One more thing. Were the levels and quality of the fillers, which were recorded in optical medium while shooting, and the fillers, which were recorded on magnetic separately and added after dubbing, different? I mean, the ambient sounds or fillers, which were recorded while shooting, and later while dubbing – was the quality and volume of the latter different from the former? J: Yes, they had to be different to save the dialogues. Q: Okay. J: To save the dialogue, the level should be kept as such that it doesn’t disturb the audience but still that sound will be perceived at the place. Q: Hm. J: So you have perceived it as per your hearing and adjust the level. Q: Why was voice given so much importance? J: See, voice is not like a song. The level changes at places. At some place where the voice level has gone down or some out-noise like a bus sound has entered there - that gives rise to a problem. To control this, it is required to create a separate channel. Q: That means dubbing has become a necessity for people as the number of vehicles have increased with industrialization. J: Yes. Earlier there used to be very little out-noise. Take the Tollygunj studios for example. Earlier no buses used to run through that road. Now there is a bus route. Many buses ply on that road. So it’s natural to have more background noise. Also, the ceiling is made of asbestos. If a crow flies and sits on it with a piece of bone, there’ll be a loud thud. Q: LG. J: These sounds will get recorded as well. Q: When these natural sounds were discarded, the naturalness of the film sound was lost. Isn’t it? J: Yes, it did. We had to compromise to some extent. There wasn’t another option. Q: What was this compromise for? Only to keep the voice clean? J: Yes. If the voice gets entangled with the other sounds, it will sound very bad. A lot of people will not be able to hear the dialogues. Nowadays
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people have less hearing power. The ears’ response has changed over the years. The constant noise that plays in our ears from outside has weakened the diaphragm as well. Nowadays you can’t speak to a young man softly. They will ask you to repeat what you said. Q: LG. J: Such is the situation in present times. Q: Have you seen any recent films in a theater? J: No. Q: When was the last time you did? J: I have seen till 2002. I haven’t been in a theater since then. Q: Could you tell me how you used to do the final mix, final re-recording of your films in more details? I am trying to understand the workflow. J: At first the sound was synced and laid matching with the visual. Then the effects were created. After that the levels were fixed according to the requirement. At places we had to play with the effects by adjusting the levels when there were no dialogues. That was the process. Suppose there was a shot on a running train. The sound of the train compartment and the overhead out-noise had to come in such a way that our ears could concentrate on the dialogues. For instance, you keep the level of the trains sound at 5%. But it was not necessary to fix that level. It could be changed and played around with. If the dialogue went on for a while and then there was a gap where you could hear the sound of the engine loudly, you had to play around for the gaps. Otherwise the emotions would not develop. You could not keep the sound at a fixed level. It was necessary to play around with both the dialogues and the effects. Q: In Satyajit Ray’s Nayak25, for instance, one whole scene is inside a train. The train sound is there throughout, but it’s different for different compartments. J: Hm. The shoot was done with a camera and a tape recorder. For example, the shoot started from Dumdum on the train and ended at a small town in West Bengal. So the train left the city and journeyed through the villages. There would be the train running sound. Then it would break loudly at a quiet quaint station in a small village. It is crucial for these sounds to be present. Q: And were these recorded separately? J: Yes. And the sounds, which could be kept were left intact. Q: Did Satyajit Ray put more stress for sound in his films compared to other filmmakers of his times? Inside of a train is a common site in
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popular Bengali films, like Suno Baranari26 or Chaoa Paowa.27 But the ambience that is used in these films for the train sequence, to create the feeling of being inside a train, is almost the same throughout. There’s no dynamics. J: Yes. Q: But the details are more in scale in Ray’s Nayak. Each compartment has its own different ambient characteristic. J: Say, that loud sound of the sound of the bathroom of a train, then the sound of the door closing. Q: Yes, then the sound of the corridors. Was Satyajit Ray keener in bringing out these details? J: Yes, he placed the sounds perfectly. Q: Okay. J: Suppose a character walks down the corridor and comes towards his own seat. So that corridor sound was recorded and placed here. That is how we had to balance in those days. Q: Then how did he (Satyajit Ray) become different from the others? Why is he different from others? J: Oh! That I cannot say! LG. Q: No! I mean for sound! Didn’t he pay extra attention to sound? J: He actually didn’t pay that much attention to sound earlier in his career. Q: Okay. J: After completing the film he would realize that there are some loopholes remaining in the sound. Then he would slowly think about it. He didn’t prefer dubbing for his films. He would go for dubbing only when it was the last option left. Q: Why did he not like dubbing? J: Because the acting generally gets spoiled while dubbing. An artist will give his best if he is allowed to deliver his dialogues freely while shooting. Okay? Q: Hm. J: That happens at the shoot. But the moment it was dubbed, it would lose that charm. Q: That’s why he didn’t prefer dubbing? J: Yes. Q: Then what did he do?
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J: For some portions where the sound would be really bad, the Moviewallah was played and the recording was done accordingly. I already mentioned about straight dubbing on the floor, using boom mics like in a location. That was used in these cases. Q: Did you work with Uttam Kumar? J: Yes. Q: Has he done dubbing? J: Yes, he was good at it. Q: Okay. J: Soumitra Chatterjee as well. There are some artists who’re very good with dubbing. There is one problem with dubbing. Most of the artists who hear about dubbing become extremely conscious. While shooting they are completely involved in that situation and perform fabulously. Suppose there are fumblings in certain shots. It is very difficult to exactly match those kinds of sounds. Artists like Anup Kumar would be able to exactly match them. But when they hear that the dialogues will be dubbed later, they avoid extra fumblings. Q: Anup Kumar has acted in many Bengali films. Were they all dubbed? J: No, not all. See, his acting style is mostly very loud dialogue delivery. Naturally, that’s kept intact. It’s too troublesome to dub the whole film. Q: Did Suchitra Sen do dubbing? J: Yes. Q: Do you have any kind of curiosity about ambient sound? Do you have any focus towards ambience? J: Nothing of that sort. Just that ambience can’t be avoided at certain situations. There are some shots where you need to add ambience so that it would sound nice. Q: But isn’t there a limitation to that? Like optical recording has a recording limit - it has to be in between 800 hertz to 8K. J: Yes, it has to be done within that. Q: But a lot of ambience will not be within this range. The low frequency or high frequency ambiences, for instance. How were they recorded then? J: Sound has a variable area as well. Q: Hm. J: Sound peaks get cut. So we had to keep that in mind while recording. Q: Was the final mix always done on optical?
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J: No, now it’s magnetic. At first the entire final recording was done with optical. Then picture and sound were synced and we checked the film to see how the recordings had come, if there was any loophole in the sound. If nothing was there, then it was okay. Q: The projection in the cinema theater was optical, right? J: Yes. That was the married print - picture and sound printed together. Q: Did you ever have creative differences with your directors? J: Generally it didn’t happen. In some cases if they wanted some sound and I suggested something that might work well, they agreed to see that. Even Satyajit Ray agreed to some of them. Q: My observation is that the presence of ambience is more in Satyajit Ray’s films than in any of his contemporaries. He prioritized ambience. Why did this happen? J: We… he didn’t generally go for dialogue dubbing. Naturally the level had to be put up for the dialogues and that’s how the outdoor noises entered. Q: I understand. So, most of it is direct? J: Yes. The dialogues and other sounds had to be levelled properly. A boost up was done. Q: Since he wanted direct recording quality, the ambient sounds were present more in his films? J: Yes. Q: Okay. J: Say an effect sound, for example, which we were applying while rerecording. There was a separate sound booth, which had its own microphone and the visuals were also given. So we recorded according to the visuals. This re-recording used to happen while the shot was being played. Suppose we had to give the sound of thundering clouds. How would we do that? India Film Studio had an echo chamber. Big sheets were thrown on the floor and that rumbling sound was recorded. That is how we created such sounds. The volumes of these recreated sounds were more than the original sounds so that we could adjust the levels wherever necessary. Q: But isn’t this cheating? J: LG. It sounded like real only. These kinds of sounds were created once within the studios and they are repeatedly getting used.
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Q: But you could’ve recorded cloud-thundering sound very easily. Why go into such difficulty? J: It wouldn’t have worked out. Q: Why? J: We had to apply as required within the shots. It cannot just come from anywhere. It has to come where I wanted it. Q: Okay. J: Isn’t it? Q: Yes. Didn’t you get that thundering cloud from stock sound? J: Yes. Q: Did you use stock sound? J: Yes. Q: From where did you procure the stock sounds? J: We got them from the English films, ok? Q: Hm. J: These were generally kept with the editors. They only helped us in procuring them. Q: How were they stored? In tapes? J: In spools. Q: Okay. When you needed some sounds that were not available in the recorded pilot sounds of a film, you used stock sounds. Isn’t it? J: Yes. Q: I am asking this because I remember hearing, for example, a particular bird’s sound in many films. J: That is because that sound was made into a loop and used for many purposes. This practice is long gone. Now you can just put the tape recorder out in the nature and it will record all the sounds. Then you have to treat it according to your requirement, adjust the levels and so on. You cannot put other sounds separately. It is all-inclusive. Q: Is this what you are calling as filler? J: Yes, that’s filler. Q: So, again, filler is ambience. Right? J: Yes. It will sound very bare if you have only dialogues after dubbing. Q: But even a place can have its own character in some films. J: Yes.
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Q: For example, the village itself is a character in Pather Panchali. J: Hm. Q: If you have to depict the character of that place, then there is no other way than doing it through sound. J: That’s correct. Q: Then you cannot just call it “filler” – just filling the empty spaces. That means ambience is equally important. J: Yes. For instance, that sound of the coconut leaf being dragged through the ground in Pather Panchali has been created by us. Q: Is that so? J: Yes, of course. How else would you get that sound? Q: You could’ve recorded that coconut leaf. Isn’t it? J: Sound has different variations. Okay? Q: Hm. J: The recording was dependent on that factor. Q: Didn’t you face any discrepancies or misbalances as a result of the fact that you partly re-recorded or dubbed the tracks? J: Yes, we had to balance it properly to make it even. Q: How did that happen? J: We had to balance carefully. At times there would be original sound and then there would be dubbed sound. The recording had to be done cautiously. Q: But it could also sound misbalanced if one sound was recorded at the location and others were not. J: There would be ambient sound added to it. We would later have to add similar ambience to those shots where the dialogues were dubbed. Q: The same filler? J: Yes, definitely. A similar kind of filler had to be given. Q: How did the word “filler” come to be used? J: Filler means some or the other outdoor sound. If a tape recorder is put on over here, then this droplet sound will be captured. Q: Are these fillers? J: Yes. Q: Okay. Is it room tone? J: No, we didn’t say room tone. It was the filler.
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Q: Then which one was called the ambience? J: Filler is ambience. Q: And effects? J: Effects means synchronized effects like footsteps, sound of lathis, sound of saucers and plates, etc. Q: When was the music recording done? J: Re-recording would be done after the whole film was complete. Then the re-recording print would be taken out and the effect sounds would be applied on that. Then the requirements of the music like how long the music will stay, how much of the effect will be given were decided. Q: When you did the final mono mix then music, voice, ambience and effects didn’t get overlapped. Right? J: No. We used to do proper separation. Q: How? J: Suppose a particular dialogue is being said. I am saying and you are listening. We used the gaps, which were there in between as fillers. Q: Hm. J: That was the process. Q: And music? J: Background music would come over a particular dialogue. Q: Hm. J: If I had already decided that I would give music for a particular dialogue where I felt it was required, I would do that afterwards.
Notes 1
Name Abbreviations: Jyoti Chatterjee – J; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 Uday Shankar was an Indian dancer and choreographer, and a pioneer of Indian modern dance, who made the experimental film Kalpana (1948). Musician Ravi Shankar was his brother, and composer Ananda Shankar was his son. 3 Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, Satyajit Ray, 1955) 4 Aparajito (The Unvanquished, Satyajit Ray, 1956) 5 “Rock and Roll” was a reversing/high speed projector used in the tape-based mixing stage made by the company Magna-Tech. 6 Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965) 7 Padma Nadir Majhi (Boatman of the River Padma, Goutam Ghose, 1993) 8 Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, Satyajit Ray, 1984)
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9 Soumitra Chatterjee or Soumitra Chattopadhyay is an Indian film actor. He is best known for his frequent collaborations with film author Satyajit Ray. 10 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Satyajit Ray, 1969) 11 Calcutta 71 (Mrinal Sen, 1972) 12 The most popular romantic pair of Bengali Cinema till date. 13 Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970) 14 Chowronghee (Pinaki Bhushan Mukherjee, 1968) 15 Ganga (Rajen Tarafdar, 1960) 16 Ek Din Pratidin (And Quiet Rolls the Dawn, Mrinal Sen, 1979) 17 Dekha (Goutam Ghose, 2001) 18 Saptapadi (Seven Steps, Ajoy Kar, 1961) 19 Mahanagar (The Big City, Satyajit Ray, 1963) 20 Bilet Pherat (Chidananda Das Gupta, 1972) 21 Charulata (The Lonely Wife, Satyajit Ray, 1964) 22 Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God, Satyajit Ray, 1979) 23 Sonar Kella (Satyajit Ray, 1974) 24 Jalsaghar (The Music Room, Satyajit Ray, 1958) 25 Nayak (The Hero, Satyajit Ray, 1966) 26 Suno Baranari (Ajoy Kar, 1960) 27 Chaoa Paowa (Yatrik, 1959)
CHAPTER 9 ANUP DEB1
A: I think I have worked on magnetic media for at least 10 years and in digital for almost seven to eight years. If you ask me about the quality part, I think magnetic has got better warmth compared to digital. But digital has got the facilities like…say you are working on a workstation in digital and it is very convenient to edit it, make a copy, and you can transfer the file also. You need not to carry. Even if you are carrying, it is a small maybe DVD or maybe a drive, whereas a tape will be thousand feet long, and one reel means there’ll be so many tracks. So, physically carrying it is a minus point. But as far as the quality is concerned, it is of better quality. Q: Okay. A: Digital is convenient as far as the format is concerned. You can carry it easily, edit it and rest of the other things. But I would still prefer to have that warmth which I heard in the magnetic, you know. Q: In a mixing desk you now work with a digital mixer, right? A: Yeah. Q: Is the platform comfortable to work with? Does it give a sense of flexibility than the previous analogue mixer? A: Nowadays there’s definitely flexibility with the digital console. It is more flexible. You can have n number of inputs in the console, whereas in magnetic has got some sort of a limitation, you know. Especially in Bollywood you can’t have more than 6 to 8 transports where each transport will carry only one track. I have seen that in Hollywood they are having twenty to thirty transports, you know. Working on the digital console with the workstation, you can run two hundred tracks, three hundred tracks, and if your console is a full-fledged professional console you can have n-number of tracks. It is very easy to work with. All the things are very easily accessible. Because of the digital console you can shift your channels, you know. Suppose it is a big console with hundred faders, you need not to go to the extreme end physically. You can call those faders in front of you. If it is a four layers console you can get access
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to any layers. There is no doubt that digital has changed things a lot as far as the working convenience is concerned. Q: Does that number of channels give better quality of work? A: The thing is that you should know that having the facility doesn’t mean that you have to have a hundred tracks. It all depends on how you can visualize your sound, how you are laying your sound. I have seen people who will put ten tracks for one sound. Sometimes you don’t need to lay ten tracks for one sound. May be you wanted to show the producer that you have made so many tracks. LG. But most of the time I had to close down a lot of things, which were not needed. Putting too many layers also makes the thing messy. Q: Messy. A: It has to be very clean sound. Q: Hm. A: Why does one need ten tracks if you can get it with three tracks? It depends on how you are designing the sound, whether that many tracks were/are needed or not. Q: But you don’t see it in digital technology also. It’s anyway invisible, whereas you could touch the tapes in magnetic-analogue era. Does this make any difference? A: I don’t think so. With the digital you can see the waveform, which is again very, very convenient. You can judge the loudness of the sound you know - this sound is very loud or that the sound is source is weak or not by just seeing the waveform, which is a big advantage. Q: If you think of looking back at the times of magnetic media that you have worked with, what do you miss? At this moment what do you miss about magnetic media other than the warmth? A: I think other than the warmth I don’t miss the quality much. Q: Does digital technology give better qualities? For instance the dynamic range, signal to noise ratio and stuff like that? A: Yeah, that is there. Q: Head room? A: Yeah, Head Room is there and the signal to noise ratio is also good. Moreover, it gives you more flexibility, which is the biggest plus point, you know. Q: Does this sense of flexibility offer a new kind of aesthetics, a new kind of working approach and new kinds of method?
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A: Yeah, you can improve your approach, you know. Earlier it was probably a limitation because of the lesser number of tracks. But here, like you know… I’ll give you an example. Earlier we used to do these effect premixes, you know, the hard record like footsteps, Foley, some major sound like car sound or action, etc. We used to premix and then go for a mix. Here the advantage is that you do a premix, but you can keep the things separate if you want. You need not to hard record it. So, you can take a final call in the final mix as to whether that particular sound is needed. If you want to avoid, you can. It is much more flexible. It improves the aesthetics also. Like, a song is on and maybe at one place you want to keep one sound, which is not clashing with the music, but in another place it is clashing and you don’t want to keep it. That advantage is there with this digital format. So, your aesthetic, your point of view - till the end of the final mix, you can have that option. It is not that you can’t do anything now. Q: Okay. So you have choice of undoing it, right? A: Yes, undoing it. Q: Does it reflect on the kinds of work that are now produced in comparison to earlier works, for instance, in the 70’s or 80’s? A: Yeah, I think that you can make a choice since you have an option till the end whether you want to go with this or you want to go with the other thing. You have more options and at the end of the day, at the end of the mix, you can see which option is working and which is not. You can change your ideas, which in turn improves the complete aesthetic of your work. Q: There are a number of channels, which also come with digital technology - digital formats, right? A: Yeah. Q: These channels - do they serve a major purpose in the work? A: You are talking about the channels in the console or channels in the workstation? Q: In the workstation. A: Yeah, you’re more flexible with more number of channels. Sometimes what happens is you can edit your soundtrack according to the shots. Suppose it’s an extreme long shot. Then it comes to close and then extreme close. So, you can cut your track and rather than putting in one track, you can have more tracks and you can cut the sound and put it shot wise so that sometimes it can come and go on its own. Q: Okay.
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A: You just set the level of the sound according to the shot and it comes and goes. You need not to bother once you set that. Q: Hm. But instead of stereo or mono, you have 5.12 and 7.13 in the channels for the final mix. A: Yeah. Q: Even more channels in the formats like Atmos. Does this adding of channels in the final mix give you… A: It’s more flexible, you know. That is my point of view. If you give me ten channels, I’ll stick to that, you know. I will be restricted. Certain things I want to keep separate and I want to take a final call during the final mix. Maybe the sound is not going to work with the music. Sometimes certain sounds, when they are solo, gel with the flute or with the strings. That same sound may not work when they are playing an orchestra. It becomes clumsy. So that option I have, you know. Suppose when I am writing my final music and things are separate, I can take a call whether like the car constant is working or not. Maybe I can keep certain phrases of the music and take out the latter portion. That way you get more flexibility as to how to use the sound, sound effects, along with the music or the songs. So if you have more channels, things are all separate and you take a call during the final mix. Q: When sending the different effects and music tracks, for example, the instruments, besides the voice and ambience in different channels – first in the two sides of the L and R, then in the centre, the rear and the behind does this expanded space give you some sort of new aesthetics? Does it force you to change your routing and diffusion of sounds? A: See, the normal procedure - normally when you’re doing the premixes and all - you do the premixes according to the visual. Okay? Q: Hm. A: How broad you want to keep, especially the ambiences and all, how the Foley should be mostly in the front. So, if you visualize the thing once in the premix, if you match your visual and the sound, the placement of sound is perfect. That means your premixing has been done. Still your sounds are all independent. If you want to increase the night cricket, you can! You want to decrease the night crickets, you can – yet your distribution doesn’t change. If you want to, you can because your sources are all independent. Q: Okay. Independent and separate. It’s not mixed. A: It’s not mixed. So, at any stage, you can have any combination you want. You can change it. That is only possible when you’ve got more
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number of tracks in the workstation and as well as at the console also you should have more number of faders so that you can keep things separate and take a final call. Sometimes what happens is that you have done the final mix. But when you’re watching it, you may feel that you know things can be tweaked down. Unless your source is separate, you cannot tweak down. Q: Do you work a lot with ambience? A: Yeah. Q: How do you use ambience? And why do you use it? A: Again, you cannot always go beyond the visuals. You’re often restricted to the visuals (on the screen). Whatever you do, first thing you have to see whether it’s working with the visual or not. The second thing is what kind of background you have, what kind of instruments the music director has used. Okay? Your ambience depends on whether the music is there or it is not there. Q: Okay. A: If it is there, what instrument is playing? Is it a very rich music or very light music or a single instrument? So, the whole thing is depending on the background and what kind of instrument he has used. Sometimes the background may not work, you know. Then you remove the background and go with the effects, go with the ambience. It all depends on what sound is required in that scene. Again it depends on person to person, you know. Q: Hm. A: If I do something, my approach is something different. The other person will be doing his approach – Q: Yeah, of course. A: Feelings differ from person to person. Same dialogue, same effect, same music but it’s ten percent mixing - the mix will be different because everybody has got a different feel. Unless you are into the movie, into the subject, into the characters, you cannot put a soul to the movie. See, whether you’re playing with the effects or the music is immaterial. It depends on what the scene requires. Apart from that, there is some kind of aesthetics, which is very important as far as the film mix is concerned. According to me it’s eighty percent aesthetics and twenty percent technique. Q: Hm.
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A: Your dialogue quality has to sound good of course. Your effects have to sound good, your music has to sound good, and your songs have to sound good! But what to keep what not to keep - that is very important. Q: So the use of ambience primarily depends on whether there is music or not? A: Yes. Q: Does that mean that you use ambience when there is less music? A: Yes I use (more) ambience. Q: What does the ambience, in your opinion, do to the soundtrack? A: Ambience creates the location where you are in - whether it’s a village or a city, whether it’s in the day or at night, whether you’re next to a sea. It is actually identifying or underlining where the location is. With this ambience you create that location. The audience should feel, “Okay, I am standing in the middle of the busy road.” A busy street, you know, and a lot of cars are passing. One is surrounded by the traffic. Q: Hm. A: Or it is a very quiet village. Quiet means there’ll be birds, and there’ll be light wind. So it actually makes the audience feel, “Look, you are here. You are in the village.” Or “You’re in the day mood,” “You’re in the night.” Q: Hm. A: Basically ambience is very important as far as the film is concerned because it creates the locale. Q: Okay, the locale. A: Your distribution of sound should be such that one should feel, “I am there.” This is very helpful in this Dolby Atmos. Of course I have not mixed any film (yet). I just upgraded my studio, but I think that it will be an extraordinary format in which you can create that ambience, that locale, much better than… I mean, compared to 5.1, 7.1, that will be having hundred percent because of the ceiling and all. It gives more – Q: Do the number of channels give more room for using ambience? A: Yeah. Q: But ambience was also used in mono era – in the mono mix of earlier films. A: Yeah.
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Q: Also, a few films in the seventies and eighties were made in stereo and also used ambience. Do you think that the amount of ambience used in those eras were quite less? A: Especially in the mono (era) you had only one speaker, which would be having the dialogue, effects, background and ambience, you know. A lot of things were happening together in the one single speaker. You couldn’t separate it. Everything became a little messy. That is the reason why they used to keep ambience very low in those days, specially, when you had music. You couldn’t afford to keep music as well as the ambience because it would become very noisy. Q: Hm. A: So, the tendency always used to be, “If music is there, you just slowly take out the ambiences and all.” But with these 5.1 or 7.1 or Atmos4, you’ve got more number of speakers. You can distribute it. That is the reason it doesn’t clash. Q: Hm. A: How to distribute it that’s your creativity. Q: Hm. But then, there were a lack of ambience in the earlier films. Do they create a sense of “not being there”? A: It was there, but nowadays, with this format, you can enhance that more. Q: Okay. In recent films we find a lot of ambiences used. A: Hm. Q: Is it because of the number of channels or is it because of a particular shift in the aesthetics? Music is really used lesser and lesser and ambience is used higher and higher. A: If you ask me, my opinion is different because I am not biased. Q: Okay. A: I am a re-recordist. I am a sound mixer. I am not biased because I’ve neither done the dubbing nor the effects nor the background. Q: Hm. A: I am an unbiased technician. I’m watching the film - my job is to enhance the scene or mood. How it’s to be done is my call. But I don’t have any weakness for anything. Q: Okay. A: If you’re not biased, you can do justice to the film. Q: Absolutely.
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A: See, what happens ultimately, end of the day whatever you’ve got - five hundred channels, you’ve got seven hundred workstation channels, and you put so many things. Ultimately it’s a human being who is going to see it, okay? These are very natural things, you know, when we’re talking. We want to hear the dialogues. See, dialogue is the basic thing. If the dialogue is not audible, the director won’t be able to communicate. Q: Hm. A: So the dialogue is very important. You have to keep in your mind that my dialogue should not be missed. Now, suppose, the scene is happening in a location where it is raining - massive rain - or it’s a noisy place. Whatever it is. But at the end of the day your dialogue should be heard! Q: Yeah. A: So I don’t agree that you work only on the ambience, or you work on the effects and forget everything. That is absolutely wrong. Q: Yes. A: You have to see whether your dialogue is audible or not. After that you see what is required and what is not. Sometimes it is there in the visual but you can afford to lose that sound - it’s not really helping. You don’t need that sound. That call has to be taken by the sound recordist, and rerecordist. He should be able to take a proper call as to whether to play more on music or more on effects. What you’re saying is right. I have also seen this thing. People almost kill the music and go on with the effects. But that should not happen. Suppose it is an emotional scene and if you play more on effects, you’re killing the emotion. Q: Hm. A: In that case you have to go more with the music. The effects are secondary. That is the aesthetic call one has to take. So a sensible rerecordist who knows how to treat the scene will take a proper call. Q: Coming back to the dialogue: most of the films - not most, but many films - these days are recorded on sync. Did you change your working method in order to work with sync sound in relation to the dubbed sound, or dubbed voice? A: No. In fact I’ve done maximum of sync sound films. Eighty percent is depending on the guy who is doing the sync sound - how good dialogue quality he can pick up from the floor or location, whether it is indoor or outdoor. Certain dialogues sometimes are not clear, you know. You have to dub them. You have to see that the tone matches when you’re laying that dubbed track. The same kind of mike that you have used for the shooting should be used for the dubbing, so that you at least maintain the
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tonal quality. When it comes for the mix, if it is just a dub, I try to do the EQ and level in such a way so that it matches with your sync sound. Then, of course, while laying the tracks - whether it’s a dubbing part or whether it’s the original sync sound - they should put the shooting location ambience in such a way that there should not be any jerk or any gap. All those things should be done by the guy who has done the sync sound. But sometimes if I find that it is not done, I try to repair it so that there should not be any jerk in the audio. In the dub there of course is a jerk since a dub is a very clean sound. So, your headache is less. Q: Hm. A: As far as you don’t have to clean it, you don’t have to patch it with the ambiences and all. Q: Do you prefer to work with dubbed sound or sync sound? A: See, it all depends on what type of film it is. If it is an out and out commercial film, it is very difficult to manage with sync sound because, the thing is, your artist has to be very cooperative. If the line is not clear during shooting, you know, the director should come and help you. But in general I have seen that if it is a sort of an art film or something and you’re having a sync sound - I think it is fine. Otherwise, if it’s a commercial film, sync sound has difficulty in working. Q: Why is it difficult? A: It doesn’t work because in big commercial films they have stars. You will mostly find that they don’t have time. They will not go for retakes for sound. They will say, “Okay we’ll dub it. Why are you wasting time?” Q: Hm. A: See, it depends on what kind of artist you’re having. If it is an art film, your artists are not very commercial and you can afford to ask them, “Let’s go for a retake.” The second thing that I have seen in a lot of commercial films I have done is that they start with sync sound but at end of the day they land up with the seventy-five to eighty percent dubbed tracks. One more problem here in Bollywood is that the location will not be changed because it is noisy and you are doing sync sound. Q: Hm. A: But in Hollywood they select the location according to that, you know. If it is noisy, they will avoid that kind of location because they know that they are not going to get proper and clean dialogues. They even take lot of precautions while they are making the set. The art director and the recordist do a lot of treatment and all. I have seen the movies it is sync
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sound but you don’t hear the footsteps, the original footsteps. How do they manage? Q: Hm. A: Complete Foley is done! Q: Hm. A: Here it is a bit difficult having a sync sound for a big budget film. Q: In sync sound the footsteps, the other effects, and the bodily effects along with the dialogue - they come with a lot of information about the place where it was shot. Isn’t it? A: Exactly. Q: If it’s an outdoor location, then the room reverb will be added to the voice and the effects to give the information about the place, outdoor place. Let’s say it’s on the seashore or it’s in the middle of a sea. So these sync effects, sync dialogues - they will come with lot of information about the locale. A: Exactly. Q: Do you like to keep them the way they are? Or do you like to replace them with Foley and dubbed voice? A: If it is a sync sound film? Q: Yes. A: See, if it is a sync sound film, normally what happens is that the dialogue will be carrying all those effects because it is sync sound. You can’t take that out. It’s a part of the dialogue. Q: Absolutely. A: Maybe the only thing that you do is Foley at some places because of the edit and all, suppose some effects get lost, you know. Q: Yeah. A: You add from the Foley and when you’re doing an international track, that time dialogue won’t be there. As soon as you’re switching off the dialogue, you’re losing completely all Foley effects. Q: Hm. A: So you have to do the Foley to replace for the international track. See international track means dialogue has to be switched off. Dialogue won’t be there - only music and effects. Since it’s sync sound, like we’re talking and we’re making this sound. So, when you switch off the dialogue, this sound will also go.
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Q: Absolutely, yes. A: But when you’re giving this international track for some other language, sound has to be there. Q: Hm. A: So you do the complete Foley sound and place it, level it and keep it off. Q: Separately? A: Separately. When you’re making the international track, when you’re switching off the dialogue, at that time you have to switch on these effects. Q: Will these dialogues be replaced by dubbed international tracks? A: Yes, may be English or may be Tamil, may be Telegu. Q: Okay. When it’s sent for festivals - may be some of the films are sent because international festivals only accept sync sound; will you then keep the original dialogue? A: Yeah. Q: Okay. A: That time you’re sending the original. It could be Hindi, it could be English - it could be anything - the original thing. Q: When replacing the original recordings with dubbing, the information is lost about the place. A: Yeah. Q: Do you have to create that ambience? A: You have to create. But if your production recordist is sincere enough, he should record some extra ambient sounds from the location separately, apart from the ambiences recorded in sync sound during the action. Q: Hm. A: Sync sound - when you’re shooting it, of course you’re getting that ambience. But apart from that, one should record the ambience when the shoot is over. He has to record that ambience in every location. So, when you’re switching off the sync dialogue, you have to lay those additional tracks to recreate that ambience. Q: Hm. A: Those thing also may be you’re switching off, you know, when your sync sound is there. So, sync sound actually means your work is almost double. It is not easy. People think, “If it’s sync sound, my work is very less”. It’s not. It is the other way.
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Q: More work. A: You’ve got more work. For shooting you’ve to arrange all the security and the walkie-talkies and all those things to avoid the noise. After returning from the shoot, you have to give extra time to clean those dialogues. Okay? Then you have to see which of the dialogues are not working, are noisy. You have to patch may be ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent. It all depends on how good your recording is. Q: Hm. A: You have to do the Foley, ok? Q: Hm. A: Then when you’re making the international track, you’ve to put more time and see when you are taking out the dialogue, your additional Foleys or ambience is there at a proper level or not. Q: hm. A: So your work is more than double, in fact. That is the reason many people still avoid sync sound, especially in the commercial films because in commercial films you have to give the international track as it might get dubbed in other languages. So you have to give more time, spend more time. That is one of the reasons why people avoid sync sound. Q: Okay. But use of music means lack of use of ambience. Right? As you said: if you use more music to underline the emotion then you use less ambience because music replaces the ambience track - you’ll use ambience when music is less. A: Hm. Q: Let’s say there’s a situation, which is outdoor and you need to give lot of information to the audience that this is here. A: Hm. Q: This is in the city, this is in Vile Parle, or this is in front of Infinity Mall, and then you use music. That means a lack of the use of ambience. How to create the sense of place there? A: It all depends on what the scene requires. Q: Hm. A: In that case sometimes you remove the music or you underplay the music. Q: What do you mean by underplay here? A: It’s very low. Q: Okay, very low - keeping the volume down.
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A: Keep the volume down. You need not to play the music high always. You can keep the ambience and music. But see what the scene requires. Q: Hm. A: Whether the music will be high compared to ambience. Q: Hm. A: But with this multi-channel format, you need not to kill the ambience completely. You can keep it. But you have to see that it should not kill the mood. Q: Hm. A: If it is a night scene, it’s an emotional scene, you can keep the night cricket. You don’t have to take it out. Q: Okay. A: But the tricky thing is how much, so that the ambient sound, such as bird sounds, should not kill the mood of the scene. Q: The sense of place and the mood, A: Mood. Q: Are they different? A: It is different. Q: How is this mood created? A: See, one has to understand what the scene requires and whether I should go more on music or go more on effects or is there a delicate balance between the ambience and the music. Suppose someone has died. Okay? Q: Hm. A: The guy, who has designed the sound, will put birds and everything, but my thinking as a human being tells me I should not keep any birds if it is a death scene. The bird sound, for example, may dilute the mood. Q: Okay. A: So I can happily kill the birds and go on with music. Q: Haha, okay. A: But if it is a normal scene, in that case I can keep a little bit of bird because that bird will not dilute the mood. So, you have to be clever enough to understand what is required. Q: Yes, this mood thing is very interesting. A: It’s the aesthetics.
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Q: Of course it’s the aesthetic strategy to take a decision. A: Yes, to take the decision. Q: That decision makes the kind of “sound look” the film has. A: Exactly. What is working and what is not working. Q: Hm. I am very curious to know about this mood thing, because in Indian cinema, there are particular moods that are created using music and sound. Can you elaborate a little bit on how do you create different moods such as sadness or anger? A: See, like sadness or drama, anger, fear, sometimes it’s the melodrama. Every mood has got a different treatment. Q: Hm. A: If it is a drama, you have to play on the music - may be some loud action effect. Suppose someone is slapping - the slap has to hit. Play with the music. If you underplay the music at that time and keep the ambience all decorative, it will not work. Q: Is there a conflict between use of ambience and creating the mood? A: That’s what I said in the beginning - whatever is needed to enhance that scene - whether it’s effects or it’s only dialogue. Sometimes only the dialogue is strong enough. You don’t need anything else for that moment. Q: Yeah. A: So, it all depends on what is the mood of the scene, what is required and how you’ll achieve to enhance that. Whether it is with the dialogue, whether it’s with the ambience, whether it is the music, or whether it’s the effect. Q: Does ambience contribute to developing any kind of mood? A: Yeah, like you are in the forest, in the middle of a forest. Q: Okay. A: That time whether you have the music or don’t doesn’t make any sense. That is the time where you have to have ample ambience to create that locale. Q: Hm, yes. A: And there also, you know, if someone has got lost and he or she is panicking, you have to select typical solo birds to create that panic. You don’t need music. Q: Hm. Also in a very dense city environment.
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A: Yeah. There again, if you’re standing at the center of the busiest street you know, there’ll be lot of traffic, lot of horns. If the visual there is that buses and cars are passing, you’ve to put all those sounds and the general ambience so that your whole theater is filled with the ambience. You don’t need any music. Q: Yeah. That creates a mood of “being there” I think. A: Yeah, suppose it is a very, scary scene, you know, suspense, like Psycho.5 It is there - your ambience is there, your dialogue is there, your Foley is there. Sometimes you have the music also. But you have to absolutely underplay the music to create that danger, you know. Q: Hm. A: It is there but it’s not there – to create that mood of danger. See, there are hundred ways of mixing the film or enhancing the scene. But one has to be clever enough to understand. Q: Understand, hm. What about the romantic scenes? A: Romantic scenes mostly work with the music. Q: Music. A: You cannot enhance the romantic scene with the ambience or effect. Q: Hm. A: Maybe for a few seconds, but it will not hold. Especially in the Indian films, you know, because, we Indians, our thinking is different. You take our lifestyle, our social requirements and how we’ve grown up with certain things, seeing certain things. As far as I’m concerned, I take all those references and try to put them in the film, you know. Suppose I have gone to a restaurant and I can immediately visualize what should happen if I’m in a restaurant. Q: Hm. A: Even if there are fifty people sitting and talking over there, but the thing is that it is a human thing you know. If we go to a restaurant and if it is crowded and we’re talking, we try to come closer to each other so that both of us can listen. Q: Hm. A: It is human psychology, you know. We try to avoid those extra noises. As if it is covered. We are focusing on the dialogues. Q: Hm. Okay. A: If we go to a restaurant that’s a little noisy, we try to avoid those things because we are focusing on our dialogue, on our conversation. The same
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thing happens in the film. So, at one point you take out the crowd and all those things. It is there but it is not there - that kind of balance. Q: Yeah. A: Because it’s a very personal talk. Q: Yeah. Coming back to the mono and the stereo and multi-channel: there is this question of distraction. I have been talking with few other sound professionals - they are concerned about the distraction because now you have speakers, sources distributed behind your head in multichannels. They are on the rear sides and sometimes even on top of your head. So, there is a big chance of getting distracted by the sound. How do you manage this? A: Again, you have to be clever enough to understand what sound and in which place I should use my surrounds. The fact that surround is there doesn’t mean that you use it throughout the film. Q: Yeah. A: Surround speakers are given to create the locale. That is the main purpose, you know, to create where you are. If you want to put certain effects, you can. Suppose it is a war sequence. You can happily use the surrounds because you need distractions in that case. Some firing is coming from there, some fire is coming from this side, some from the center back, you know. Maybe a helicopter is passing over it. So, you are not bound that time. That is the point. You should use the format fully. But, we’ll kill the mood if we use the surrounds in an emotional scene or a very delicate conversation, or in a very casual scene! Q: LG. A: So, according to me, the speakers are there, but I should know how to use them. It is there doesn’t mean that you put everything in the surround. See, one should not forget that when we’re watching a film, the film is there in the front. Screen is there, picture is there, you cannot come back absolutely. Q: Yeah, hm. A: The screen is there, it is not here! So it is your trick where to distract and where not to. Q: Yeah. The screen is the two dimensional thing in front of us, and sounds are being placed in the surround. Do you think that there is a lack of sync between sound and image in the surround? A: That depends on how you’re distributing the sound. Q: Hm. Yeah.
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A: You can hardly come out from the visuals. You have to follow the visual but you have to see how much you can come out from the screen so that I get a sense of surround. Q: Hm, yeah. A: I should get a sense of surround. Surround should not take over completely. Q: But it can go a little bit off-screen also. A: See, it depends on how much to go. That’s what I said - how much to come out from the screen so that the focus remains in the front. But there is a sense of surround. If I tilt the sound completely, then my visual is there and sound is here. It will it will sound out of sync. Q: But there was no problem like this in mono. A: Because you didn’t have any option. Speakers are there. Q: Yes. In stereo, we have two speakers on the two sides of the screen. How, in your opinion, has this transition from mono to stereo to surround occurred? How do you personally see this transformation from mono to stereo to surround? A: See, of course it helps the cinema. It helps us to improve our distribution of the sound. If it is mono, you don’t have any option. You can’t have surrounds or sense of surround or location. Here, in these formats, you are creating the location. That’s the first difference. You can create the location and at one time you can keep three or four layers that will not clash. Q: Okay. A: Say, my dialogue is in the center and my music is in the left, right, left surround, right surround subwoofer. So, subwoofer is the major thing, which helps a lot because you can hear the extended low frequency. If it is a thunder or it is an earthquake, you can create that heaviness which you couldn’t create in the mono. Mono had got a limitation because the optical sound had got a limitation from a maximum of 8k to 80 or 100 Hz as the lowest possible frequency. Q: Hm. A: So, you had a limitation. There’s no limitation here. Limitation means 20 hertz to 20k - a full bandwidth. You can use the full bandwidth. Q: Hm. A: Again, you should understand how to use that full bandwidth. Where I should use the extreme low frequency, where I use the mid frequency, where I use the upper mid frequency and where I can use my high
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frequencies, extreme high frequencies. If you can exploit that whole (dynamic) range, your sound is bound to be good sound without hurting the human ear. Q: Yeah. A: So, my target always is not that it is a 5.1, 7.1 and you put this thing that thing. It’s not. Cinema is happening in the front. The first thing is you cannot come away from the visual. The second thing is since you’ve got an option of using the full bandwidth of the sound with this format, you should have the good quality of sound. Q: Hm. A: This fully extended range was not there in the mono. Q: And in stereo? A: See, normally in Indian films there is nothing called a two-track stereo. Q: Okay. A: Stereo means, like you know - Dolby came up with this analogue twotrack. It’s called two-track because if you see the print - print is obsolete now - there’ll be two tracks. One is the total left, and the other is the total right. Q: Yeah. A: Okay? But when you’re mixing or when the print is playing, you’re hearing left, centre, right, surround. Q: Yes. Are there four channels? A: Four. Surround channel is the mono one because it’s a single track. Q: Hm. A: Whatever you play to the left will go to the right because it’s mono. There’s no left surround or right surround, but front, left, centre, right. So, since it physically shows that it is two tracks, they call it two-track stereo. But actually it is a four-track stereo. Q: Four-track stereo. Okay. A: Otherwise cinema doesn’t have acoustically two-track. Q: But then, the rear is used for ambience or music, right? A: ambience. This thing came after that only, you know, 5.1 digital. Then it is left, centre, right, left surround, right surround, subwoofer. Q: Was there no subwoofer in the stereo? A: Yes, there’s no subwoofer in stereo. They came up with the subwoofer to enhance this kind of distraction like some car crash or something, which
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needed extreme low frequency. Earthquake and all that kind of sequences, you know. Q: Films like Disco Dancer6 and Shahenshah - they’re called stereo mix. Were they all made with this four-track stereo? A: Yeah, four-track stereo but if I’m not wrong, in those days there was no Dolby two-track stereo, which is called two-track optical stereo. Q: Optical stereo? A: I was one of the team members of Shahenshah.7 We used to do the magnetic stereo at that time. Q: Magnetic stereo? A: That has got again left, center, right, surround, but on the magnetic stripe. Q: Was it separate from the film sprocket itself? A: Yeah. One is outside the sprocket, another is the inside the sprocket. So this one side is two-track, another side is two-track. Q: Okay. Magnetic stereo? A: Magnetic stereo. Q: Did that continue until this four-track? A: Until Dolby came up with the - I should not say Dolby - Dolby came up with this thing long back, when Bollywood first got the optical stereo, that four-track stereo on the print. Q: Which film, can you remember? A: I think this was 1942 A Love story.8 Q: That was the first Dolby four-track stereo, right? A: It came here. Of course that film was mixed in Shepperton Studios, U.K. I’ve met those guys. They mixed there and for the first time we saw four-track optical stereo. You can’t transfer on the negative and make a print because it is optical. Q: Okay. So married print is possible, isn’t it? A: It was a married print. Q: Okay. A: That is the first time India got the print. It was mixed in London. Then, I think, Rangeela9 was the first film, which was mixed in India. Again, optical stereo. Q: Optical stereo. Before it was magnetic stereo, was it separate from the film?
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A: Magnetic stereo, yeah. Like the film Maine Pyar Kiya10 and all those you know, had magnetic stereo. Each reel we had to transfer individually and running time after checking whether the tape is correct, whether it is sounding correct. If there were any dropouts in the tape, your audio would get lost there. Q: Hm. A: I am the person who first mixed the Dolby Digital sound in India. Q: Which film was it? A: Daud. Ram Gopal Verma’s Daud.11 Q: Daud, yes. A: That was the first Dolby Digital mix. Q: How was the experience working on it? A: That was my first film. I had an idea since I had worked earlier for the magnetic stereo. I tried to do my best, but of course things improve with the experience, you know. Q: Yeah. Could you put a little bit of dynamics right in sound? A: Yeah. Exactly. You now use the subwoofer, then use the surrounds, then keep the ambiences a little out - off-screen, you know, spread it and all those things. Q: Hm. A: So, that started. I had the idea because I did work on magnetic stereo. So I had some sense of distributing and using the subwoofers and all. At that time there was no subwoofer in the magnetic stereo. But I had at least 60%-70% idea as to how to approach. After that, of course, I improved myself slowly. Q: Now you only mix for surround, right? A: Yeah. I’ve been mixing for the last so many years. I have mixed 5.1. I have mixed 7.1, and now I want to attempt the Atmos. Q: Yeah, Atmos. Do you adapt yourself to this transition accordingly with the number of channels? A: Yeah. Q: Do you find any difference between 5.1 and 7.1? A: Between 5.1 and 7.1, there’s not much difference. In between there’s one format called Dolby EX and all. It didn’t work much. 5.1, 7.1 – there is not much difference. See, even if the difference is 10% or 20%, it’s not noticeable for the audience and unless it is a noticeable for the audience, it will not matter.
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Q: Do you think that Atmos is the future? A: Atmos no doubt is the future. But the thing is that the producer has to give time. If you really want to do the mix in Atmos properly, you need time. Q: Hm. A: And unfortunately Bollywood – LG. Q: It doesn’t give time to sound people. Yeah. A: 98% of the films don’t give you time. Their releases are fixed. Q: LG. But what will the Atmos give extra to the audience? Is audience aware that there is a major new technological shift coming up? Will the audience accept it the way it is? A: Frankly speaking, I have not seen much of Atmos films because here we have got only two cinemas in Atmos till today. But whatever I have seen, it sounds very good and those people use ceiling speakers very tactfully. Q: Hm. A: See, at the end of the day, any format you take, the mixer has to understand how to exploit that format. If I don’t know how to exploit that format, you give me any format, I won’t be able to create magic. Q: LG. A: And if I don’t create magic, audience will say, “Ok it’s the same!” Q: Hm. A: What is the difference? I have to see, I have to tell them that, “Look, it was like this, it can be played like this.” Q: Yeah. A: It can be decorated like this. So, all the formats are really good for me. Unless I don’t know how to use the format, and how to give good quality of sound, I can’t blame the format. Q: Yeah. One thing I’m very curious about. Most of the recent films I see in Europe mostly, in India it’s also I think a recent phenomenon - young people watch and listen to films in smaller devices like smartphones or iPad or iPod Touch or other smaller digital devices, and listen to sounds by headphone. A: Hm. Q: As a re-recordist and sound mixing specialist, how do you see that future when films will be more and more watched in small screen and how will you make your sound according to that?
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A: See, this is the reason Dolby has come up with the Atmos. Q: Why? A: Because headphone will not give you the kind of great sound that you will get in the theatre! Q: Okay. A: Why change from mono to four-track, from four-track to 5.1, 5.1 to 7.1, 7.1 to Atmos? So that they can bring the audience to the theatre. Q: Hm, okay. A: If my sound is not great, I cannot pull the audiences in! Q: Yes. A: This is the reason behind bringing different formats! Also, slowly people are having a bigger screen, bigger TV at home, okay? Q: Hm, yeah. A: Even you see the mobiles. Now people ask for bigger ones compared to the earlier small one, which came first. Q: Hm. A: Slowly you see we don’t enjoy the small things, small mobile. Q: Yeah. A: You can’t see anything you know. And a lot of facilities, Internet, this and that, everything you know. So people’s choices are changing. They want to see the big screen. Q: Hm. Big screen. A: We don’t like watching even the TV serials or news on the small thing at home. We buy a bigger television. So, if you give the audience a big screen with a big sound, they are bound to come. See, we go to see English films paying 300/400 rupees. Why? Because of the great visuals and great sound which we will not get in TV! Hollywood knows how to bring in the audience. You have to do that. Your sound and picture should be great. People will say, “It’s not enjoyable at home, let’s go to the theatre.” That is the reason they have brought this Atmos. Q: Auro 3D12 as well. Final question before I wrap it for today: Do you think of the audience when you mix? Do you keep in mind the audience who will ultimately consume or get entertained? A: Yeah, that is very important. I don’t know what other mixing engineers feel. But I feel when I’m working; parallelly, I’m also the audience! Q: Hm.
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A: If I can’t feel the thing as an audience, I won’t be able to do justice. Suppose, if I don’t feel it in an emotional scene… That’s what I said - 80% is aesthetic, 20% is the technique. If I don’t feel it, I cannot create that mood. I cannot make my audience cry. That feel, that flute is there or whatever instrument is there - it has to be played in such a way that you’ve to create that mood, you have to create that anger. That comes from inside. That is my opinion. When I’m sitting there, I’m working - I think that I’m the character on the screen. How would I have reacted if these things would have happened to me? Q: Okay. A: Suppose I lost my mother. How would’ve I reacted? Q: So you become the audience. A: I become the audience; I become the character! Parallelly, I become the audience also because, unless I feel myself as an audience, I cannot give the hundred percent. If I’m not crying, my audience cannot cry. Q: Okay. A: Aesthetics plays a very important role. It doesn’t make any sense whether you increase by 10db or 20db or 50db or -30db. You’ve to see how it is reflecting, whether it is touching the heart or not. That is very important. If you can’t do that, you cannot put a soul to the film. That is very important. Q: Thanks a lot. It was very good, very enjoyable.
Notes 1
Duration: 1:14:15 Name abbreviations: Anup Deb – A, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q Other Abbreviations: Laughter - LG 2 5.1 surround sound is the common name for six-channel surround sound systems of mixing (post-production) and reproduction. The order of channels in a 5.1 file is different across file formats, but generally it include Front Left (L), Front Right (R), Center, Sub-woofer, Surround Left (LS), Surround Right (RS). 3 7.1 surround sound is the common name for an eight-channel surround system. It adds two additional speakers to the more conventional six-channel (5.1) audio configuration. 4 Atmos is a surround sound technology developed by Dolby Laboratories. It expands on existing surround sound systems by adding height channels, allowing sounds to be interpreted as three-dimensional objects. 5 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) 6 Disco Dancer (Babbar Subhash, 1982)
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Shahenshah (Emperor, Tinnu Anand, 1988) 1942: A Love Story (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1994) 9 Rangeela (Colourful, Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) 10 Maine Pyar Kiya (I Fell in Love, Sooraj Barjatya, 1989) 11 Daud (Run, Ram Gopal Varma, 1997) 12 Auro-3D is an immersive 3D audio format developed by the Belgian company Auro Technologies. 8
CHAPTER 10 ANUP MUKHERJEE1
Q: The first thing I want to know is: how were the film industry and the opportunities available there when you passed out of the film Institute? A: Let me start from a little earlier. I went to the Institute in 1971. During 1969-71, the Bangladesh war and other political movements were happening in West Bengal. It was a disturbing phase. I was looking forward to going to the premier film Institute, and there was an inner interest too. So I went there, and my vision, the vision of my life changed. This happened because the whole world opened up in front of me. I saw French and Italian films and all the classics one after the other, like the famous Russian film Battleship Potemkin etc. This actually changed the philosophy of my life with which I had entered the Institute. Thereafter, the teachers that we got were film stalwarts. In fact, the head of the Department of cinematography then - at that time it was not the cinematography department but the motion picture photographic department though it is the same thing just that it was called motion picture photography - Mr. Lal Jaiswani had worked in Hollywood. It was heard that he was an operating cameraman in Lawrence of Arabia.2 The others, masters in their own fields, had also mostly worked in Hollywood. They, along with teaching us the methods of working in film, gave us an insight. So, while learning in the Institute we realised that this boundary is not enough - the things that we come to hear and think about here. We would have to struggle since otherwise nobody would recognise us. Nobody had a clue about how students would get work after getting out of the Institute. A common process then was to join a studio and become an assistant and spend at least 7 to 8 years as that. After this experience in audio he could start working independently. So what is exactly taught in a film school? What exactly can someone learn in three years? Something that we don't get to know in 10 to 15 years because otherwise nobody otherwise recognises. The challenge that I faced when we passed out was that I had to prove myself. What vision have we come out with? What changes can we bring? The target that I had when I started working in the industry was to learn and try to establish a way of life and a philosophy of work. It
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could be either in the Bombay industry or Calcutta, because Calcutta is my homeland. Once, when I was studying in the Institute and I happened to come back here, I watched a film. Then I realised that I could not understand the audio of any film that I watched. But later I realised that it was an issue with the infrastructure. Slowly, I realised that the infrastructure was not acoustically treated properly. It was all a mess. I realised that the changes required which could either be qualitative or aesthetic. Only what is not entirely for visuals and something else had to be created. Soon I graduated. When I came out into the industry, Mangesh Desai was there working in the industry. He was working at Raj Kamal Studios then. Then, there were Kaushik Bawa and Ramen Chatterjee at other studios. My contemporaries started assisting them and they would have gone on to assist for the next 10 years. Being an assistant mostly meant tape winding and microphone placement and other such small jobs. They mostly did what they were asked to do even though they knew that it might be wrong according to their sensibilities. Life is all about these contradictions anyways. Now I would like to speak about my life. Though I passed out of the film and television Institute I did not know what television was. Q: Hm. A: When I passed out in 1974, television had not arrived in India. In fact, there were only two centres - one in Delhi and the other in Srinagar. The third centre started in Bombay. Many people might have asked that, “Since you have come out of the film and television Institute what do you know?” Truly I did not know anything because we did not even have television wing by then. Only the name had been announced. It was during our convocation that the television building was inaugurated. So, whatever it may be, once I passed out, I started enquiring with some of our seniors who were already working in television. They asked me if I was interested in working and I responded positively. They'd informed me that though it is television work happened in film. Other than this studio all the outdoor shoots used to happen on Reversal Film or Universal Films and then went on for direct positive development with a separate magnetic tape, which was called Sepmag. This is what we worked with. One of the advantages that we had was the fact that I joined television first and not the industry. Some of the known faces were in television and the others were in the industry. There was a new television wing at ISRO - I went there also. Some of my friends had already joined there. The advantage that I had while working here was that I could experiment on a lot of things. Since time is a major factor in television, it builds a certain kind of discipline. You have to keep the channel fed somehow or the other at the right time.
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For instance, if the news is at 7:30 the field has to be in sharp at 7:30. There was no other choice. I would have probably been back at six after shooting that. Within the next one hour the developing and the sound transfer, the editing has to be done and by 7:25 it should reach the telecine. So it was all about a one-hour gap. The challenge of making it in such a short span without missing the perfection, the proper synchronization with the ministers and a lot of other VIPs and other people, like for instance a small documentary can happen within this. This gave me an opportunity to learn how to work fast and still maintain and present a good quality of work with all the hardship. In those times the cameraman had a light boy to help him, but the recordist did not have anybody. At the Institute they would have an assistant to hold a boom and we would have an additional three people while we did our job. Here it was completely self-made. Everyone had to deliver on his own. So this was challenging as well. Even though what I did was to understand what television is, I also gained experience in work. Every day there was work and the industry would not be able to provide me this amount of work in the beginning - maybe seven days of work and then six months of waiting. This was a daily practice of work and a lot of experiments also happened. This is why I got the opportunity to work in television at different places for different projects. To add to this there was no mixing facility there. You had to do online mixing, on spot music recording with dialogues, you know. That kind of work! You are from the sound department and I'm sure you understand. Through this hardship, learning happened and an individual vision was formed and the evolution of an independent style happened. I've gone through a lot of hardship. For instance, once the sync cable between the Nagra and the camera tore but still being the Prime Minister's coverage it had to be done. You cannot make it out of sync in anyway. The only way out then and the appropriate solution was found and executed. Doing this, I was associated with the television industry for around 7 to 8 years. I also managed to take up a foreign training. It was at Malaysia, under AIBD - Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development and ABU - Asian Broadcasting Union. Foreign trainers, especially German and Australian trainers, were with us. We did an international news exchange program. After completing that and coming back, what we saw was that the Indian television was not ready with that kind of technology that they had already adopted in Kuala Lumpur. That is what made me wonder when it is going to come here. By then, low band was already there and we did not know what low band was. Even though it was filmed in B&W, colour had come and to refine the work process mixing and other things were done. This made us wonder when it would come
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here. That is when I got an opportunity. NFDC3 film sector opened up in Kolkata. That's where for the first time “rock and roll” mixing and dubbing setup was established. In all of India two such setups started - one in Bombay Sea Rock and the other was NFDC Kolkata. The earlier version of “rock and roll” existed in BR studio. It was there when we passed out. One is to 1 ratio that is back and forth is about one time. These are said to be high-speed which is about 4 to 6 times. Why did I join NFDC? The hunger to understand television was already satiated. My actual hunger, which took me to Pune, was for cinema and I went there through the competition. The selection would happen at 12 to 14 places and I got through from one of them. So, that was my first target - film. The other target was an opportunity to work with the stalwarts like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Tarun Majumdar, and Tapan Sinha. These were the people who were working at that time in Kolkata and the younger people who came including Goutam Ghose, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Anjan Dutta they were also working. Mainstream filmmakers like Biresh Chatterjee, Prabhat Roy were also there. Amongst seniors, Ajoy Kar and Salil Dutta and others were still present. Once it started, we got advantages with rock and roll. What we learnt in Pune was single track recording normally. In dubbing, if there were 10 people in one loop, all 10 artists were lined together and they were recorded simultaneously and doing proper placement for them and also to simulate this whether it was outdoor or indoor; if it was in the morning or in the afternoon. The differences that were there for day to night and between indoor and outdoor in terms of tone, everyone had to do it together. But in rock and roll recording these methods was changed and we could adjust time according to the artists’ availability and do it. Q: Hm. A: This worked as an advantage for the industry as well. All the artists were not required to come together. At first, we were a little skeptical about the feasibility of this operation, whether at all it will work if the artists are not gathered together. Would we be able to match the tones? Or will two people maintain the same scale of expressing? If the recording happened separately there was a chance of this happening. At the same time the probability is less because the other track will be played for him to listen and then he will deliver his own lines. It was the advantage of this process. Then I explained to them that in case of loop dubbing, a 100 feet loop where 10 people are talking in a similar manner, after 2 hours the consecutive next loop will be playing and the difference of time between these two and the expression of these can be different from each other. When the audio of the loops will be joined together for making the whole one sequence, then it is possible to make it sync sound. It can go up and
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down. But that is not happening as the artists themselves are conscious and they know what to do. One who has spoken before will not speak again later. They fix their own individual expression. The advantage with this is whenever an artist comes he will get the other tracks on the headphones. He will get his own guide pilot track and then he can speak his own expression. This change happened and gradually the industry also changed according to the new way. The system that was used in the earlier times the process of re-recording all together which is now called mixing - for that they had 10 minute reels and they had to remember for 10 minutes only. Effects will come, music will come and there was a music mark in that, like music 1, music 2 and so on. There was a marking system for the music. We used to put on the music according to the marking. This didn’t happen anymore in rock and roll. The need to remember wasn’t there, we would mix till a portion and if that was okay we could continue in a flow, we could return to a point later for correction and again move ahead by punching in and out. These were the advantages that people started to realize at that point. This influenced the filmmaking a lot. I will eventually speak about that. Q: This shift from television to cinema and the use of the new equipment rock and roll are quite clear. But how did the work happen before rock and roll came in the practice? A: During rock and roll recording system, when the number of studios for audio post-production increased then obviously dubbing – now if we can speak of the earlier times then we used to record music live. Say for instance, K L Saigal is singing underneath a tree and a mid-long shot is being taken. There we would not show any accompaniment. They were placed at a safe distance, single microphone taking used to happen live. This process has come back now again. Now, during the live recording, where will the tabla player sit? It could be on top of a tree or the harmonium could be placed behind the tree. So, keeping in mind the proper balancing of this the recordist used to fix the spot of their seating where this artist would not be visible and the song would also become beautiful to hear. This also evolved within some time because then the songs were recorded on fixed cameras. Maybe a group of musicians are playing flute and they are standing inside a small pond neck-deep in water and playing the flute, this also happened for a certain time. What I feel for is the hardship they had done during that time and a change in that happened since the time the playback system came. The playback was more or less parceled from India because in Hollywood playback wasn’t popular in that manner. The songs were recorded separately the way orchestra is generally recorded and then it was shot. Once the playback
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system started, it reduced the dependency quite a bit. The camera became much smoother and moving at the same time, which helped or added in shooting various moments of the songs separately. So the playback system was one where the song was recorded prior and it was played back while shooting and the synchronized performance of the camera along with the playback without which it won’t synchronize. I wouldn’t go into the detail of the system that had to be adopted to allow this change. So, according to the playback of the song the artist would give the lead of the song, the song playback would happen and it would be shot from different positions and compositions. Similarly, since the audio level increased in the studio locality - I mean the unwanted noise, as in, in signal to noise ratio the signal reduced and the noise increased – that didn’t leave any other choices other than going for dubbing to get the clarity of dialogues. One thing was sorted - the dialogues were clearer because there the distance between the source and microphone didn’t vary. But again one responsibility of the recordist increased - he had to now simulate the time and the space too. Whether it was open air or inside the room, whether it was morning, afternoon or night. This slowly entered the process of dubbing. This means that a loop was created for every shot, whatever the shot length be. Say, one sequence has 20 shots - each of the 20 shots will have a different length. One is, say, 50 feet, another 100 feet, and another might be 120 feet. The shot was cut and its first frame and the last frame was joined together. This was created like a belt, which would continuously run in the projector with a gap. The artist would rehearse with that. While that was on, the artist would see that in the film – that was inside a big dubbing theater where the film was projected, and along with the projection they would use the microphone and try to lip synchronize and say the dialogues. It might be found that after 10 rehearsals he has gotten used to it and then we used to go for take. At times, all the artists would be speaking at the same time and one or two microphones were used for that and that was recorded on another platform. This used to happen in direct optical recording also, and later in magnetic as well. At times, maybe after the whole tape was recorded it was entirely bulk erased and re-recorded again, or else it was kept. Whichever take was okay among one, two three and four, would be transferred for the final editing. I'm not going to elaborate this process much because you by now already know it. So this dubbing procedure I just spoke about, this loop after loop and 20 such loops together makes a scene. One scene is shot at one time in one or two spaces. If it is a mis-en-scene two or three scenes like this will add up together to make a sequence. The ear of the recordist played a very important role for this process. His ears will tell if the artist is speaking in
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the right scale. If there is any change in the previous loop and the next loop he will have to communicate that with the artist. After that, the tape would go to the editing room, and the editor would match it and see if it was working. He would sink it by pushing a few frames here and there. Then it came back for the final mix. Apart from the dialogue track there were a few more additional tracks, mainly the synchronised effects and diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Diegetic sound which we hear on screen, for example when a car passes by - that will be recorded separately and transferred and kept parallel on those positions of the reel and synchronisers were used. One would be for the picture and the other four or five in rollers in the same gear and sprocket. Those four or five tracks in the same position where it starts in the film, which we call the clap mark. Now it is called the beep mark. From that moment on, the distance of every track will be the same. When we're running the film the speed has to be matched with the car that is moving and the positions would be decided according to these matching and the dialogues also would be there. This was the effects track. More effects were recorded because the dialogues were adopted and they did not record any relevant effects. For instance, tearing paper or shutting the door, sitting on a chair, etc were not taken. If it were a live recording, automatically these sounds would have come. These are generally dubbed effects. Now it is called Foley, a term that came much later. Earlier we used to call it sync effects. Among these sync effects there would be footsteps and all other sounds that should be present according to the visuals. Only those we used to dub. Parallel to that there would be another track, which was the ambience. Ambience according to me is the most important part of the film because it is the lowest level of sound we are using. At the same time, I believe that ambience is the magic that engages the audience with the film. You also belong to that plane. You are one of those artists who are watching from a plane at a distance one of those characters. This is my first point. Secondly, it is also a tool to motivate them psychologically and take them to that plane like the background music that is not there in the image but later added by us. This is to create a thread between the director and the audience. The director tries to communicate with the audience and at places when it does not work out, music is required. The case is different for mainstream films. I'm talking about cinema as a whole. So with the case of ambience, night ambience can be varied like the sound of crickets or some other insects and crickets might not be there as well. This is how feelings come out of the film and engage the audience. I think it is the ambience that is creating that effect. For instance, if someone goes to the jungle the effect might still be in the mind. I've seen many famous films like this, for example La
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Strada.4 I can never forget the seaside shot in that film - the kind of sounds that I have heard, like the car moving or the sound of the bike. So whenever I'm using bike sounds in a film, I try to achieve that tone. At times I get it and at times I don't. The ambience track had to be made. And then there would be one or two tracks of the BGM (Background Music) with cross fades in between. So this is how the tracks were prepared for the final mixing which is also called re-recording, which did not mean rerecording because of bad recording, it was really recording as in final mixing. This is the time when the life is given to a film. We have everything from the dialogues to all the other effects properly balanced and the relationship between these elements is built over and above the music as a whole. Finally, it is decided how the music can be dimmed and that actually gives you the real life of the film. That is how we communicate because only static visuals do not make any sense unless you put some sound in it. After “rock and roll” machine came though, the process is the same. The only change was we went from optical to magnetic. All the dialogues, the music and the effects were all transferred from optical or photographic from which the print was created and then the track was prepared. So a little before “rock and roll” everything was done on magnetic tapes. The width of the tape was the same, 35 or 16 whatever the format. If we had to use magnetic for “rock and roll” we had a lot of advantages. We could go through each portion carefully and do it according to our timing and correct anywhere in between. This happened, let's say, during the nineties. From eighties to about half of the nineties this “rock and roll” era was on in India. I don't know about other places. I'm guessing it would be around the same time. But post-1996 the scenario started changing. I'm sure you are aware of that change. This change came almost like a tsunami. That is what I think. Q: My research area is the historical evolution of sound production, digital technology and ambience in cinema. Your reference about ambience is going to be very useful for my research. I would like to get into the details about it slowly. But before that, I would like to ask how was direct recording used before dubbing after coming of sound in the film post1931? A: From Jamai Shathi?5 Q: From Alam Ara6, more precisely. 1954, 1955, these times – perhaps during Pather Panchali7, it was direct recording too. A: Not only that. Let me tell you. From 1982, I switched to films from television. Till about 1985 I got a few films, which were direct recording. All the films from the Assam belt had to be direct recording. There was no
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place for dubbing. There was a small studio, which was not properly equipped and acoustically bad. Q: During direct recording the ambience and the sync effects were recorded directly. But you mentioned that it was not enough to provide the simulation. Were the sync effects and ambience that were recorded during direct recording not enough? Was anything added later? A: You cannot look at it this way. Let me make it easy for you. Tollygunge from the fifties to the seventies and thereafter has had drastic changes. Nobody used to go to the localities where the studios are located now. Like Kudghat and other places developed much later. These were calm and peaceful places. During those times wherever the shoot happened in the area the basic ambience remained the same. The vehicle traffic was almost zero. People did not notice much of the ambience that was present in the film compared to the way we perceive ambience today with the surround sound; in a monoplane, if I put that much pressure on ambience from the same speakers, it might sound much noisier. The noise element will become denser. Q: Yes. A: So, that was how it was. The recordists were busy doing clean recordings and they made sure that the ambience level from one shot to another shot remained the same. For instance, in a close up shot the camera goes closer and I take the microphones close as well and then it is a long shot and hence the microphone has to be kept at a distance. Cordless mics and lapels were not in vogue at the time. Okay? So what happens is both the ambience levels vary. Am I correct? Q: Yes. A: And to cover up this jerk, a bird track would be placed as a loop. This is just to distract the audience from the jerk, so that they can concentrate on the dialogues and other effects. This was cleverly done back then also. For instance, it is dawn and the cock is crowing and other birds are also chirping and then, say, we enter a house or inside a studio. Outdoor was not always necessarily recorded outdoors. It is done still in the era of colour. For example, in Mera Naam Joker8 a lot of sounds that are there are studio recordings, which were recorded during the shoot in the studio and in the backdrop you can see the mountains. This went on for long. These days we are putting the mountains in DI and chroma while in those days it used to be back projection or a painted background. When a car comes and stops that effect was recorded separately. Multiple takes were taken. I've heard from seniors that this happened earlier also. In the film Morutirtha Hinglaj9, the whole of it was direct sound recording, not even a
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single dialogue was dubbed. This was made in 1961 or 62. The famous soundtrack by Hemanta Mukherjee and mostly there were no dialogues, all recorded in the studio primarily. The rest was in the desert, probably Rajasthan. We used to obviously choose these isolated zones and the shoot used to happen there, like at riverbank or someplace else. Then gradually the number of tracks increased. Earlier, there were two or three additional tracks other than the dialogue and the dialogue would be there if there was dubbing. Then the mixing happened. With “rock and roll” more tracks were available to use. In a single tape four tracks could be used, on which we have utilised 8 to 9 tracks in Padma Nadir Majhi 10 and Antarjali Yatra.11 We have pushed a few tracks online as well from quarter inch tapes or cassettes or other sources. At that time this was really a hardship. The effects in those times like that of a riverbank crumbling down, or the banks of Padma as long as a furlong breaking down in the river. The source of this effect was not available anywhere. There was no existing stock where you could get the sound of this crumbling of the bank. There would probably be stone breaking and stuff like that but not a bank breaking down into the river in stock. So we had to create that. In fact, effects were created much more innovatively during those times. For instance, this effect was created by recording sounds of a person wrapped in a carpet and pulled by four people, doing a roll-off on that, jumping into the bathtub at the same time and stuff like that. This implies that the brain had to work constantly to figure out if there were any other alternatives available. The guys who did such effects in Chennai charged a lot also. Say we needed the sound of a stone rolling. The effects guy would just roll the microphone on a table and create it. That was his innovative brain. Even the recordist had to be innovative to contribute. For instance, if there was a high tension electric wire passing from about creating a hum they would plug in a Tanpura effects to it. This is how people used to innovate a lot of solutions. Q: What was the aesthetic difference between direct recording and dubbed effects from a sound technician's perspective? A: The first difference is of perspective – the perspective would absolutely vary. After all, dubbing is an extremely synthetic simulating process. I'm trying to simulate something different on screen with something else. What happened in direct recording, for instance if a policeman is walking, microphone would be placed at the bottom for him and another one at the top as usual only to get the close up sounds of the footsteps. The rest comes as it is on the large microphone – the boom microphones. Sound technicians generally used this kind of method according the available perspective, and there was an advantage in this method that there was no
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reverberation in outdoors; while inside studio it would not be so dead sound-wise – there is a roomy ambience, roomy atmosphere – a room tone. The room will tell if you scream inside whether it was indoor or outdoor in the reverberations or reflections back to the microphone. Anyone who has his ear trained will recognize this. These kinds of problems were there. Perspective couldn’t only be adjusted by level control. Here is this trick: in terms of dialogue delivery or in terms of producing sound effects, the tone will depend on how much pressure is exerted to the sound. This is how the technicians worked. They tried their best to ultimately produce the sound that is realistically credible. Q: Was it more advantageous to produce sound in this way in direct sound? The perspective would perhaps appear more realistic in direct sound recording. A: Yes, of course. But problem was that the microphones available then were not so sensitive like today. If there were microphone sensitivity, recording was perhaps not sensitive enough, as it was then an optical track. It could record within the range of 80 Hz to 6000 Hz. Therefore, whatever harmonics and sub-harmonics were there – without capturing this full range it is not possible to have a solid frequency response in the sound – the actual timbre of the sound. So, this was missed. Lata Mangeshkar had a delicate and shaper voice, but listen to her earlier recordings – it was quite dull. That means, she had to put much pressure in her singing; that’s why we can listen to her voice. Everyone at that time prepared themselves for the technical hardship, as well as the physical hardships – be it artists, directors or the technicians. They took their own time to operate unlike today, when you go to the shooting a day after you write the script, and next month is the release. Q: What was the effect of changeover from optical to the magnetic medium? A: Optical had an inherent problem of ground noise. This ground noise increases as it is run as the signal to noise ratio changes. As a result, the noise would overwhelm the dynamic range; also the recording would only be limited within 80 Hz and 6000 Hz range. On the upper level, noises like sounds of the puffing of rice would add with regular audio signal. After magnetic came, these kinds of problems were resolved. Also, in optical recording we could not even erase, or change anything. You had to throw it away if you could not use or if you didn’t like it. In magnetic, on the other hand, you could reuse it. After rock-and-roll came, erasable tapes were available for multiple uses. Use of raw stock decreased – where we
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needed 10 rolls, now we needed just 1 roll; it became more economic. These were the primary advantages. Q: Apart from the signal-to-noise ratio, perhaps dynamic range also increased in the magnetic? A: Obviously. That can even go up to 15k if we get a proper output. Like a child’s brain is sharper than an older person, the magnetic tape sounds great when it is new, but more it is run, its quality deteriorates. And after a certain period of use, a total loss of high frequency occurs. It is not that magnetic is the most satisfying format. In the age of 70mm, which was a six-track magnetic stereophonic production with 6 tracks on married print, films like Lawrence of Arabia, Star Wars12, later Sholay13 in India, were made with six-track magnetic stereophonic mixing. The problem was that the print of these films never went bad, but audio did. Because there were different kinds of head used, let’s say in India and in the US. So, the Ferrous Oxide coating would be removed slowly. It becomes drier. It catches oil that is applied to the projector, and it damages the tape. So, after each 30 runs you need to reprint the whole thing – only audio, not the visual. This is a problem. After final mixing, it’s again back to square one, i.e. an optical track. As the final married print of the film is on an optical track, synchronized audio and visual. Q: Now, I am curious to know about Satyajit Ray’s work. Did he use direct recording always or also used dubbing? Have you worked with Ray? A: Satyajit Ray started working with “rock and roll” for his film Ghare Baire.14 This was only postproduction work. I have heard about his work before and have worked with his son Sandeep Ray. I came to know through several people associated with him that he did direct recording in most cases. Some sounds were recorded in the studio but the outdoor he did with straight or wild dubbing system. As far as I've heard the picture was not shown. The guide track was generally recorded on a Nagra or some other recorder. Ray used to play that and make his actors say exactly the same thing instantly at the location. He used to do rehearsals according to the guide. If there were any minor changes, he would make it but otherwise he would make sure that he's got it perfect at the shoot. That is why nothing much required a change later. But once rock and roll came he did not follow this straight or wild dubbing procedure any longer. He did everything in rock and roll. During Ghare Baire he found out that it is possible to see a reverse picture show on rock and roll. Since generally you cannot see it on such a big screen, he appreciated this a lot. He also started enjoying this process a lot. We did the dubbing of the whole Ghare
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Baire in just five days, which is almost impossible. He was such a perfectionist right from his shooting spot that nothing much was required to be thought about later. All we had to do was quality assurance. He was sure about the acting. Each day was given to one main artist - like Victor Banerjee on one day and Swatilekha Chatterjee on another day and Soumitra Chatterjee on another. That is how it was. Then we used to do effects. We did it so well that he was very impressed. We did effects and everything and did not leave anything behind. We even recorded the sound of combing hair separately, because this was unimaginable during mono. During Ghare Baire also it was mono but the clarity of sound was entirely different. Some of his other films were direct recording but this film was entirely dubbing. None of the audio was live shot. After that, four of his films like Ganashatru15 were partly dubbed, and effects were also created. Then Sakha Prasakha16, Agantuk.17 We also did a few films of Mrinal Sen. Q: Were they dubbed? A: Yes. Ek Din Achanak 18 is completely dubbed. We did effects of Khandhar 19 and I also did the complete audio production of Antareen, including dubbing and mixing. It was completely done by me. I did a few films of Tarun Majumdar's, such as Dadar Keerti.20 After “rock and roll” came, people started enjoying and a lot of film projects started happening in our NFDC studio. Q: Why did Satyajit Ray move from direct recording to dubbing? A: Actually, in most of the cases it was indoor and the acoustic quality indoor was gradually degrading. And it wasn't possible to do this outdoor because even if you don't see it visually cars would be passing in the background. The sounds are passing through the vegetation as well. With audio you cannot block anything unlike visuals where you can make a boundary. When it comes to audio you will hear Bongaon's audio in Jessore! No passport is required there. So, as the studio acoustics were degrading slowly, reverberation started increasing. To maintain the quality, the films were being dubbed throughout. And even he could not physically do this anymore - he went for part dubbing in Sakha Prashaka. He was in this film - it was partly dubbed and the real audio was kept in other places. Q: So there was direct recording as well in that film? A: Yes. Agantuk had the same thing. Q: But his earlier films like Aranyer Din Ratri21 had direct recording. A: More or less.
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Q: I'm curious to know something about Satyajit Ray. He made his last film in 1992 when stereo had already come to Indian cinema. And in 1982 stereophonic mixing started, like the film Gandhi. A: Where was Gandhi22 mixed? Q: Wasn't the final mix in stereo? A: Gandhi was mixed abroad. Q: Yes it was. The very popular commercial Hindi film Disco Dancer23 was mixed in stereo here in India. A: See, during those times stereo mix on stereo opticals were done by a few guys. You need a stereo optical recorder to record in stereo and you need a stereo theatre as well. If I make it and no one else can hear - which is happening in a lot of cases - I'm giving highest quality output working on a Harrison mixer but the output is going through Ahuja amplifier or something like that, then what would you expect? Are we aware of what we should be doing? The chain of our whole production, from script to screen, do we know the required technicalities behind all this? And the kind of quality it should have? I think this is the main reason. With Tarun Majumdar's all in all encouragement I did a four-track stereo for his film Path o Prasad.24 That was magnetic track. How did I do it? I recorded one track on the outside of the perforation on a 35mm and another track inside in the place of the optical. Two such on either sides - one track between the sprocket and picture and one outside the sprocket and the same on either sides, which makes it four-tracks. They made this concept of four track stereo distribution. The playback was done on good projectors but the heads were four cassettes heads for each track. It was not their fault and the space was very less. After four rounds, the surface came off. That was what happened in reality. We never think about the end product. I've imagined and thought about a lot of times how to take any real picture of the Earth. I don't know how I'll do it. Maybe, on a rocket or a tabletop. Now there is DI and CG and everything seems to be possible with them. But imagine the hardship in those times, what Satyajit Ray imagined imagine today's Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen.25 How many kinds of magic did he create? What hardships did he go through to work on the optical? How many layers did we create? Q: In optical? A: Yes. Q: But, though he experienced stereo in his times, he never used it in his films…
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A: It hadn't come to India before 82. May be abroad. But Gandhi was made in 82 that I know because I was part of NFDC. That was down for an international market. To find a projector in India would have been possible somewhere in the mid-eighties. That is when we did Path o Prasad as well. Q: Satyajit Ray consistently did mono mix from beginning to end. A: He did not get an opportunity. He should get the space in the first place. He had definitely seen 70 MM films including Sholay. So. I don't think he would have wanted to make a 70 MM film. Q: Yes, I agree. A: The fact is that he knew his canvas and what he was dealing with and with what space. If he really would have made a film like Close Encounters26 - he had written a script titled Bonku Babur Bondhu27, he could have done it for this film. But that didn't happen. He fell sick after 82 - 83. When would he find the time to do? After coming back he wasn't fit enough to do it again. Tarun Majumdar did it. I worked for Tapan Sinha's Ek Doctor ki Maut.28 At that time all the effects and the dubbing would happen here in Calcutta but the final mix would happen in Bombay. I reversed this scenario for this film. Tapan Sinha said that I would have to mix. I told him, "If I am doing the mix I will do the dialogue premix as well." Most of the dialogues were dubbed here at my place. Only two people did it in Bombay, Pankaj and Shabana. We got all the three tracks from there. It happened at Sunny. Those were brought here and I mixed the whole thing. A very important film as well. Q: Was it a stereophonic mix? A: No, absolutely not. Stereophonic in that sense came mostly in digital. I wouldn't say stereo, rather the use of surround sound, Dolby SR, Dolby Digital… Q: Yes that is an enormous change. But before that if you have to mention a difference of sound in Satyajit Ray's films, I think it would be the use of details. A: Yes. He used to deal with it realistically. That is true. Mostly he would treat it realistic. And in cases where it went above realistic and say surreality came in, it was treated accordingly. For instance, in Bhoother Raja themes and others.29 He elevated realistic sound to another plane in different ways with use of different musical elements and sound effects. That is extremely interesting, isn't it? If you take Pratidwandi 30 for instance, you will see this kind of treatment in one or two places like that
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of the dream sequence. Then the use of leitmotif - the bird comes and again the bird comes. Q: And the use of ambience in Ray's films seems to be very rich. A: Yes, very rich from the very beginning. I would say right from Pather Panchali.31 That is what I have noticed. In fact, we learnt from watching his films. At the Pune film Institute, watching films was a habit. Every day we used to watch 2 to 3 films, like classics or current releases, important films, serious films. Different festival packages used to come there. As a result of that, a vision has taken form. Ray used to create what used to happen in Bengal purely through music. For instance, in that one train journey in Aparajito 32 the transition from Banaras to Calcutta he did through music. Changing the folk elements, he came into Bengal in that one train journey. This is how he did it musically. Maybe he could have even done it with effects with his imagination. Q: To do it on ambience. A: But what used to happen in those days is that some of the sound elements, in Satyajit Ray's case it would be mentioned in the script. Another thing is those that used to develop watching the film on the editing table and was noted that he would use or not use sound at that particular point. For instance in Ritwik Ghatak's Subornorekha 33 the sudden emergence of Ma Kali. What I mean is these are additions. In Pather Panchali, for instance, a considerable amount of sound was added later. Q: The use of ambience is relatively lesser in Ritwik Ghatak's films. He seems to do a lot of experiments with effects. A: His style of expression was more direct and attacking. He would reach that space directly. Descending from the stairs in Meghe Dhaka Tara34 or that whip sound, or maybe another film where he treated it musically like Komal Gandhar35 with Dohai Ali refrain. We had our house on the other side of the partition, but it is not existing there today. So, Ritwik Ghatak had a different style and Satyajit Ray was more influenced by Hollywood, that's what I think. He had a realistic approach towards cinema and to derive meaningful expression out of it. Q: So, there was the transition from the optical to magnetic. Didn’t that affect their work? A: Ritwik Ghatak didn't go to that position of changing. He might have done that for Titas36 made later, I'm not sure about that. But magnetic was used by mainly Satyajit Ray. Later, other people like Mrinal Sen, Tarun Majumdar, Tapan Sinha and others worked in the magnetic era.
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Q: The flexibility of the magnetic medium or format, did not that affect the quality of work of these people? A: There was some influence in case of music because the musical instruments that were used before, precisely we used to try to find out if any instrument is there within 5KHz, we used to avoid using a high note bells because in optical there's a chance of distortion as the density varies. So this was one of the issues. That way there was a change since everybody started using instruments of higher range. Q: Yes, magnetic can handle up to 15K. A: Yes, provided it is reproduced. The speakers to support this kind of high range came much later. 15KHz might be getting produced but we only hear a portion of the harmonics only. Q: And on the lower range, is it 30Hz? A: Yes, 30 to 35Hz. Q: So, dynamic range increased, headroom also increased. That’s how the possibilities of erasing and overdubbing also increased, but how is this change getting reflected in the quality of the sound work? A: Firstly, you should understand how the theatre has changed. It wasn't only the change of the recording. Everything before was aligned according to the kind of theatre that was there. Same goes for the mixing as well. The moment we realised that the theatre quality has improved and its speakers and amplifier systems have been changed, that's how the dynamic range also increased. Now, a lot of people are trying to input a lot of elements, which wasn't the case earlier. Previously it used to be precise directions of putting something in a particular place like a train passing. You can take the example of Saptapadi.37 In this film, when the hero meets the actress for the second time and watches her through the mirror, a train passes by in the backdrop and the mirror shakes a little. That's how precisely it was used. A reason gets created for the mirror to shake. So, this was thought of from the script level that the dispensary could not be a small village dispensary. That's why the train passed from behind. That was the idea. If the film were made now, more ideas would come for the surround sound design. Q: You're right. Now let us come to digital technology. How have you seen the transition or experienced it in your own work? How would you elaborate on that? A: From my perspective what I can tell you is that people like me who are neither very old nor very new, have spent quite an amount of time in the industry and I think we're the luckiest. We have seen the total transition
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happening - transition from the old style, direct recording, loop dubbing, the mixing of those times then “rock and roll” dubbing. Now it's digital, Dolby SR, DTS, Dolby Digital, and Dolby Atmos. So, we are the luckiest! And what the teachers of our Institute did actually was they helped increase the adaptability power in us. They have instigated us to learn for the rest of our lives. We went through that process and so we still have the inquisitiveness about what's coming next. Why? Because I know about my aesthetic requirements. Now, how much I can reach that is more crucial. Now, I think, that it is possible to go to the Everest because there is oxygen in the cylinder for some time. Previously, there used to be very little oxygen. We have reached that stage now. Now, from my vantage point I experienced all the changes, from optical or direct optical sound to magnetic. After Digital came it was quite a relief. What we used to think for so long can be a reality now. Not only reality, but achievable. Earlier, sounds were produced manually. Now it can be processed. I'll give you an example. To create the sound of a riverbank breaking in the film Padma Nadir Majhi, I had to drag a person inside a carpet and record that sound. No one even knows about it. I'm informing you so that it can be understood. People might not even believe it. But towards the end in the film Uttara 38 , a big boulder rolls down. This boulder’s sound I have created out of nothing because of this tool, the digital tool. I had a sound of a rolling tyre, which was flattened. I processed that sound and added a few elements with it and made that material so that it sounds like the boulder rolling down. Earlier, you had to think of this process in a different way. Now it appears to be more realistic in the colour era. Earlier in colour people used to think that is right because they didn't hear the sound of a boulder rolling. Q: But wasn't it possible to record the sound of the rolling boulder directly? A: Now if the distance of the boulder is almost half a mile, then to follow the boulder and record the sound is almost impossible. Where is the LF element? You will only get the rubbing. You will only get the sound of the boulder hitting. You wouldn't get the body. Q: That means direct recording is not the answer in cinema. A: It works for certain things, like normal dialogues and stuff. But in case of enhancements there is a difference at times in the tonal quality. Direct recording is okay. A lot of people who make mainstream films they are more conscious towards the voice quality. If there is any difference in Amitabh Bachchan's voice quality then he will become mentally upset. So, to achieve his voice quality in outdoor might be possible, but to do it
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throughout the film becomes difficult because mostly the situation is like that. To go for direct recording in West Bengal requires a lot of infrastructure. How many producers will you find who will be able to afford that? In Bombay you generally see direct sound happening. But if a shooting is happening at a road junction and the road is blocked within 1 km radius with the help of assistants who are blocking the road and not allowing cars to pass, they are allowed to pass once the shooting is over, will we be able to do it here? Will we be able to afford it? Those assistants will charge Rs. 15,000-Rs. 20,000 per day. This is apart from your recording equipment cost and recording engineer’s cost. No one will be able to afford this because there wouldn't be much return. They might be able to spend. Some costly films also happen, for instance the film Chander Pahar 39 , which is an expensive film, happened. How was it possible to make this film? Because they had about 50 halls under their control, they could force the screening as well. Even if it was another producer they also could afford spending that much of money. But would that producer be able to run the film? I have a doubt about that. So basically, making a film is not the be all and end all. You also have to think about controlling the machinery, which is very difficult. In recent times cinema halls are running under very few people. But earlier this wasn't the case. Even now, Tarun Majumdar and I would go to Purna cinema hall to find out the quality the hall is in because of a film was going to get released there and we found that it was in terrible condition. The back of the baffle or speakers was open, and a person was sitting above and the show was running. Some work was happening on the speakers. The entire hall was naked and didn't have any acoustic treatment. The sound was too disturbing and no dialogues could be understood. If the hall would be crowded then still it is fine, otherwise not. So these were the conditions in which films got released earlier. Then Tarun Majumdar would go and tell them which things needed to be altered and that would be done. If the total setup goes to a single person's hand, whatever he says will be done. It is very good that Digital came. Everything is good about digital; we're really lucky that this kind of sound quality is happening now while earlier we would be dissatisfied with that. We never got what we gave. But after the digital another fear has cropped up. It is very similar to the multinational companies; I'm going to get lost. My existence depends on a few people. Q: But your name is going to be there in the credit list. That you have done this work will be registered. A: But it has to run. The film has to run, right? Q: Yes, it has to run.
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A: If it does not run then even if I have a DCP or a DVD, then what? You tell me, how much of archival value will we be able to maintain this way? How much is the durability of this? Five years? What will you do about changing the software every six months? So today you are doing a DCP, this DCP won't be readable after few years because some new format has come in already. Like now you have a newer version of Mac Pro. Half of the things will not work on that. What will you do to maintain this and keep it, in a way that the hard disk does not crash? One film will not be having multiple copies. But the funny thing is that from the analogue era, we can still see a film by the Lumiere brothers. But have we seen a first digital film? Or can we see it later that this is the first digital film made? Can anybody bring this out? It is very difficult. Q: Yes, it is. A kind of non-linear method is here now. A: Yes, that is everywhere, even in editing. Nonlinearity is in an extreme situation now. Q: It is difficult to keep it chronologically. A: So this is a very difficult space now. That’s why I think that there must be some archival technique where there will be at least one analog format saved. That we're still doing. Many a times we are making a direct print from Digital. If we do it there is no print negative but there is a direct positive. If we have that facility then it is still possible. Now, if this was necessary to do that you have to keep an analog print other than your DCP that will remain as it is. Q: Yes. True. A: It will stay intact for years to come. I think that this should happen. Q: But this is also true that a lot of analog prints have gone bad because of negligence. A: That is the problem of the individuals. If today such prints can be kept with proper temperature of less than 5/6 degrees, they will not go bad. They went bad because we could not make proper arrangements to keep them. BFI is keeping them properly. How are they keeping then? They are taking the prints from our country - the bad ones - and they're repairing them there. They are taking the prints to the film clinic and making them fresh. And they are digitising from that stage keeping a copy. But what is the digitisation format? And how long will that survive? Q: Yes, they will probably survive and not become degraded, but it might not be readable in the future systems. A: That's exactly what I mean as well. Going bad does not mean breaking apart or anything. You would not be able to access it any more. A print
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can be accessed for about 100 years, but you will not get a conventional projector. The market is such that if you have a projector like that where will you see the film? So, back to square one! Q: After the transition to digital, do you think the use of ambience in cinema has increased? A: The ambience actually is coming closer to the audience. Earlier, on an average if the audience would sit in the middle of the theatre, my perspective of listening from the speakers would be a minimum of 50 feet. A sound would come from a distance of 50 feet from a mono plane. When Digital came, you are doing mono at first. I myself did it for Paromitar Ek Din40, Uttara etc. The distance remains the same for these but it was much clearer, the clarity increased a lot. Even the amplifier systems and speaker systems changed a lot due to digital. But the moment the use of surround sound started, I only started this in Goutam Ghose’s film Dekha41, which is the first Dolby SR film where surround sound was used first. In fact, we knew then what to do theoretically but the feelings changed once we did it. The learning process started once we did it. A lot of experiments happened. Over a period of 3 to 4 films we figured out what experiments are possible and so on, like it usually happens. So with surround sound, wherever one is sitting inside the hall, the distance between that person and the surround speaker is within 10 to 12 feet. What the audience would hear from 50 to 60 feet, those became surrounded within 15 feet distance. Q: Yes. A: This means that the person became enclosed within that space or range. It means that you are within the space of cinema. After this happened, certain things had to be taken care of. It shouldn't lead to irritation. Q: Yes, it shouldn't be a distraction. A: It was primary to see to it that the heads do not turn away from the screen. If suddenly there is a noise of something falling and the audience turns around to see, then the effect of cinema is lost. Isn't it? So, one has to know to use surround properly. Any particular sound, like a bird sound used in the surround in a loop, should not irritate the audience. Ambience should be soothing. So, from here the real use of ambience started and I personally think that it was an aesthetic enrichment. Q: Is the reason behind this only the recording format, the wider flexibility from 20Hz to 20KHz or the separation of the different tracks and channels? A: No, you can think of it as a whole since we got a miniature representation of the kind of sound we hear in real life, even though it
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wasn't so perfect. It is not possible to get such perfection also. Because the moment it went to surround, 7 to 8 speakers would play parallelly. Q: Yes. A: That is not something, which is desired. There might be some elements here that have to be spotted at specific places. That is not happening. Something overall is happening. But still, just to fulfill this need one ambience could be created, let that be of a jungle or of riverside or of a home. So, we got a chance of looking for reality in this. Q: Which was not there in mono. A: This wasn't possible in mono because it concentrated mainly on dialogues and few effects and music because people here in West Bengal are still going to see the story from the book and the picture. They don't go for the cinema. Q: But Satyajit Ray has used much ambience in many of his films, in mono only. How did that happen? A: Yes, that happened. You have to first see what kind of film is being made, what is the intention of the film and who is making the film. If you happen to see a film by Tapan Sinha, he was originally a sound guy. If you see Ek Doctor ki Maut, I have used room tone in those times. He told me that he had almost completed the final mixing. I asked him back how. He said that he had used different tones for different rooms, reverberations are also there, somewhere high somewhere low according to the size of the room and whether it's a bathroom et cetera. This I felt was very good; this was the real use of sound. Q: In which year was this film made? A: This was made a little later around 87 or 88. Q: Was it done on magnetic? A: Yes, totally. Q: And it was “rock and roll?” A: Yes, fully. So we started enjoying this process. After that, I have gone on to make about a hundred films for sure on surround, Dolby. In the mono era I have done over 250 films. So, at that time I was observing the changes. After ambience came I also started experimenting and now I know how much to go and how much not to. In fact, I think now we work much more as a psychologist for keeping the audience glued to the film psychologically. This has happened and after a few films only I will try and use Atmos in one of my upcoming films. Q: Will it be in Bengali?
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A: Yes. It will be up for the international market. It will be an honest effort. See, “rock and roll” started in Calcutta with me. I only started digital and use of Dolby too. So, I wish and expect that even Atmos will be started by me. Q: But is there a theatre supporting Dolby Atmos in Calcutta? A: That is not required. If Atmos is not there, it'll play in 5.1. Atmos will be played wherever it is present. I'm sure Dolby authorities are already thinking about it. As long as there is no theatre, the Atmos will have no effect. So definitely they will try to upgrade the theatres. Probably day before only there was a seminar here - someone named Vijay Vatak, a representative from Dolby - had come down. This is around only and I’m hoping I'll get it in the coming three years. If not experiment what is the harm in using it, proper use, to understand the depth and other things. I never thought that this experience would happen in this life only! Whether I'm getting or not, that is later. Q: LG. How will you think while working in Atmos? A: I think that the thought should be given right from the script level because it is better if the visual elements are all coming from a single reference so that I can make use of it later on. Even if it is not there physically, hope it comes out through the dialogues. Then also it can be used. Let us imagine that there is a road and lined on both sides of it are 2 to 3 floored house - there sits a track shot. I have already given it a thought how to play around with Atmos here. Here, the use of ambience, the use of discrete sound, something that will be used as object. For instance, from one of the third floor of the houses a Beethoven piece is faintly heard. It stays there only, my camera is moving towards it. It slowly fades out after that. Again, probably in the front on the left-hand side something is happening. That too remains at the same spot. Again, there is another ambience at a lower plane, which does not have a relation with the earlier one, but still it is entangled with that one. This is just like how we will see or experience in real life. I would like to simulate that, provided that the film was already realistically thought of. These things should be incorporated in the script. If somehow one of the shot is not there, I'll be in trouble. Q: Okay. So the first film you did on surround was Dekha. When you first worked on surround, this extra space or extra speakers came onto your hands while previously in stereo you only had two speakers, which was a little more than mono in width. Now it completely came in your hands. How did you handle the situation?
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A: See, the word design in our country practically is happening post Dekha. Till this film there wasn't anything called a sound designer for a film. Whatever I am doing as a sound engineer, and Goutam Ghose as a director, we are sitting and deciding which sound will stay in which track, this is going to be used this way according to the script. That’s how we will place these accordingly. Slowly this turned into design. I don't know whether it was correct or not because whatever I had heard about design earlier, it was sound job only in Hollywood, it wasn't a sound engineer's job. You must be knowing about it. Then it slowly merged because more than 50% of the editors’ work came back to the sound theatre, starting from the dub match to the track playing, which used to happen in editing earlier in the analog era, shifted here. Here the opportunity is much more. More than hundred tracks easily can be used altogether. This wasn't possible in the editing room. It was quite handy as well since these are the times of copy and paste. So, what are the things that you need to know to become a designer - whatever I used to think, very truly and honestly speaking - the idea I had before was that the things that we couldn't do before the rock and roll time, it was possible to do these things. I'm visually watching and thinking at the same time that “Okay! The grass is moving in front. There is a water layer after that which doesn't move, and then the third layer is a wave and moves.” But in mono we couldn't do anything. All we could do was vary the levels. In case of surround now, it's 5.1, 7.1 and even 9.1, and there is Atmos. So, everything can be kept in space now. It has almost come to reality. Even then, since Cinema should be subjective, I will only decide what to make people hear. Just like we hear only what is necessary for us, the rest we generally discard. Q: Absolutely. A: That's how we make use of it; it's just similar here as well. It's not only about reality but also beyond that, it's also important to think how that will happen. That doesn't have any definition as yet. No one will be able to say which is surreal. From time to time reality or surreality will be created. From the point of view of the psychology, if we get more tools on hand like Atmos where we'll have 64 speakers in different places, in a single perfect sized hall - hall sizes are not the same everywhere - the speakers will be placed according to that and it will be totally controlled by Dolby professionals who will place the speakers according to their design and then we can go ahead. Otherwise it is not possible to bring whatever we think there is to reality. Now, this will decide how much of stock I will be using. A lot of people collect sound from different libraries available online like BBC. They collect sound and use it for the film. This can be any particular discrete sound. But, say, a film is happening in the village of
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Purulia. Will it work if you use the sound of a swamp belonging to that place? Yes this is happening. I've seen this in case of a Hindi film - it was a serious film. It was a sequence where Netaji had gone to Peshawar. So the designer plays the sound of a peacock calling there. Whether at all a peacock is available in that geography or not is not important. Earlier the director editor and the recordist used to say everything together to me and my job was to do the mixing. That’s it. Maximum I could suggest were minor changes here and there. But now, it's different. If you want to become a sound designer now, the proper use of softer sounds in cinema which is actually the ambience if you look at it that way… I mean that which is not on the screen, sounds that are beyond the screen… those are responsible for creating the drama actually. That is where the aesthetics is building up, unless you force and create something according to the visuals. This is what I personally think, I might be wrong. This is what I felt while working. Q: Okay. A: I believe you also believe in the same. What I can conclude from this is that if you don't know sociology, our history, the geography, if we don't understand the natural characteristic of a place, then it is not possible for us to create that. For instance, I may not be able to go to Antarctica, it might be difficult for most people, but still I'll have to work for a film on Antarctica. If I fail to imagine in that case it is not going to work out. Even if you want to create a make-belief scenario, you will still have to imagine it. And to do that, you have to study the place. For instance, the text of one of my films, Krishnakanter Will42, is written by Bankim. It is the story of a zamindar family. Now, what will be the ambience of the night during that time? What sound can be there? It is almost 100 - 150 years ago that I'm talking about. If I am not aware that in those times the Ranaar (postman) used to be active, the security guards in those times used to patrol in the night calling, "Hushiyaar," I will not place them. These are not on the screen; you cannot see any of this. The space is only convincingly created once you place that sound. I have placed the sounds like the Ranaars passing by, and sometime later a security guard passes by calling loudly. Maybe he comes back after a little while, the scene was long basically. There was a sequence of theft, which I had contradicted. The place where the security guard calls for awareness - that's where the theft happens. Everybody was sleeping in that area. Everyone who saw the film told me that the use was quite appropriate. Similarly, I got a national award for a film called Iti Srikanta43. Kamallata's activity of picking up flowers in the morning, where Srikanta comes and watches her, that's where I have used the sound of peacocks. This is because it is directly related to Krishna and
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directly related to Kamallata, and peacocks used to exist in this area almost about hundred years back. This is what I did and after the National Award jury members told me that the award came to me because I had given this a thought because normally no one thinks about ambience. I am very strict about it. If there is no ambience I will not be able to design properly. Q: I would like to know a little more elaborately about the idea you have about ambience. You were mentioning in points but you didn't elaborate at that time as to what is the exact role of ambience in cinema? A: What I think is that ambience takes the audience to that space, it helps to express the time to them and it helps the audience to become one with the film. Q: Okay. A: What ambience will have, how will the design be - it doesn't generally happen with a single layer, a lot of elements will be included in that. Let's consider a jungle where there is a little open space. There we add some leaves rustling sound and we also had a few discrete birds in specific positions. The mush of a day cricket was placed constantly. There might be another layer added to this. Now, in the balance which ones will have more pressure and which ones will have less depends on the drama happening in that space. There is no specific measurement for this; it comes when the other related sounds like dialogues are added to it. Right? Q: Yes. A: In today's time, imagine "dada ami bachte chai"44, the place where the character expresses this. It is difficult to say what the structure of that place would've been now. Q: Yes, perhaps. A: In the film Ajantrik, the car passes by such mountainous region but there is no sound describing that part. What we would've done now I don't know. We might have placed something there. I ask the students whom I teach to do sound design for the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin.45 While doing that, you will figure out what made the cutting points in the silent era and what it is now, and what advantages and disadvantages are following after that, since that place is quite complex. Q: The discussion we were having about extra space, an important question in my research is that - this transition from mono to stereo to surround to Atmos - this step-by-step transition and the increasing of the sonic space - how is a sound designer or a sound practitioner handling this shift in their own work? What is their perception about this shift?
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A: The first thing is that everyday human beings are increasing their demands. They're watching the advertisement of a product and then immediately going to buy it. "What if I change my TV from 29 inches to 36 inches?" Now there are wall mounted televisions and the span of the TVs are increasing slowly in homes. Even if the wideness of the cinema halls is not increasing, the wall-to-wall projection length is surely increasing. IMAX is here with a huge screen. The technology is developing because competition has to be maintained with the television as both the mediums are similar. One is a small format and the other is a big format. But now this divide no longer exists. With the coming of digital era, the same thing can be shown in both the places in a similar way. This is because HD transmission is happening now, television output is coming in 5.1, and it is coming in theatre also. Now, what is the basic difference between these two? Watching a film in a cinema hall and watching a film at home on a HDTV in 5.1 - there is a constant attempt to make these two experiences similar. This is where the experiment is happening. That’s why we're doing 5.1 and 7.1. Even 9.1 is happening. Now what will happen I don't know, what else will come… Only the underneath of the legs is leftover. Probably sound will start coming from there as well. Q: LG. A: I think that the technology is progressing and a lot of new thinking is coming along. How much are we able to aesthetically improve, to make the use of it better in the film that is where the doubt still lies. Are we making a film of that volume or quality? Whether we are working with subjects of depth, or just any other light subject, the gloss in the films has been increased along with attractions. Everything is very cosmetic. This is what is happening. But I still find this space interesting while working. Basically the kind of world we belong to, the thinking the thought process et cetera, probably I get a replication of that only in this working process and whatever is happening, we have the film in front. After the film has been shot, the postproduction is happening then. Now if a film has to be made in surround or Atmos, then it has to be kept in mind from the beginning, starting from the writing of the script. Otherwise it will not be feasible to design. Even if you impose it in postproduction, the results will not make a huge difference. I'm sure there can be exceptions. But I think a decision prior to production and a thought process behind it before the shoot will help develop the project in a better manner. What I think is that normal people do not have much ideas about the sound. They don't have an idea of how the sound comes; they think that everything is recorded by the camera. People who go to watch a film in the theatre would thank the
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theatre after the show and they think that the projectionist who is running the film is turning on various speakers at different times and that is how the sound effects are coming. Yes, this is what basically people imagine; I'm talking about West Bengal especially. A film named Shabdo 46 was made here, where they showed what happened with a lot of Foley artists. But I'd never come to know why your Foley artist would go insane. I never understood the story. Whatever! A designer might go insane keeping in mind the thought process he has to go through, but the Foley artist is just creating the sound effects. Definitely that character went mad due to some reason, but people started thinking that before this film there was nothing called sound in cinema. This is the general idea of people now. I came to know about this from someone quite famous. So, what does this imply? That sound happens just like that. When the sound design comes towards the end of the film’s production, generally the budget is not there which is required to make the Dolby 5.1, 7.1 or Atmos and not even the time that we would have to spend in the theatre. By theatre I mean a proper mixing theatre, these are not mixing theatres. These are just studios for track laying and basic premix and many studios like this have grown. They are trying to give an output which when displayed in a big theatre is either getting lost or playing at a higher volume or something else is happening. There is no proper alignment or equalisation. Whatever it may be, some are successful and some are not. I think most of the experiments are happening on a superficial level, they are missing out on depth in some cases. I recently did a film called Ajaana Bataash.47 It was an imaginary script, the central character being a woman who fails to say the perfect words. She fails to say what should be said, but she thinks that she has expressed what needs to be. This is her psychological problem. Her mind says that she has spoken out. But her colleagues say that she hasn't said anything. In the course of film we understand that surrealistically her speech gets lost, a breeze from nowhere comes and captures her speech and that is carried towards the trees in the jungle and stored there. Okay. So how are you going to express this in the film? I had to create this space. This is an ideal situation for surround sound. Again when the trees return her speech, which comes much later in the film, the trees speak in multitude and none of this sense of humour is created thus. This wasn't possible in case of mono. We could successfully create a relationship between her thought process and the words. Whether it was successful or not that comes later, but at least we could try. Q: Yes. Did the films made during mono era not have such kind of thinking about how we are going to use wider spaces?
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A: To use that from one plane or one speaker, a kind of delay was used. That was required to indicate that it was coming from a distance. The location could never be spotted; the reference could be there in the dialogues like left side or right side roads, for example. During the mono era, thinking was totally different. Nothing as such was thought of which would be difficult to create or shown at a later stage, especially if the work was regarding audio. Words getting lost, words getting stored and returning - all is in audio. All these three are concepts in audio and you will have to project this. So you need to create this kind of a space. For mono it will be a different thought process. Like Satyajit Ray created different planes for different ghosts. He would've thought differently if he were making the same thing now. I really feel sad about the fact that we do not have Ray in present times. Q: Yes, I think in the same way as well. A: I did not even get Tapan Sinha. What could he have done in this era of surround sound! I would really want to see that. Even Bergman! Kurosawa still tried to do something like this in his film Dreams in surround. Q: Okay! Filmmakers like Wim Wenders, who are making films now in surround sound and 3-D, some of them are saying that they will make films only in 3-D. They wouldn't go to any other format - this is their medium. Now, he has made films in mono as well; how is he imbibing this shift? A: If you consider my case also, Wim Wenders started working much ahead of us, and he's still there. During our time we saw his films and then we started working. We only are unable to go below surround sound now, I can’t do a mono mix any longer. Not that I cannot do it, but feels like it is almost no work. I can mix a two to three-hour long film in less than two hours now in mono. Even till two or three years back, a lot of mono mixes happened in the theater below us. There, I would have sat at 6 pm to start mixing and the film would be over by 10pm. Then the director would ask me if I had paid attention. I would ask him in return if he got what he desired. I have given certain inputs and there was nothing else we could do for this film. The work would happen on basis of what exists. Say, we also wouldn’t be working for much longer now; it is for obvious reasons. Because there will be a fall gradually in our aural sensitivity curve. My listening condition may not be as good as it is today. That will start decaying in the coming 10 years. Then I might start doing something else, something from the creative perspective only. I am not sure about what will happen. Q: Have you ever thought about making a film?
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A: No, I wouldn’t say I didn’t think. After passing out from the Film Institute everyone has a wish of making a film. So I had the same as well. But what I think is that I won’t be derailed from this until I am satisfied. I am not satisfied with my work till date. The film I work on, after two or three reels, I feel there are so many mistakes that truly I can’t see it any longer. So I stop watching. If asked why I didn’t watch, I say that I have seen it so many times that I do not like it anymore and that there are so many mistakes. I feel bad myself. Probably that’s the reason why I am still working. Q: Amongst the films you have done, which ones were your most favorite? One is Ek Doctor ki Maut. What are the others? A: I like Antarjali Yatra quite a bit. I mean, not the content but my work experience. Later there is not much good work actually. One film experience, if you ask me from the point of view of my work, then there was a film called Manda Meyer Upakkhyan.48 Q: Okay. A: I tried to do something for that film on Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s request. We did the entire dubbing on the outdoor location. Q: Okay. A: The whole film. I asked him if he was sure about it. Q: But why would the dubbing happen in the outdoor? A: I’ll tell you. Have you seen Manda Meyer Upakkhyan? Q: No, I haven’t seen that. A: If you can, watch it. The whole film’s sound is in the outdoors - the fields of Purulia, people calling each other from different directions, etc. Q: Wasn’t it possible to do this in sync? A: We didn’t have the budget to do it in sync. It’s not that it can’t be done but who will do that? Most of the people fail to understand the basic requirements. Communication never happens properly. Anyway, what happened for that film was the director said that most of the situations in the film were outdoors, so if we would dub all that then it will look artificial. I asked him if he was sure and - I would go ahead only if he was sure. So, we went ahead. He had a house in Mallickpur near Sonarpur. It is in a village. There was a huge lawn surrounding that house in the front and back as well. We packed the whole workstation along with the monitors and we dubbed most of it according to time slots i.e. the day portions in the day and night ones in the night. We put up a tent and kept the front open and did dubbing. The dialogues inside the car were recorded by the
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keeping the recorder in the bonnet of the car. When you see the film you will realize that the audio is different, it is not regular audio. Not the usual crispness that we get. But still there is a field, there’s open air - all that you will get along with the dialogues. When the characters speak, you will understand that it is under the open sky or it is inside a room. We arranged for another room inside the tent, which was indoor location, and the outside was the outdoor. This is how it was done. The footsteps were also recorded there. There was also a portion where the pushing of a car had to be recorded. It was more or less recorded that way. You can call this an experiment. I had fun doing that work. A lot of people said that the soundtrack might not work and all. I told them that they wouldn’t have to think about that. I have done direct sound as well. So the live sounds that we had done, we never discarded all that. And this is in fact a controlled condition. Here I can increase or decrease the distance between the source and the microphone whenever I wish. But we didn’t have that facility in the village tent. Ultimately I did the mixing in Bombay at Sunny, which was Dharmendra’s setup. Aloke did the mixing along with me. He had seen the tracks already and had called 5 to 6 people already. He asked them to come and see the tracks, how nicely they were done. This is a fact. So, I have done enough experiments. At least I tried different kinds. Whether they worked or not, that’s a different context. I have bagged four national awards; probably they might have understood why they were giving me those. My first national award was for Uttara. Then Bhalo Theko49, and then Enough of Silence.50 This was a strange film. The last one was for Iti Srikanta. Enough of Silence was a silent film about a sound recordist who was trying to record contemporary everyday sounds related to the idea of peace. It’s a strange subject. From zero, the whole film’s audio was designed. The design almost got constructed on its own. I was thinking and adding something, the film happened like this only. It was mixed in Kolkata. So this is all more or less. I don’t know how much this will help you. I told you what I thought.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:18:48 and 47:40 Name Abbreviations: Anup Mukherjee - A; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q 2 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962) 3 National Film Development Corporation of India or NFDC is the central agency established in India to encourage the good cinema movement in the country, through state supports. 4 La Strada (The Road, Federico Fellini, 1954)
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Jamai Shashthi (Son-in-law day, Amar Choudhury, 1931) – the first Bengali language talkie. 6 Alam Ara (The Ornament of the World, Ardeshir Irani, 1931) – is India’s first sound film, or talkie. 7 Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, Satyajit Ray, 1955) 8 Mera Naam Joker (Raj Kapoor 1970) 9 Marutirtha Hinglaj (The Desert Shrine, Bikash Roy, 1959) 10 Padma Nadir Majhi (Boatman of the River Padma, Goutam Ghose, 1993) 11 Antarjali Jatra (Goutam Ghose, 1987) 12 Star Wars (George Lucas 1977) 13 Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) 14 Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, Satyajit Ray, 1984) 15 Ganashatru (Enemy of the People, Satyajit Ray, 1990) 16 Shakha Proshakha (Branches of the Tree, Satyajit Ray, 1990) 17 Agantuk (The Stranger, Satyajit Ray, 1991) 18 Ek Din Achanak (Suddenly, One Day, Mrinal Sen, 1989) 19 Khandhar (Ruins, Mrinal Sen, 1984) 20 Dadar Kirti (Deeds of my elder brother, Tarun Majumdar, 1980) 21 Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970) 22 Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) 23 Disco Dancer (Babbar Subhash, 1982) 24 Path-o-Prasad (Tarun Majumdar, 1991) 25 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Satyajit Ray, 1969) 26 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) 27 The Alien was an unproduced Indian-American science fiction film in development in the late 1960s, which was eventually cancelled. It was to be directed by Satyajit Ray and co-produced by Columbia Pictures. The script was written by Ray in 1967, loosely based on Bankubabur Bandhu (Mr. Banku's Friend), a Bengali science fiction story Ray had written in 1962 for Sandesh magazine. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) resembles the short story and the script in progress by Ray very strongly. 28 Ek Doctor Ki Maut (Death of a Doctor, Tapan Sinha, 1990) 29 Bhooter Raja sequence in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Ray 1969) is a remarkable example of Ray’s ingenuity, employing innovative potential of cinema he managed to produce a phantasmagoric experience in low budget. 30 Pratidwandi (The Adversary, Satyajit Ray, 1970) 31 Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, Satyajit Ray, 1955) 32 Aparajito (The Unvanquished, Satyajit Ray, 1956) 33 Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965) 34 Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960) 35 Komal Gandhar (A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale, Ritwik Ghatak, 1961) 36 Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas, Ritwik Ghatak, 1973) 37 Saptapadi (Seven Steps, Ajoy Kar, 1961) 38 Uttara (The Wrestlers, Buddhadev Dasgupta, 2000)
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Chander Pahar (Mountains of the Moon in the United States, Kamaleshwar Mukherjee, 2013) 40 Paromitar Ek Din (House of Memories, Aparna Sen, 2000) 41 Dekha (Goutam Ghose, 2001) 42 Krishnakanter Will (Raja Sen, 2007) 43 Iti Srikanta (Your Truly, Srikanta, Anjan Das, 2004) 44 Meaning, “Brother, I want to live” – is a piece of dialogue by the protagonist, from Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960), immortalised by its timeless and reverberating emotional appeal. 45 Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1926) 46 Shabdo (Sound, Kaushik Ganguly, 2013) 47 Ajana Batas (Unknown Breeze, Anjan Das, 2013) 48 Mondo Meyer Upakhyan (A Tale of a Naughty Girl, Buddhadev Dasgupta, 2002) 49 Bhalo Theko (Take Care, Goutam Halder, 2003) 50 Enough of Silence (Mukherjee 2001)
CHAPTER 11 HITENDRA GHOSH1
Q: Let’s begin with Satyajit Ray. H: Ray has been using the sound of the train. The sound depicts this and that, okay? I mean it has been used emotionally. He had used different types of sounds for different locations and moods. I was quite impressed and I wrote about it in my thesis. Then they gave me a permission to interview him. So, I went to Calcutta. Ray actually used to know me because my parents and Ray had studied in the same class. So he used to know me that way. I asked him, “You’ve been using this sound of train”. LG. But my point is that analysis, they think too much about it. It has happened very naturally. It so happened that all his train sounds were sounding different. Q: Hm. H: He didn’t use the same train in all. In the film he has been using about 10 or 15 times and there were no stock effects at that time. So, he had to use the original location train sound and it sounded a little different in every take was a different take. Ray rather made a big thing out of it. Q: Later you also did some mixing for Ray, right? H: Yes, later. Q: I think Shatranj ke Khiladi2 for instance. Isn’t it? H: Yes. Q: What I would like to know from you - I mean, you probably have immense amount of stories and anecdotes to tell - but my curiosity would be primarily to know about the transitions - transitions from mono mix and stereophonic mix a bit, and then surround mix. How did the practice change from one to the other? H: See, the change actually came in many places. You can say that the change started coming from the 80’s. But we were doing a little different from the world. See the world went into Dolby. After mono they straightaway went to Dolby. But we didn’t. We were doing magnetic fourtracks. That was something, which we were doing totally in India. We
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used to go and put magnetic heads, four track heads in different cinemas. The heads were made in India. So, that way, we used to call it stereo. But it had four tracks. At that time only we started giving the fourth track into surround. But there was no woofer track - there was only left, right, center and surround. Q: In the projection room the four tracks were separate, right? H: Yeah, they were separate. Then, once the Dolby came, then of course we also got it changed. But I think we were quite late. Dolby came in ’84 or ’85 I think. But we started using it in the 90’s. We actually started in ’95, but Dolby basically came in ’96. Q: Daud in ’97 was Dolby.3 Though there was a Kamal Hassan film in the south before it. H: Six tracks magnetic stereo also started coming in between that. There was a film called Patton4 that was made in six-track magnetic stereo. Q: Yes. H: So, a lot of changes have come from the mono days. Q: But mono mix had a particular kind of sound arrangement, such as voice, effects. H: See, the basic thing in mono is that the source is one. So, whatever you do with your level of recordings, it has to go at the back only. If the dialogues are going on, you have to put the music at the back only, so that the volume of the music has to go down. Then, the layers of sound levels have to be maintained in mono. But when the stereo came - Dolby - then you have a vast thing. You don’t need to come down a level because it is coming from left, or it is coming from right. There’s a big span of the sound. So, our thinking became a little different. Q: Yes. What was that difference? H: When it came, we were very excited that surround sound is there. “Let’s put this one in the surround.” At the beginning, we were actually making things a little gimmicky in terms of track laying. Q: Okay. H: Then we realized that these are all distractions. If a sound is there in the surround, people sometimes look at the back, sometimes they get distracted. So, slowly, we were again coming back to the frontal. Q: Okay. H: When the stereo started coming, we used to put even our music at the back in the surround and all that. But, slowly with so many tracks being already there - now Atmos is also there - we are still going and
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concentrating on the front. Even the Hollywood films are still doing that. You will hardly find any good Hollywood film where the panning is too much. They are again going back to the old one. Maybe sometimes the surround comes and goes, you know, that way. We were literally making it a gimmicky thing in the beginning, you know. Q: But then, with new technology coming in, we see that the numbers of channels are increasing every time. What do they do? H: Well, I don’t like it personally. See what happens is that when you are mixing, you are in the center of the theater. Now, suppose I am mixing in this studio - I am sitting here. So, for me, I am seeing whatever playing I am doing over here, in this position. But in the cinema hall, I am not the only one who is watching the film from the center, right? People are in the left, left corner, right corner and also at the back; and they should experience the same thing, which I am doing. Right? But if you have multiple tracks, it is not possible to give the same kind of thing everywhere. So a big question has come now. In Atmos, for example, I give a sound, which is right on my head when I am sitting at the mixing level. Some sound - suppose a bird sound on the top - in the theater only those people who are in the middle of the theater will have that sound coming on their head. Rest of those who are sitting above that row, they’ll be experiencing that the sound coming from the back. Okay? Q: Hm. H: These people who are at the back will feel that the sound has come from front. So, you are not giving the same kind of sound to everybody. Now that becomes a question as to why do you want to do that? That’s why I prefer the Auro track, which has come recently. Q: Auro 3-D. H: Yes. That is much better. My personal opinion regarding this is that with Auro they are at least giving the same sound to everybody. It doesn’t point out. If they are putting a bird sound, which is coming on the top, the same sound is there in all the speaker lines. Q: Okay. H: So, whether you are sitting here or there, you get the same feeling. That way I prefer Auro than others. Q: They do some sort of wavefield synthesis. H: They should not localize. The problem starts during localization. Or you have to accept that. It so happens that this mixing level, these seats happen to be at the front. Front rows happen to have the cheapest seat. But
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you should get the best sound when you are paying more. I think they’ll sort it out. Q: Mono had this limited scope of not only channels, but also dynamic range, in terms of mixing. I think levels also. H: Since we are dealing with digital recording now, the best thing it is… What used to happen in mono is that the track had to be photographed and gone into sound negative and all – that was a long process. So, there were a lot of losses in the sound and we couldn’t have that dynamic range also. Suppose we have a soft sound of shuffling. But that sound used to get mixed with the noise of the optical track. But now, you can get a very clean sound with the digital technology coming and with everything in hard drives. Absolutely all the details can be heard now. That way, the quality of sound has improved a lot. Q: If given a choice, which particular format will you prefer? Mono, stereo or 5.1? H: I would prefer 5.1, but without doing too much and would treat it like mono, going into surround at some places. I don’t like the gimmick of 5.1. I prefer the way Hollywood is making. I prefer that kind of mixing. Even their action films also are mostly at the front. Only the reverbs are going in the surround, you know. Sometimes when they want to pan something, they pan it like that. Otherwise you are concentrating on the front. I do like that kind of a thing. Q: But this clarity that the digital technology has introduced - clarity of details and sound information - does it bother you or does it make your choices easier? H: No, it helps me a lot because sometimes you need a lot of layers in the sound. Suppose you have a sequence in a village. You have birds over there. Say, there is a river flowing also. Lots of sounds are there. But in the mono times we couldn’t get all those sounds clearly. Sometimes we would come to that and then go back and then get the other thing. But now, because of the clarity you are getting, you can put reverb on the left side and have the birds on the right side. Many things can be told in a much better way. Q: But if you treat a surround like mono, then the spreading of those details would be much wider. Right? I mean, everything should be in the front if you treat it like a mono mix. H: No, the front too has left, right, left center and right center. So, you can have a good amount of space; because what happens ultimately is when the audience is looking at the screen, they are actually concentrating on the
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screen part. Apart from the length of the picture, the rest of the things are dark. So your surround should only make it sound wider. It should not look like the sound is coming from back. Q: Okay. H: When we put same sound, say violins in music - when I put the violins 50-50, 50% is at the front and 50% is at the back. How does it sound for the audience? It sounds like the violins have spread - not coming from the left or coming from surround, it has gone wider and it has gone beyond the screen size. The sound has become a little bigger. So, when you want to show something like you are pulling out of something like the church location and then you want to zoom out like this, you are going wider in your picture. If you can do that in the sound also, it adds to the feeling. That’s why this 5.1 system can be useful in terms of enhancing the visual. Q: Then I’ll ask you about noise. Noise is a specific term. I am rather curious to know about your views on ambience. H: See, noise is something like a sound, which you don’t like. We call it noise. The sound, which you like, cannot be noise. Right? Q: Of course. H: You can’t call it noise. Say there is a scene now where we are sitting here and there is a pinning sound, which is coming. Now, if it is not disturbing you and you feel that it is giving authenticity to the sequence, it is a noise that way. But when you are putting it and it is being liked and it is helping the visual, then it is no longer a noise. Q: Yeah. Because it was termed as noise then – for every film in history, noise is the term used. But the definition of noise has changed after the coming of digital technology. Now, we often redefine noise as ambience, background sound, room tones etc. H: Yeah, room tone has started coming because now we can play around. Earlier, we used to have dialogue track. Suppose there is no music and the dialogues are dubbed dialogues. So, there is a lot of gap in between the dialogues. What we do now is we put room tone. If we are sitting here, there is a room tone for this space. That way we can add and it doesn’t disturb us now. Q: I am curious to know why this shift had happened - it was considered noise before, but now it is being used in the soundtrack. H: Sound is something that you have to enjoy. See, sound is something that you are experiencing every day, from the time you get up in the morning to when you go to sleep. All day you are hearing sound, you are seeing visuals. So, you should have the same kind of an experience in the
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cinema too. Earlier, the cinema used to be a little away from the real life. But now, because the technology has developed, we would like to get the audience the same experience that they are getting outside. Today when I go out, I hear a lot of traffic. Suppose I meet you there. I am talking to you, right? You are hearing me but with so much of noise. Earlier, we would not use the traffic sound because we wanted the dialogues to be clean. But today, with new technology and whatever you may call it, I have the sound of the traffic and make it sound as if you are really there. So, we are going into more on the natural experience, which you have outside the cinema. People are enjoying that. Now, the only problem that comes is the background music. It is any way an artificial thing. So, we have to be very careful now about how to use the background music. When I used to do Satyajit Ray’s films, he would give me background from about 20 feet before where he wanted it actually. He would record 20 feet more music. He would give me another 20 feet more for where he wanted to end the music also. His idea was “I have got a lot of time to fade in. But when I come, the audience should not feel that I have come with the music. It should only enhance the sequence, without making the audience feel that there is background going on.” You get me? He used to tell me all the time, “Come in such a way that I should not feel that the music has come.” that is also how background can be used. That’s the only artificial thing today, which was not there. He was very particular about the background music. He would record it himself. But then, there is another class of people, who, if I miss the background for even two frames, if I’ve come late, they’ll be like, “No, you’ve come late. I want it exactly here.” This class of people thinks that everyone should notice it. Sometimes, what happens is that the film becomes a little boring or it’s not holding. Then they want to use the background so that the tunings of the background will at least make them feel a little engaged, especially if you have a chase sequence - one man is running after another man. If you only have the footstep and all that, it may not give you that mood. But if you have a very thumping music, it might create excitement. So, the background can be used that way. Q: It seems that the use of ambience in the mono era was very less. H: That is because we needed to have very silent portions in mono to get the ambience. But now with 5.1, we can have the music going in front and we can still have the ambience in the surround. Q: But Ray’s films for example - his use of ambience was amazing. For example, in Mahanagar5, made in 1963, he used ambience, which seems like -
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H: He actually calculated and put the ambience over there. His whole designing is that. Suppose, he wants to take me out of this room at this point of time. Now, how do I make the audience go out of this room? He would use the birds’ sound in such a way that when the audience is hearing it, they are actually thinking that they are outside that room. Q: Hm. Psychologically? H: Yes, psychologically they go out. He used to design that way. If you study all his films, you’ll find that sound has played a role in a lot of places. He has used sound that way where he thinks that music is not going to help. Q: Yeah. But in Shatranj ke Khiladi there is lesser ambience. H: See, when the game of chess is going on, the concentration has to be there, even if they are sitting at the lawn or another place. I remember doing it, and I was actually saying, “It’s an outdoor, let’s have some birds.” He said, “No. I don’t want that.” Q: You should feel that you are playing chess. That’s a long holding shot. H: In that way he used to calculate everything, even the movement of the camera also he used to calculate. Q: Shatranj ke Khiladi and Charulata 6 were also period pieces. It’s difficult to provide ambience in period pieces. I like these films the most because it’s difficult to provide ambience; he plays with time in them… H: If you see, he has actually worked a lot on Shatranj. He couldn’t make it for many years because it needed a big producer and his producers were not able to spend so much money on it. Q: You have also used ambience but maybe you have spread it out in stereo, in four-track stereo or magnetic 8-track stereo. How did you use ambience in those times? H: I did four or five films in that, I think. One was Subhash Ghai’s film Saudagar.7 Another one was Sudhir Mishra’s film Dharavi.8 We used it in the same way as we did in mono. The only thing that was different was I used cuckoo sound which in mono there is no travelling. Q: Hm, yeah. H: I had to keep it at one place in mono. Here, I could move the sound of the cuckoo and I made it go round. That panning helped a lot. Q: Helped to? H: Helped to say that the bird has just gone away. Q: Okay.
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H: That feeling of going away was not coming otherwise. For example, there’s a gunshot in an outdoor and the birds have to fly because of the sound. So for that, the feeling of leaving that space was not coming in mono. But it came in in four-track because I went into surround and there it goes into the surround. So, people hear the sound of the gunshot and then suddenly they hear the sound of the birds going away. Q: So the off-screen space was exposed for the audience. H: Yes, the same thing. The same sequence is there in Ritwick Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara.9 He had the same kind of a visual. But because it was mono, he used the sounds of the birds flying. But it didn’t do that kind of an effect that we could achieve later on. Q: Also when the father dies in Aparajito.10 H: Yes. But my point is that the director’s perception is there. They think like that. Q: But that off-screen space can be further widened in surround sound. H: Yeah. These are the certain things, which help. The 5.1 system has really helped. Q: People are working with sync sound now. H: Sync sound has come back again. Q: Yes, it has. H: Because now they have realized that the sound can be recorded very well. Earlier, we were not able to record properly. There were no recorders and we used to have the Nagra only. It could take only two mics. Nowadays, you are using six or seven mics at a time, lapel or Lavalier mics and all other kinds. So, the quality of recording has come back again. This thing was not proper for dubbing also. Dubbing doesn’t match up to the kind of performance that the actors give while shooting. Nowadays even the artists feel that whatever acting is done in front of the camera remains the best. “We’ll not be able to produce it while dubbing.” Now half of my films have all original sounds. Q: You also worked for a bit in those earlier times when live location sound used to be there, like, in 1930’s, ‘40’s and 50’s? H: No, I didn’t. I came in ‘70’s. Q: Okay. H: My first film after passing out in the ‘70’s was Nishaant by Shyam Benegal.11 Everything there was original sound - there was no dubbing, no effects recording or Foley recording. We had to do everything there. I didn’t even use any stock sounds. There were vintage cars being used
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there. What I did was like a documentary shooting. For every shot, even if it was a silent shot, I used to take its sound. If the shot were that only the cars passing, I would say, “No, I will take the sound also.” So, I would be next to the camera to take the sound and I used get the exact perspective. We recorded with Nagra and we used to have Sennheiser 814 - the long one. It was so good to record birds on that – it was T-powered with 12 volt. Q: Directional mic? H: Totally directional, absolutely a gun mic. I would point it down and if the bird was there on the tree, I would catch that bird. I have recorded that kind of stuff. Q: I don’t think he had many people to control the situation. But then, there would be many different elements of noise in that, even unwanted noises. So, how did you control that? H: No, we had to edit it and all that. I still remember, I was doing Shyam Benegal’s film Junoon. 12 There’s a scene where Nasir comes and the pigeons are kept in their cage-house. So he comes, he gets very angry and takes out the pigeons and he talks out of anger. In the rehearsal he just explained to the cameraman the way in which he was going to move. So, I said, “All right, but if you are going like this then what about the boom?” It was quite a long shot and so I gave him a lapel or Lavalier mic. He never told me what he was going to do. In the shot, he was extensively hitting the cage and shouting very loudly at the same time, and he went into madness, total madness for one full shot of one minute or one and a half minute. I was getting all kinds of feedbacks and noises. So I told Nasir that you have to do it again. He said, “I cannot perform this again!” and Shyam also said, “How will he perform?” I said, ”We can’t use this sound now. What will I do?” So it became a challenge for me as to how to cut those portions and use them like that. If we were shooting now, we could have managed. So, I cut it, I used his words. While cutting, there were jerks in the voice because it was madness. I added pigeons to that. It took me four or five days to make that track. Q: Okay. H: So, sometimes it becomes a challenge for us to record and use the original sound. Q: Of course. But maybe it’s much easier now with multi-track recording in digital technology. H: There was another sequence from another film. Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Neena Gupta were there in the shot. Kulbhushan was singing while
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Neena was talking, all right? Now, since it was not a single shot, when you were cutting to another shot, say, Neena’s close up, then Kulbhushan had to sing. But he had to sing the same line. Q: Hm. H: How do we do that? So when the director explained the scene to me, that he is going to sing and she is going to interrupt him, I told him take it in one shot. Then the whole thing becomes all right. He said, “No I will go into her close up, then his close up, then maybe two shot, maybe shoulder shot.” I said, “Then how am I going to maintain the continuity of that sequence?” He said, “You sort it out.” So I said, “All right. You first take a long shot with two people there. Not a very long shot, but mid shot and don’t cut it. Let the entire sequence happen, okay? I’ll record that.” I recorded that entire one-minute sequence and said, “Now I will playback like a song picturisation, you know. Q: LG. Okay. H: LG. Let them do the lip sync now. Whether it is a close up or not, I will play back and let them do lip sync. The minute I thought of that, I got it. Now the sequence looks as if we were cutting from close up to this. The continuity was maintained because I used the same sound. Q: Yeah, absolutely. Like playback. H: Like playback, yes. Q: Did you have these kinds of stories with Ray? H: Yes, there was one with Ray, but it’s not correct to say it. He used to mix with my boss, Mangesh Desai. After Mangesh Desai died, he said, “Okay, you do it.” So he booked my place for one full week. I had to do for 14 reels. He said, “Since I am working for the first time with him, let him book one whole week for this.” What happened was, he came on a Monday, and with the first reel, I got his pulse that he wants this kind of stuff. You won’t believe - I finished all the 14 reels by 6:30 on Monday itself. LG. His wife was saying, “What will happen now? We have paid!” They used to stay in Taj. They had given a 7 days’ advance to them. So his wife was saying, “What to do? 7 days of money will go for waste!!” I said, “Why don’t you do one thing. Go to Goa. Goa also has Taj. So they’ll adjust the money there.” They found it to be a good idea and went to Goa. After the seventh day, I was mixing another film and suddenly I saw them coming. She held my hand and said, “Thank you so much.” I said for what? She said, “For so many years we have never gone out!” LG. Because of you, we could have a holiday!” Q: LG.
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H: After a year, he sent me a telegram for the next film. That time telegram read, “Book only Saturday for us.” LG. I told his son Sandip, “Oh that film was easy. It doesn’t mean that I will be able to do it in one day for every film.” Actually it was all indoors for that film, and his music was there and some footsteps were there. Three tracks were there. For this, the first day he told me, “Give me the music track, I’ll handle it.” I said, “Fine,” and gave him the fader, the music track. At that time we never used to have a rock and roll machine, we couldn’t stop. Our thing used to be like once it starts, you have to do the whole reel in one go only. You can’t break it, you can’t stop it. So I said that this is the fader for music and then I started the thing. You are looking at the picture and not getting the music on. LG. So I told Sandip that it would be problematic. How many times can we do it? He will forget! So he said, “You only do it.” I gave him a fake fader to operate and I would keep an eye on him. As he would go up, I would also go out. LG. What to do? He is a director, not a technician who will concentrate on these things. He is a director. He gets involved with the sequence. Q: Is your treatment the same for sync sound and – H: I was the only one at that time who used to do sync sound. I preferred sync sound than dubbing. Dubbing used to be in loop at the time (ADR). I used to make everybody do footstep and all that during dubbing. Say, we have a hundred feet loop. So, when they would keep on doing take after take, the director would say, “Yes, this take,” and we would know that the fifth take was okay. At the time we did not have a mixer, which could take separate tracks. We had a mixer, which only had a dialogue track, music track and effects track. So, how do I record the footsteps? If you are recording the dialogues, then I need the footstep also. Right? These days you can record your Foley separately. How could I record that then? What I used to do is, in that loop one mic was for the artist and the other mic was for them to walk. So they themselves had to do as many footsteps that were present in that loop. Q: The actors? H: Yes. Nasir would say, “Should I be concentrating on the footsteps or on my dialogues?! It’s double work!” LG. I would say that, “your dialogues are okay but your footsteps have gone out-sync!” LG. Q: LG. H: They used to do Foley like this then. Suppose, you have kept a glass here. In the loop, you’re saying the dialogue and you keep the glass. I have given them a glass also to make it. Q: It is almost doing like sync sound inside a studio.
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H: They had to concentrate on their lip sync plus this and they would go mad with me. LG. There was no Foley at that time. Q: Is this in the 70’s? H: Yes, 70’s. The first time I used Foley was when Sholay came in 1975.13 Sholay was done in magnetic recorders that had four tracks. So, I suggested doing footsteps and all in one track. That’s why you’ll find that the footsteps of Gabbar on the stones in Sholay. Then there was a big thing - the coin that was flipped. Ramesh Sippy said, “I want the sound of that coin.” At that time we said, “Yeah, we’ll do it.” When we were trying to get that sound by various ways of flipping coins, we were not getting anything. So we told him that there’s no sound coming. He said, “Oh! Don’t worry. We’ll tell R.D.” Then he told R.D. Barman to give the coin’s sound. At that time synthesizers were new to the scene. They had just come out. R.D. was told to somehow use this tool and make that sound. He gave a lot of sounds and Ramesh Sippy rejected all of them. We were dubbing at Rajkamal then. So I used to wear kurta back in those days. I was coming down from the projection room and one coin fell down from my pocket. They have mosaic flooring and stairs. So, the coin fell and it made a certain sound. Q: Okay, yeah. H: I heard it and I realized that it is a good sound. Why don’t I do that? Then I got a big Electro-Voice mic from the dubbing theater, we got the cable and put it there and then I threw one coin on the floor and recorded that sound. After recording, I went to editing. At that time we had Steenbeck. I saw the shot on it. Now the shot was different - the coin rolled down quite a bit. Now this sound was very small. So, what I did was, I cut the sound of the coin dropping on the mosaic and joined it. Even in the visual it was like this, a little bit of, you know, jerks. So this jerk and that jerk matched. Q: Okay. H: I showed it to Rameshji. He said, “Yes this is very good. But I guess a little more volume is required because there might be music here as well.” I said, “Don’t worry about the volume. That I can give you.” This mixing was done in Pinewood, London. Q: Hm. H: We were all there. The recordist there in the mix said, “What is this sound? The coin doesn’t make any sound.” We said, “No, we made this sir.” He said, “No, I’ll not do this.” He was so adamant that he would not use that sound but Rameshji liked it. In the break, while having lunch, he
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asked me how we could convince that fellow. We insisted him a lot during the lunch. He said, “No, I cannot use this. I’ll be asked why. The coin doesn’t make any sound. How did you use it?” I said, “Just use it. We’ll see what happens.” The whole day went in convincing him. Later he did it. After the film was completed, we didn’t at all like the mix, which he did. So, we got the dialogue premix, effect premix and music premix from there and then Mangeshji mixed it in India at Rajkamal. That is what you hear now. We called him for the premiere. It happened at Minerva. I was sitting right next to him. When that coin sound came, the audience was stunned. As it was that any premiere show you went to at that time, people used to whistle, clap and all that used to happen. These days there are no such premiere shows. Public used to really go mad at that time. So, when they heard that sound of the coin in this sequence, they started shouting and applauding loudly. Then the mixer said, “You people were right! Your audience is very different from ours.” LG. I said, “I told you, people will love this sound.” Even today people talk about that sound. Q: LG. You also worked with Ritwik Ghatak, right? H: No. When I was at the institute we used to have him. I remember what happened once while I was mixing with a studio. They had a first floor. You had to use the steps to reach the first floor and we had a very small RCA mixer. It had about six to eight channels in total - that kind. Not these kinds with many faders. I was mixing something that I had to complete. Ritwik Ghatak used to keep on coming to the institute and people used to really use him, you know. Say, if one wanted to see a Czech film or something and that print had come, they would all go after Ritwik. “Sir you know this film? This film has come. It’s very good. You must see it!” “Okay, I’ll see it.” So, when he watched it, we also watched it along with him. LG. He used to enjoy. But his life used to start only in the evenings - evening till late in the night. So, here I am talking about 11’o clock at night - I was mixing alone in that studio. He must have been passing by and he must have heard it. So he came up and I got up. He asked me what I was doing, in Bengali. I said, “I am doing the mix for a film.” “This thing that you are using here, do you know what it is?” I said I am only mixing. The tracks are all separately coming here. He said, “You will never come to know. What you do is lift the mixer and break it, repair it, and then you will know what it is.” LG. I still remember Ghatak that way. But he said the correct thing. What am I doing? I am only using the fader. Do I know what is inside that and how it works? He was great. Q: In contemporary times when most of the Bollywood films are happening in sync sound, how do you approach sync sound? Is it a different approach in mixing?
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H: Yeah. The approach in these days is so different. So many changes have come now. What I used to believe as cinema is changing every day. I used to feel that I don’t have to worry about the footsteps coming if there is an emotional scene. Today, the whole system is different. They want all the kinds of effects coming into the film. I was doing Ram-Leela14 a few months back. They wanted all kinds of sounds in that. Whether you call them the new generation, their thinking on sound is totally different from what we had. My biggest challenge was that technology kept on progressing. In my time there was no computer. I have never learnt a computer. So, how to upgrade myself was the only challenge that I have faced in these last thirty years. How to be in today’s world and also learn the new technologies, which are coming through. So many things have happened! Earlier, there were no magnetic recorders. While mixing, the direct sound used to go to the sound negative. Thus, I couldn’t even make a single mistake. Today, I am very relaxed. I make a mistake. I go back and fix it. LG. That whole tension isn’t there. But if you look at it that way, I am not doing a good job because I am not tensed. You give your hundred percent when you are tensed. You know that you cannot afford to make any mistakes. So you try and do your best. I am not doing that now. What am I doing? I know that if I make any mistake I can go back. There have been a lot of changes in technology. I remember when I was doing 36 Chowringhee Lane15 with Aparna Sen, I told her, “See, I am showing it to you right now. If you want to say anything, say now because now I am going into the optical. So, I will not be able to do any changes.” So I was doing it and the moment the optical was over, Aparna said, “Hitu, you take out the music from that portion.” I said, “Aparna, what are you doing? I have already done it! That’s why I asked you before!” She said, “Now I feel that.” I said, “You can’t do it now. I can’t do it.” I must have shouted at her, that kind of a situation. She started crying! Then I said that let’s put another negative, I can’t do anything else. Since she was crying, I had to do it. LG. So I did it. The next day I was doing another reel. But she was in a good mood or something that I don’t know. She again said, “Hitu I want this dialogue to be removed.” She was expecting me to shout. She was pulling my leg actually the next day! LG. I saw her expression and I somehow thought she was not meaning that. “How can she remove this dialogue? If she had told me about the music piece then I could understand that she doesn’t want. But how can someone take out lip-synched dialogue? So definitely something is wrong.” I didn’t react only. LG. Q: Yes. It used to be a personal connection. Nowadays people just come and get the job done.
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H: Earlier we used to have a lot like that. Because we were doing at one go, we used to get so much respect, I am telling you – from everybody, even from Raj Kapoor. He used to call me Ghoshji. I was half his age at that time. He would never get angry. Even if they didn’t like something, they would not yell saying, “What have you done? Is this how you work?” But nowadays just see how people speak to us. In Raj Kapoor’s last film he said, “Ghoshji since mixing is my favorite and I get very tensed, I need to smoke.” I said, “Sir, this place is not meant for smoking.” He said nothing would happen if I do. I said, “Do one thing. I’ll open this door. There is a door, like this in Rajkamal. I’ll open that and I’ll put a chair there. You sit there and see the film.” He said that it’s a good idea. He saw the whole film from there. LG. Now people will say, “Why can’t I smoke?” But one thing I now believe in is that maybe you have your own style of mixing, but remember that you are working for a director. First thing that you should know is what kind of a mix it is because you can mix any reel you pick up in a hundred different ways. You actually have to satisfy the director. You can say, “I prefer this way. If you don’t want to have it, it’s okay. But I would like to keep it this way.” At the most you can say that. But you should mix it according to the way the director wants. In my career, I have got the arty type of filmmakers, and the most commercial films have come too. So I had to change myself in terms of mixing. Every time a director comes, I will have to change. There was this director, Saawan Kumar Tak. His mixing means dialogues should be absolutely crystal clear. If background is there, background should go down like anything when the dialogues are going on and when the dialogues have finished, you can raise the music. “I don’t want any effects, no sound effects,” he would say. Then there was Rakesh Ranjan, the recordist. In one film there was a shot where there was a mansion and a car comes in the car shed. There’s mud there. So Rakesh Ranjan had got very good sound of that car going over that mud, and the background was going on. It was a Mercedes car. So, I slowly had that sound, little bit just to establish that there is a sound like that. He said, “What are you doing? I don’t want this sound of the car.” Q: LG. H: I said, “Why? It gives a little feeling. He said, “No. Why do you think I am using Mercedes? Because it doesn’t make sound.” Now, what do I do? I had to remove that. So, you have to understand their psychology, what they feel about filmmaking and that’s how you have to mix. You can’t say that I am a mixer - I will do whatever I want. That cannot happen. You should always keep in mind that there are people who don’t have ears for music. They have only ears for sound effects and all. Once the music
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comes, they will just put it because the music has to be there that’s why they are putting. Otherwise they don’t have any interest in using that music. There are people. Q: But in course of time BGM (Background Music) is being used less. People are using more effects and ambiences. H: Yes. That’s because now they feel that you can do whatever you want because of the tracks. Earlier, the background music was used to hide certain faults of theirs. If the scene was too long, or if it was not helping, then background music was used. With the background, the pace would become faster. Now there’s education also. Right? The earlier filmmakers were not so much educated. Nowadays you are exposed to so much of different cinema, so many ideas are there. The editing has changed so much! Leave aside sound, you see today’s edits and the earlier edits. How fast they cut! Sometimes I am amazed to see certain sequences. Q: These days, do you keep the ambience level or the noise level up? Do you allow more ambiences to come into the track? H: At some places you are seeing certain things. If you are not seeing then I don’t put. I still prefer the old school actually. If a romantic sequence is going on, I don’t want to disturb them with birds or traffic or anything of that sort. I still prefer to use the background if there is background music. Q: Will you spread out the ambience in terms of placement? H: Yes. See, every film is an experience for me. I am learning every time I am doing a film. I have done more than 3,000 films. Nobody in the world has ever touched a 1000 films but I have done 3000. Yet I feel that I am still learning because, as I said, every reel can be done in hundred different ways. How do you want the audience to react? That depends on your mixing. Q: Hm. But when sync sound people are coming - there are many young and a new breed of sound technicians and professionals working with location sound and sync sound. They give a lot of information to you. I think it’s a thousand times more information than the films from the 70’s. What happens to that? H: Sometimes I try to take it out if it’s not of much importance. Basically, one has to see it from the audience’s point of view. You are after all not giving a test. This is something that I keep on telling everybody - don’t treat it as an exam. Some time back, someone was doing a mix and he was totally confused as to whether he would do 0.5 or 0.6 reverb. It hardly made any difference to my ears. To the audience it means nothing. But the whole day went into deciding whether we should keep a 0.5 or 0.6. So my
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point is that don’t treat it like you are sitting on an exam table and there is an examiner who is going to give you marks. Whether it’s 10/10 or 9.5/10, you are actually making it for the audience. If the audience is able to figure out that there’s something wrong, they will not be able to tell you frankly what has gone wrong. But definitely they are going to say that something wasn’t in place. As long as that is not happening, you should mix it till then, and in terms of the audience. Q: But audiences’ tastes will also differ. H: Yes, that keeps changing because they are exposed to various kinds of films in the world. They know how much of what should be present. That I agree. At times what happens is that we don’t know what they want. There is a producer, Pahlaj Nihalani. I used to do his films. So after the reel was over he would say, “Ghosh, this reel didn’t touch my heart.” Now, he is not pointing out where I have made a mistake, or he is not telling me what he wants from the reel. He is only telling me that it didn’t touch his heart. I have to interpret what he means and where am I going wrong. It didn’t touch his heart means he didn’t feel the reel, basically. So, which part of the reel? I thought about it. What are the sequences that are there in this reel which touch your heart? Suppose there are two. “Okay, if I can improve these two, maybe he will get a feel.” So, how do I improve that? Why does he feel that way? Then I said, “Suppose I remove the music since the music is not in tune with the emotion which is happening. Let me do it and see.” So I worked again. I removed the music. Then he came and said “now it’s working!” He will not tell me that “remove this music”, or things like that. Similar directors also come my way and there are other kinds of directors too. Even if I go five percent more, they’ll say, “No, music is too high. Bring it down. Not this, not that etc.” Then I become an operator only because they know everything that they want. There’re all kinds of mixing. Q: Going through these different kinds of changes from mono, stereo, Atmos and stuff, do you perceive anything? Do you have a vision or some sort of understanding from a holistic point of view as to why this is happening and which way is it going? H: No. I think it should be like this. We were limited to our typical cinema. Now, in Indian cinema also, the vision is becoming bigger and bigger. Animations and special effects have come. So, that kind of a vastness has to be there even in sound. Otherwise there is no difference between cinema and TV. Q: Yeah.
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H: How do I differentiate? Today if I play around and a lot of things are happening in the cinema, they’ll come and say that all these sequences come on our TV as well. All these mundane crying sequences come on TV.
Notes 1
Duration: 1:21:36 Name abbreviations: Hitendra Ghosh – H, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q 2 Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, Satyajit Ray, 1977) 3 Daud (Run, Ram Gopal Varma, 1997) 4 Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970) 5 Mahanagar (The Big City, Satyajit Ray, 1963) 6 Charulata (The Lonely Wife, Satyajit Ray, 1964) 7 Saudagar (Subhash Ghai, 1991) 8 Dharavi (City of Dreams, Sudhir Mishra, 1993) 9 Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960) 10 Aparajito (The Unvanquished, Satyajit Ray, 1956) 11 Nishant (Night's End, Shyam Benegal, 1975) 12 Junoon (The Obsession, Shyam Benegal, 1978) 13 Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) 14 Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (A Dance of Bullets: Ram-Leela, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2013) 15 36 Chowringhee Lane (Aparna Sen 1981)
CHAPTER 12 DILEEP SUBRAMANIAM1
Q: I am curious about your coming to sound. D: Okay. I finished my graduation in Chemistry. Q: Hm. D: It was very strange. I did work for two years in a paint production company as a Junior Executive, you know, producing paint. There was no connection with cinema whatsoever. Being Tamilian and being from Bombay, the whole immigrant pressure is always there, you know. Being from the middle class there is always pressure for you to get a job and do something constructive. Cinema was like miles away from anywhere. It so happened that my mother wanted me to study a little more than BSc Chemistry. She was the one who kept encouraging me, “Why don’t you apply here, why don’t you apply there, why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that.” So by that time I had done the whole circuit of IIT, IIM, SAT, CSAT, SSAT and all these various examinations and tests and everything. Everywhere I was not successful. So she said, “Okay, now this is another option. Have a look at it.” But by that time, I was two years working. I had only worked. She said, “Now is a good time to go if you want to go and study further.” So, I took it up. I had no clue. I appeared for the examination and I cleared it in the first time. Maybe it was a specific aptitude, or maybe it was something that clicked within me. From that moment on, I was part of this process of filmmaking. And why sound? Because I had no idea about anything else. I knew about electronics, I knew about chemistry, I knew about physics, maths. I had no idea about camera, camera work, visual arts, you know. That is an evolved kind of field in itself. So I just gave up on camera. And I gave up on editing because I had no idea what was that all about. Direction was like way beyond me because I had not done literature; I had not done even amateur dramatics in school or college. So, this was the only thing that was left for me. Then I moved in here. I did study the course and I finished it. Once I got in, I checked with various professionals who happen to be friends of or relatives of colleagues of mine from the paint company. It was like
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walking into people’s homes and saying, “I’ve got this interview letter, what do you think I should do?” And sure enough they had all heard of this or had done the course. One of them had actually finished the course in sixties. He was very encouraging. But typically Punjabi and laconic, the only thing he said was, “Do it. You wouldn’t starve to death”. Which was a prophetic word but I took it up at that level. I didn’t give it much thought basically. So that was how I came to this to be a part of this process. Q: Did you come to Mumbai after you completed your course? D: Yes. I came back to Mumbai. Since I had a home here, I just continued living in Mumbai. What happened was that when I came out of the film school, 90% of Indian cinema was being post-synched, dubbed and it was not a very exciting time - 80’s, late 80’s and early 90’s. Between 70’s and 80’s, somehow we’ve made the worst kind of films in this country. It was trash, it was commercial, it was dominated by stars. It still is in every which way. But even the technical finesse and sophistication were completely lacking. We’re working with mono. World was moving to stereo and Dolby Noise Reduction system and stuff like that. And we were still struggling with mono tracks and it was like a really very messy situation. If your friends were actors then you would get work as a sound engineer. Not that you are breaking the bank or making a dent in your budget or something like that, nothing like that. Even the most successful ones who were reasonably well to do, they were not super rich, even rich by any standard. All said and done, it was not a very professional atmosphere. So I opted to do documentaries, which my friends were doing, and I did smaller films like NFDC and stuff like that. My film school friends were working and I used to work with them because it gave a sense of satisfaction of being treated as an equal, of being treated as a professional, of being treated as somebody who knew his job and who has done the same course or had a similar upbringing as theirs. They never looked down upon somebody’s work. It was always like an equal partnership. So it was very rewarding. Documentaries were very rewarding. To this day, I consider my best work in terms of effort and in terms of the amount of stuff that I have put into a film and my involvement with the characters and stuff, to be in my documentaries. At that stage it was a really wonderful experience to go through all the documentaries that I did and for the reason I did. And I fortunately or unfortunately worked a lot with Channel Four, at that time BBC & Channel four. A lot of their documentaries I did. At that time video was just coming and so we did video as well. Some documentaries were shot on film, some on video. For twelve years I did a lot of documentaries. In Bombay, at that time, television had just come in and it was taking root.
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So they were starting serials, game shows. That was like the beginning. So the first few game shows on television or the reality shows that are called now… Q: Hm. D: All of these were done by me. They called me to do these works. Q: Hm. D: And weekly programs or news or financial coverage and interviews with CEOs, you know. We used to do these kinds of things. It used to pay well but television was a throw away. One watch, and nobody watch it again. It’s not for posterity - nobody is going to watch it ever again. So, eight years of television happened. Eight years of rigorous television – from 7 in the morning to 10 in the night – every day. I formed a loose partnership with my associates from the film school. It became like a loose network. Anybody who wanted to hire us, hired us through our company and all of us would take our share in that. So, one would go here, one would do that shoot, one would go handle an MTV shoot, one would handle a UTV shoot, one would handle a daily soap. So it became like a club for eight years, you know. Our sound guys were running to provide crews that were constantly required to do sound. We had a fixed formula that this is the equipment that is going to go, this is video, this is serial; this is coverage of the news. We had worked out everything like the equipment required and the kind of people that could handle each. A lot of people who are now in this field have come with us and have been a part of that process. Q: And then you joined cinema, isn’t it? D: In 2000, what happened was, around the late 90’s, this television began to take a huge toll on my personal health. And it became very boring. Television channels also realized that it was cheaper to hire somebody on a monthly basis than hire crews daily. Q: Hm. D: MTV got an in-house crew. Channel V got an in-house crew. All these guys, we had started off with them. For the daily soaps of UTV, I had a person on a monthly salary. Q: Hm. D: That was an option, but we refused to take that. I’ve done two years of work, so I know what professional life is and I know what pressures or what frustrations a job can have. So I didn’t want to be a part of that job and I never did. Then for a good six months or something I just sat at home, wondering what to do because no work was coming.
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Q: Hm. D: All our associations were broken up because everybody had gone their own ways. It was a challenging time. In 2000, I started doing feature films again which were dedicated to doing sync sound. Q: Okay. D: By that time, this whole movement had come back in sync sound. Initially I had done a lot of sync sound work during television and before television in the documentary work, and also the short films with people like Govind Nihalani and Shyam Benegal. I had done Discovery of India, which was basically all sync sound. And it was shot on film. Q: Yeah. D: So the experience of cinema was there. It was not as if we were not shooting anything in sync. It came back in a big way in the industry; it started off again in 2000. The cinema guys who had come from some kind of a film training background were all doing sync sound. I did a whole lot of those films. It became quite a rewarding experience. Then, by chance I moved into commercial cinema space with Yash Raj’s Hum Tum2, which was one of the first ones that I worked on, a commercial cinema. So there it was like a whole different ball game dealing with artists, dealing with, you know, egos, various locations and stuff like that. That was a different challenge, which I started and I still continue to do till this day. So, that has been my line of work basically. Q: Why did you prefer to work with sync sound? D: I’ll tell you something. You are telling a story. It is not important for the audience to know the process involved. It’s immaterial. But at the heart of a story there is always a credibility issue. Fundamentally if you can convince people that you’ve done this, and you’ve done this you’ve shot at that place. You’ve physically fired a gun at that plane, there is no gun in your hand, there is no plane that has fallen out of the sky - there is nothing that has happened. But if you’ve managed to convince somebody through sound, through picture, through your expressions, through whatever, you have narrated a story. Q: Yes. D: If you’ve convinced the audience for that moment, you’ve narrated it. I maintain that 90% of the so-called stars in India have a certain factor, which is credibility. People believe what they are doing. They are popular because people actually believe in what they are doing. They don’t watch it as a spoof. Q: Yeah.
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D: Shahrukh Khan’s mannerisms maybe whatever, Salmaan Khan’s maybe whatever, I am not taking moral lessons from them. I’m saying onscreen they have a quality of credibility, which is essential to convey your message. What helps immensely in that process is sound - and at a very sub-conscious level. What happens the moment you dub it with somebody terrible…? Ideally, here you are acting, and you are dubbing. So people know your voice, people associate your voice with your face and they go with it. Or you find somebody who sounds similar. The trick is to find an Amitabh Bachchan clone! Q: LG. D: Why? Because he must be as credible as Bachchan. You see? Q: Yeah. D: So, what we are sub-consciously aiming at is the fact that we need to connect with our audience. It helps immensely in the process if you can shoot in sync. I am not a terrorist and neither am I an extremist who’ll say, “This or nothing! This doesn’t happen”. The best of films have huge parts that are dubbed. But that is not for anybody to know. The process has been attempted and a different process has been taken up. But the point is that the end result has always been credible. That’s why that cinema is successful. Q: Hm. D: That’s all. Q: Credibility. D: I learnt a bitter lesson in Rockstar. 3 I dubbed Nargis Fakhri with a professional dubbing artist. I kept telling myself that we are going wrong. We tried three or four artists, including Nargis herself. It broke my heart to see that the audience had no connect with the central figure of your tragedy only because of the voice - mainly because of the voice. Q: Was Ranbir’s voice his own? D: His own. And 90% of it was retained in the film as it was on location whereas her (Fakhri) voice was completely replaced. Q: Do you think that’s the reason people couldn’t connect to her character? D: It’s one of the major reasons that people couldn’t connect and not yet subconsciously forgiven Nargis Fakhri for that. Q: LG. D: I’ll tell you this. There is a disconnection. If you see a film that is nonsynchronous, out of sync, you’ll watch it for some time. Nine out of ten
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people won’t be able to tell you what is wrong. They will not tell you that the sound is coming early or the picture is coming late. Technicians who work in this field will not be able to tell you. “Something is wrong my friend”, they’ll say. It is at that level. It strikes you but at a very subliminal level, that there is something going wrong which I can’t put my fingers on. You need to find the reason and you can’t find the reason. Q: Hm. D: the next one is defiance. “Forget it, I am not watching this shit!” Q: LG. D: “I am not interested in that damn story”. You know, that is what happens. Q: Even though in post-sync - in the post-production stages - the faces and the dubbed voices are synced together? D: They are perfectly synced together. There is no technical issue, nobody can tell it apart. But for some strange reason they realize this face is not this voice. It is very weird that nine out of ten people will catch up. “Something is wrong here. What he is saying is not sounding correct”. Q: Hm. D: It’s not as that dubbed films are not successful. They are enormously successful. It’s very strange. But I wish to be a part of the process that helps cinema be credible and be coherent rather than fill something in somewhere and walk away with the money that I am going to get, not that it’s a large sum. But in my conscience I should be happy that what I have done is harder and what I’ve earned is hard earned and it is deserving of that payment. Q: Not only the voice, then it comes to - let’s say - sync effects or Foley effects. D: Foleys and sync. See, at a large level what we are doing is we are manipulating emotions. So there’s a dichotomy here. When I say that it has to be credible, it has to be credible. Q: Hm. D: But at the same time, the story has to lead into a direction that the director wants it to go. Q: Hm. D: If he wants it to go to a dreamy space, it has to be done. That is his vision of that story at that moment. If somebody is in pain and he is screaming maybe he cannot put that scream, maybe he’ll mute it under the music but that’s a creative call that the director takes at that time because
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he wants his story to flow in a certain way. Now, these are the devices, which are being used to manipulate audiences’ emotions. Q: Hm. D: This is a lever that we’re using. Make no mistake that we are manipulating them. But at the same time, there’s a very fine line between what can be and what cannot be manipulated. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The results are only known later on. That is the magic of this medium. Q: Coming back to the technology: do you think that the digital technology has helped to revive sync sound in some sense? D: Digital technology has revived cinema sound as it is now. Revival of sync sound is a by-product. Digital technology has helped revive cinema and the process of making films completely. We are reaping the benefits of that as a by-product. Q: Hm. D: The main thing is how well has the digital cinema improved the viewing experience of the audience and the experience of the audio enormously. It has given tools in the hands of people who would not even have considered shooting a movie, filming a story. It has made that medium affordable and made it a popular thing. It has become more technical, fair enough. But everything has become more technical. Getting into a bus and buying a ticket has become more technical. What used to be just one conductor with a punch card and issuing a physical ticket now comes out of a machine, like a ticket vending machine, which is connected to a central server. So, everything is connected. Everything has become more complicated. I’m not judging that. I’m saying that it has put the tools of cinema in the hands of people who are dying to make things, dying to have their voice heard. As a result, everybody can do it and so be it. This is what it should be always. It cannot be an elitist outlook to art or a medium. Q: Absolutely. D: This was like a huge issue. Film is expensive; the cameras are expensive. The whole process had become so top heavy. “Someone will sell film, we will buy it for ten thousand rupees, and then we’ll load it and shoot the film”. All the time, the ten thousand rupees will be ringing in my head. But the moment I switch on the camera, all that is gone. It has truly liberated people, especially the filmmaker. We are mere cogs in the wheel along the way.
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Q: Perhaps that’s the outcome of digital technology as a different kind of recording media. But quality wise what is the specific difference between magnetic recording and digital recording media? D: I’ll tell you. Magnetic recording was ultimately reduced to optical. In technical terms, such as dynamic range, frequency response and the headroom, what we used to get was a very limited response to what we recorded. Q: Hm. D: If I remember my earlier films, we struggled to make one thing heard at a time. It could be only the dialogue. At a critical point if there was no dialogue, we felt that “Ah! Now is the opportunity! Let’s somehow bring this clothes’ rustle into the picture.” Post that, if something happened then you still had a little bit of a space when you could hear a couple of his footsteps – slightly muted but it was there so that we get a feel. You subconsciously established one item at a time because the medium was unable to handle all three things - his voice, the clothes rustle and the shoes - at the same time. So, you’d hear one. If you heard all three then probably you’d miss out on the ambience. It was a very limiting experience. Ultimately we were working on optical, which were what cinema prints were all about. So now that it moved to digital, even the prints have become obsolete. The way I am moving straight from the mix room to the viewing room with simply as waveforms loaded onto a hard disk. That’s it! Q: LG. D: It has become a hugely better experience overall. Sound moved earlier to the digital domain, the picture has come recently to the digital domain. Sound had already gone digital a long time ago with the advent of DAT’s. Q: And in terms of multi-track recording? D: Correct. When it went digital it went multi-track at the same time. There were analog multi-tracks, but they were not portable machines. The real truly digital early multi-tracks became portable. Q: Hm. D: The professional equipment started becoming portable. It started with two tracks, stereo as usual - then four, then six and eight and so on. Q: Coming back to the elements that are included in film soundtrack, I’d like to know about your idea of ambience. What do you think that does it do to cinema in general? D: When I spoke to a mixing engineer, he had a completely different point of view and it really flattered me and frustrated me. I’m talking about
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commercial Hindi cinema. He said a brilliant thing. He said, “The film producer is sitting behind me and constantly asking me to increase the music level” - because he has paid for the music. Q: LG. Hm. D: He feels that is the selling point of the film. “The director says that the dialogue should be heard, or else how will the story go forward? And the sound designer sitting next to me says increase the ambience!” Q: LG. D: He is a south Indian mixing engineer, a good friend of mine. So I told him, “What do we do then?” “Let me give these three faders to each of them”. Q: LG. D: “Let them fight it out amongst themselves,” I said. “What is your take on the ambience?” “Come on my friend, the same traffic and the same birds!” It killed me because ultimately after all the trouble that I go through to put in the appropriate ambience to fill, he reduced it to the fact that it was traffic and birds. That’s not the point. Spoken word is also spoken word in every film. But the way it is spoken, the way it is done – they tell a different story. So, I’m saying the ambience might be the same world over or you know, for a country it might be specific to a state or a region. Q: Hm. D: As long as we are true to that and we are playing with that, it’s fine. I am again willing to accept manipulating audiences’ emotions with ambiences and incidental sounds if room permits than this oppressive push of the music that we are facing. Q: But there is no ambience like that in the 70’s, 80’s. D: Yes, there was no ambience. You see a film like Ghaayal.4 A very big filmmaker made the film. If you’ve seen the second half of Ghaayal, they have completely done away with the footsteps and sync effects. They’ve removed it and kept only the dialogue and the background music. If somebody punches somebody, that “Dhishum” is there. But apart from that, everything else is missing. They have kept this clean of all these “irritating” sounds according to them. “Take them all out, they’ll add nothing here”. LG. So, somebody must have taken that creative call and it’s very unnerving. That’s why I think our cinema got a bad name in the 70’s. We started getting a terrible reputation! Q: LG.
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D: For using the Zoom - how ugly was the usage? Q: LG. D: I mean it’s not an elegant device at any given time. But to use it like we did, it’s just terrible! It’s very spoofy almost, you know. Q: An apology to cinema. D: Yes, it’s very bad. Zoom became something to adjust the frame with. Q: But recent films are involving more ambiences. It’s quite visible (and audible). Many films… D: Yeah, many films. That’s a welcome trend. Basically it requires courage from a director’s point of view. See, what happens is that the pressure is too much on anybody who is directing in India, there’s a lot of money riding on it. Everybody wants a certain failsafe method. Q: Hm. D: And I keep telling them that it is better to have a good ambience track than a bad background music track. A bad background is going to harm your film. A good ambience is going to enhance your film. Even if your background goes missing somewhere, I don’t think people will notice. It’s like an addiction. What has happened is that we hire people to do background and for the want of a better word, they do wall to wall coverage. So whatever you need from it you keep it, and the rest you remove. What happens is that just because it is there, you keep fading in that fader. But if it is missing, then as a director your mind starts working in other directions. May be it’ll be nice if we can hear this bus interior, as it is going along Bombay’s traffic, you know. It will probably help the actor’s mental state a little bit more. If he’s really frustrated and looking for a job and is sitting in a bus, maybe putting music there wouldn’t carry his frustrations to that level as much as maybe that traffic sound and the bus sound would at that moment, if treated properly and harshly. It’s an oppressive city. So you should get that sense of oppression. I’m just giving you a crude example. But that is the way it is. My vote would go in favor of that. But it doesn’t really matter because the mixing room is a political atmosphere where everybody has a vote. Q: Yeah. D: And it’s literally war. Somebody wants something heard and maybe he is right. These three elements - the producer, the director and the sound guy - are constantly at loggerheads with one another. It is very rare that they work within the time limit. When they do, the results are obvious. Q: I’ll just mention what I learnt in Denmark. I was talking to Lars Von Trier’s sound designer Kristian Eidnes Anderson. He told me that before
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going for shooting Antichrist5, Anderson and Lars Von Trier went to the location together, stayed there in a tent for a week and studied the location before going for shoot. D: Hm. Q: That’s the kind of collaboration they do. They kind of work in tandem. D: Yeah, that they do. That kind of tandem work I had done with one Rockstar, where Imtiaz Ali was really painstaking in spite of a couple of wrong decisions that we made about Nargis, her voice and this and that. But he took the call that a rock concert that this man is playing should sound like a rock concert, never mind if the music is by A.R. Rahman. If people are screaming, they should be heard. Q: Hm. D: And, you know, most of the times in a rock concert you hear people’s scream more than the music. I said that element should come through. And in surround sound. Q: Yes. D: You should get the feeling of sitting in a stadium. Q: So you literally recorded the whole performance? D: Yeah. Recorded it. But the problem was that the moment you record the performance, the leak of the performance comes into the applause. Now the performance we are going to do a fresh track-laying, and remove completely and keep only the applause. That kind of filtering is not possible. Q: Hm. D: So, immediately after the shot I had to set up the microphones in such a place and go with the audience again - the whole emotion, without the music. Q: Okay. D: If they were clapping to a tune, switch on that tune. Switch if off… Q: Okay. D: And hope that they keep time. You keep an assistant director or somebody who is wearing headphones and has a cue on the headset. Q: Hm. Okay. D: But this process is painstaking. When we ran through the film, a lot of locations were not under our control. When we ran through the film again and again we had a session of about ten days of only crowds in which I kept a layer of crowd, which sang in tune with the song. I can’t have
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audience singing out of tune. It’s a good song after all. If you sang “aaaa” the audience would repeat it, you know. So I had one layer of the audience, which was actually the chorus singers who came to me as a crowd. Q: Okay. D: They did without music, with only this cue they recorded after his voice. Q: Okay. D: So they were more or less in tune. Okay, not too much in tune. Then it would have been caught out as music. You do that and then you have another layer, which is slightly more out of tune. Regular guys like you and me who cannot sing, you give them headphones. Q: Hm. D: And then the third section was just a general cheering, and the whole crowd. So each song took three layers to do and hence it took a long time to finish. Imtiaz was extremely patient throughout the process. He understood what required to be done and he supported me right through it. That was a good experience. I am saying that kind of collaboration is sometimes possible with the director. Sometimes it’s not. Q: Coming back to technology again, and multi-channel surround sound. D: Hm. Q: Earlier films were mono; then few films were made in stereo and then Dolby came with noise reduction and more standardizing stereo; then surround came. D: Correct. Q: How do you see this transformation from mono to a bit of stereo and then surround sound? D: A relatively short period in the history of cinema (stereo). What happened was that we were still struggling with the technicalities of the process at the time when the changeover was happening. By the time we move to the next, Dolby SR and one more improvement, 5.1 then 7.1, and now Atmos. This improvement happened relatively quickly in my career, you know. I’ve seen all three stages. Track-laying in the sense that laying of ambiences and laying of voices became more and more complex. The post-production work started being done in computers simultaneously. What used to be physically done by tape or by editing or cutting tape, or something like that, now started being done digitally. Then the number of tracks on the digital machines started proliferating like there was no
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tomorrow because with the increase of computing speed, it’s a very sharp curve, if you see the process of evolution of computers. It’s a very sharp curve and we are following that. Basically, we are interlinked completely to the microprocessor and the computer industry. Faster they process the audio; they process the data. Audio also gets processed back that much quickly. Q: Yeah. D: So the rise is analogous to the computer industry. Absolutely! My first computer was 8GB and I was really happy. Nobody even looks at 8GB anymore. It’s in a pen drive now! Q: LG. D: That is the difference. My phone has more computing power now than my computer had when I started! So I am saying, a day will come when I will pull out my phone and say, “Sound ready!” Q: LG. D: That’s not far off, you know! LG Q: Yes, of course. Music composition is already done on iPhones. Composers are using iPhones for composing. D: Composing, hm. Q: But this expansion of space in terms of channels - how do you see it? D: It’s good. I feel that it gives me better fidelity, a real life experience. If I watch a race film, you know, ideally a car race film, which is very sound heavy like Rush.6 It’s beautiful to watch in surround sound and to watch in multiple channels. Once you watch that you wouldn’t even be able to watch it on your computer screen or on your laptop. That’s because the whole joy of that film is the way you feel the proximity to the cars. Our cinema experience has now become more and more reflective of that expanded space. So it’s wonderful to have more channels – the more the merrier. I am all for it. I am just saying that more channels or whatever you’re doing is okay, but just don’t make it gimmicky. If you make it gimmicky, if that’s ultimately what you are using it for, it’s not going to work. If it draws attention to itself, then the whole experience will collapse on its own head. Q: Yeah. But how to make a balance if you’re so distracted? D: I’ll tell you. The best sound is something that is never noticed. The best picture, the best camerawork, best story are the ones which don’t make you feel out of it, when it’s being narrated you’re a part of it. The moment you feel out of it, you’ve already lost the battle.
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Q: LG. It’s a very Hollywood type of approach that the technicalities, the craftsmanship should be invisible. D: Yes. I completely believe in this. I mean, in most of the cinemas the craft is always subliminal. Even the new wave cinema never pointed to its craft, except maybe a Brechtian technique of, you know, referring to the audience. But that was done for a purpose to break the audience out of that shell. Q: Hm. D: The alienation technique, you know. But that was for a purpose. Even then, they would leave you to the devices of the cinema. I completely buy the fact that – what are we emulating? We are trying to show a story and we want to get into that story. So it should remain that. That spell should not be broken. In fact, the interval breaks the spell. Q: LG. D: That’s my problem. If that’s too long, the interval actually breaks the spell! Q: Yes. Some theorists have argued that Indian cinema is cinema of interruptions. Every time there is some sort of culmination happening – D: There is a song or something. Q: Or interval. D: Yeah, I never understood that. Song is something that you might say is culturally very acceptable to our audiences, that song is there everywhere in every aspect of our lives. But it’s never that integrated with our lives ourselves so much that storytelling has to have a song. That’s a very weird concept. That is something I think the westerners have not yet accepted. They find that very distracting and disturbing. Q: Yeah. Coming back maybe again to sync sound - it provides more information about the space where D: Correct, it does. It’s more true to the space, yeah absolutely. Q: But then, sound mixers or designers clean the voice. When they clean the voice, some of the information is lost. Isn’t it? D: No. This cleaning process, or the process of any kind of manipulation of that recorded track, has to be done with a great deal of judgment. It cannot be a standard process. It is not that I put in my audio here and I get clean dialogue there. That defeats the purpose, completely. What am I doing? Is it possible to, suppose, whisper “I love you” into a girl’s ears in a local train, and still be audible to an audience of 400 people. Is it
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possible? I am saying that it is not possible. Okay? Is it possible to see somebody in the dark? It’s not. Q: Yes, that’s not possible. D: But we make it possible in cinema by creating an artificial darkness and by lighting up that person in such a way so that it appears that he is in darkness. The same thing goes for this. It appears that he is sitting in a crowded local and whispering. Again, the question is of the balance. How credible or how well balanced is your approach? Is the train noise too low for a crowded train? Q: Yeah. D: Is the train noise too high that I can’t hear him saying this to her? Is it too dark so that I can’t see the fellow? Remember Rambo7 when it came? We saw it on VHS and couldn’t make out a thing in the second half. It was completely dark. First Blood8 - we couldn’t see anything. Only when he lit that match inside that cave that we went, “OH!” (Expression of exclamation) Sylvester Stallone is sitting in a cave. The whole of second half was almost lost on us because we watched it on VHS. Q: Yeah. D: So this is the thing. Cleaning is a tool. How well you use it and how appropriately you use it is what is bothering you in a particular location. Is this ambience appropriate for this? As long as it is appropriate… I shot a film called Gundey 9 in Kolkata, at the Maniktala fish market. In the Maniktala fish market you can’t afford to have actors whispering to one another saying whatever sweet nothings. So there my aim is to get the – forget the dialogue – I do not want that fishmonger behind the main actor. He is selling fish to that lady. I want his dialogue. Q: Okay. LG. Yeah. D: That should be clear. This I can replace. Q: Yes. D: In a manner that it will never be seen as being replaced. That is my specialty. So leave me to do that. But I won’t get that fishmonger again in Bombay. With all my resources I will still not be able to get that man who speaks in that hoarse voice, (attempts to emulate the voice) like that, you know. I can’t get him. Q: LG. Yeah. D: So my job is to record all others perfectly who are priceless, but are going to be unavailable to me later. That is what I did. I put mics in every corner of that market and recorded everybody on multi-track.
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Q: Definition of noise in cinema can vary… D: It varies from person to person. It’s very subjective. A lot of people find everything noise. I am asking is it appropriate to the scene? If it is appropriate to the scene, I’ll accept it. And audience will also accept it. Like in Syriana 10 there is this classic scene of this man, the informant talking to, I think it is Clooney only, and telling him about something and he chooses a location where the waves are crashing onto the wall, on a wall like a jetty. He chooses that location so that they cannot be spied upon. So if you understand the context and you understand the auditory space that they are in, the noise of the waves is acceptable to the extent that you’ll have to strain to hear his lines - that is the aim. Q: Yes. D: I would have lost that scene; they would have lost that scene if they had dubbed it clean and removed all the sense of waves and just kept a feeling that there are some waves crashing on this. No! The idea is that it should overpower his dialogue. He has come to that place so that he cannot be spied upon. And it is being shot with a camera angle, which is really long, long shot and they are like specs in the distance and you’re straining to her his voice. It’s a wonderful scene. See it once. Q: In which film? D: Syriana. George Clooney’s film. Q: Okay, yes. D: About the politics of oil. Q: Hm. D: Nicely done film. You’ll struggle to recognize George Clooney. Q: LG. D: Yeah. That’s a wonderful quality that some actors have. Q: Now coming to ambience again: in multi-channel, more tracks are involved, more tools you have to use ambience and other tracks. D: Yeah. Q: So when ambience is used in mono, even though there is a major lack of ambience in the dubbing era of cinema - when we come to multichannel sound or surround sound: 5.1, 7.1 and Atmos, you can use a lot of ambience. D: Correct. A lot more. Q: Yeah. But how can you do that in terms of enveloping the audience?
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D: I’ll tell you. What happens is that now visually your whole field has opened up. So you can feed something on the left, you can feed something on the right. You can afford to keep something behind, though not too obvious. But if somebody went out of frame and closed the door and it appeared in the right rear or the left rear, it would still be accepted. That kind of freedom was not available because there were only these speakers at the front and they had to either deliver the dialogue or these effects. So now we have opened out the medium, as a result of which you can individually treat sections of the screen and assign audio to sections of the speakers corresponding to that physical space. That is two-dimensional. But it is giving you a space of three dimensions by the way it is shot. I’m not talking about 3D films. I’m talking about normal 2D cinema. You can follow the space that sub-consciously it projects. Q: But one thing, about the off-screen space – D: Hm. Q: Before surround, there was stereo for a bit of time, or mono with primarily screen oriented sonic space. D: Mono. Q: Sound was always behind the screen. So it was connected to the visual. D: Correct. Q: There was no off-screen space as such. D: No. None. We were very limited. Q: But then it was expanding a bit, like in stereo mix we are going to the corner of the screen. But when we come to more surround - expanded surround - we expand the space itself to include more off-screen space. How does a sound designer manage to keep the attention to the screen or on the narrative while handling those off-screen spaces? There is major chance of audience becoming distracted. D: Left, right, yeah I understand. We follow actually a standard rule of thumb that almost always the dialogue is coming from up front. Q: Yes. D: Okay? But the reverberations of that dialogue are always spread in whichever direction we desire, whichever part of the screen that artist is seen. So what happens that there is a feeling that though maybe he is on the left side, there’s a feel that he may be on the right side. By simply moving the space and not necessarily his direct sound wave but the reflected sound waves, if you can place them in such a manner, it gives
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you a sense of that space. It still is true without distracting. This, I am talking about the dialogues. Q: Yeah. D: Now, with these dialogues coming from the main speakers, your other speakers have become free to have ambiences. But there’s always a rule of thumb that this dialogue is your story carrier, unless, of course, if there is none at that point. Thus, the effects have to be secondary. So they are sufficiently muted in comparison to the dialogues such that the balance is achieved. That is the whole mixing process where we don’t overwhelm the audience with this surround. Q: Hm. D: It should hardly be noticed. It should always give a feeling of the space without actually drawing attention to itself. Q: Yeah. But in that sense Atmos or the Auro 3-D… D: The mixes have become very tough; they have become difficult processes. The judgment involved has become more and more sharp and more and more fine, you know, in terms of the balance that has to be achieved correctly. But it tends to go wrong. It does go wrong a lot of times. I am not denying that. Q: Two final questions. One is: In Europe I see a lot of people, younger people generally, are watching and listening to films on smaller devices. Like iPad, iPhone, etc. So, I am very curious… D: Correct, I completely understood. Q: In India there is an immense amount of mobile users. D: Correct. Q: And at one point of time cinema will be watched mostly on mobile phones, maybe with headphones. At the same time, mixing is becoming more and more complicated; more and more complex sounds are involved and created - the many layers of ambience, for example. How will a sound designer or a sound technician or a sound person think or adapt to that particular transformation? How will you mix your feature films for smaller devices? D: I understand. See, the saree is “Benarasi”, which takes years to make. Q: Hm. D: At the same time there will be chiffon, which is printed and which is made in a mill. Both are serving the same purpose. Q: Yeah.
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D: So I am saying that there is a mix, and for these devices there is something that we call a down mix. It doesn’t mean anything derogatory. It just means that a down mix is supposed to accommodate most of the stuff that you’ve put in your main program without compromising too much on the main story because it is now limited to his headphone or the two small speakers, or whatever the device he might be using. So, there is now a whole industry - not an industry but there is a whole process in place at the very mix stage - which caters to things like, “Now this is going to become a ringtone.” So what am I supposed to make? This song is going to become a ringtone. What am I supposed to do? I am supposed to convert it into a format that is acceptable on a phone and put it on the net for download. Okay? A classic example. Q: Hm. D: I can make a CD. CD is a wonderful stereo mix of the song. But ringtone is not that. Q: Yeah. D: It’s a down mix of that song which is available as a ringtone because of ease of use. But it no way detracts from the main product which itself is the song. The same is the case with cinema. If you choose to watch it in theater – I’m sure you won’t enjoy Avatar11 on a mobile phone. Q: LG. D: There is a certain experience that has to be – it’s a conscious decision. Watching cinema is also a conscious social decision that you choose to sit with three hundred unknown people in an enclosed space hoping to enjoy whatever is being put out in front of you. There is a certain sense of giving yourself up to something that is been transmitted to you. It’s not a roaming around in the personal space, which a Walkman is. Okay, maybe a Walkman is a crude example. Let’s say a headphone. It’s like eliminating the surround and I am in my own space. There are two different aspects. Watching it in the theater, I think you’re being more receptive. Here you are being more exclusive. You want to avoid as many people as possible. Q: Yeah. D: Correct? So the two mixes have to culturally reflect this. Q: Yeah. So will you think of a different kind of mix for that? D: Yes it is a different mix and it is a compromise. Always. Whatever be the range of the medium, my mix will always be compromised whether it’s being heard on smaller speakers, tinier speakers, because it is meant for a big theater. But how much of that fidelity I can maintain in a smaller set-up is my skill as a mixing engineer.
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Q: Yeah. And finally I would like to ask: when you not only mix, when you go for sync sound recording, then you come back to a studio to mix it and give a final output, do you think of the audience? How is your relationship to the audience? D: I always put myself in the audiences’ chair. Q: Okay. D: Always. Right from the script writing level, I put myself in the audiences’ rank. I’m one who is thinking, “Does this dialogue make any sense to them?” Forget what I’ve recorded, my recording is secondary. Is the content sensible? Is what is being said necessary? If I find that it is not necessary, I am the first one to tell that to the director. “I think it is been done and dusted. I think now it is time to move on. He has already said this in this part of the film.” So scriptwise, forget my dialogue. I am just a tool. Is it necessary? My whole thing is what the audience is getting out of this now. Q: Yeah. D: I’ll always consider that. The moment there is a disconnection, I know that the repercussions will be fatal for the film. Q: So, in that sense, do you like to please the audience? Do you like to entertain the audience? D: No. The story should be conveyed. There’s a lot of disturbing visuals and disturbing sound, people are screaming and there’s blood spurting. That’s not pleasing, that is disturbing. Whatever the story is, I must convey that to the audience and they must get it. I am not saying it would be pleasant or unpleasant. It might be thought-provoking; it might not be so at all. It might be just a song and dance routine. But they should enjoy that song also. They should feel the pulse of the dance. Q: But the sense of the place - to be specific - would you like to give him or her a sense of the place where the film is based? D: Yes, absolutely. If it is shot in Chhattisgarh, I have to make sure that I get the essence of Chhattisgarh. I am not putting a caption there saying they are in Chhattisgarh. Q: LG. D: How can you do that? Q: Using which tool will you do that? D: There has to be some sound, and some visual of course, which is area specific. But sound has to play a part. See, we can’t put local traffic when we shoot abroad. Even if it is only traffic, I have to record for a movie, I
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would rather go out and do it abroad. It’s a huge cost to the producer. But I am saying that it is essential for the film. That’s why I said take a recording engineer along with you when you shoot a film, for Christ’s sake, so that at least you can get me the appropriate ambiences of that space. Whatever be your budget constraints, I’m sure an ST bus stand is something that I cannot re-create. Q: Yes. D: A State Transport bus stand is something I cannot re-create inside a studio. It’s virtually impossible. An ST bus stand is an ST bus stand and I must get that space in the sense of that space with the people, the way they speak, the kinds of sounds you hear, the “Chai-wallah” (tea vendors), the people spitting, you must hear that. People getting off the bus, straightening their bags, talking nonsense, discussing other schedule, bus schedule. You must hear all that. Otherwise the sense of that space is never going to come through. Q: If that sense of space or place is not there? D: There’ll be a huge disconnect. It’ll be like a film shot on a set which has no reality left to it. There’ll be a huge sense of disconnect. I am not saying most films that have disconnection are unsuccessful or successful, I am not discussing that. But what I prefer is to have some kind of a connect. I saw this (film) Aankhon Dekhi. 12 I loved the film. Rajat Kapoor’s film. He is a lone warrior. He’s been at it for so long - producing his own stuff, releasing his own stuff and raising money for the next one. Shooting and releasing without compromise, which I think is great. It speaks volumes of somebody’s personal commitment to tell that story, which is essential. It is the crux of creativity. If a painter started painting everybody would become like a wall painter yaar (friend). That’s not the point. He paints what he likes. The audience chooses to like that because they see something in it. Q: Would you like to generally make a comment or a statement about your work, and the kind of work you have been doing, or the kind of work you would like to do? D: I feel that culturally we must evolve from this culture of loudness that we are getting into. Q: Absolutely. D: More speakers do not make more volume. Okay, it means a sense of space but it doesn’t mean overwhelming sense of volume. I am paying for more speakers for Dolby licensing. It doesn’t mean that my program has to be louder. Loudness does not attract attention. Beyond a point loudness
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fails to serve its purpose, it’s counter-productive. The difference between our mixes and the western mixes is entirely cultural. We keep the dialogues at a certain level and we keep the music underneath that at a certain level, which is unacceptable in any part of the world. In large parts of the world, it’s unacceptable. As for me, I wish to bridge this gap, not educate our audience. Maybe even if it means doing two mixes for two different regions keeping the perspectives and, you know, sensibilities in mind. But my work has to reflect what the audience expectations are. They have to be connected to the story whether it’s India or whether we are going to the U.S. I would prefer a mix that is of a different sensibility. Q: Yeah. D: There is no ego involved in it. You cannot have ego in creativity like, “this is mine - I have done it.” The director has done it. You are adding to it. We must always remember that. Q: But it is also true that a new breed of sound designers, who have come from film schools, have raised the bar; they have struggled hard to be heard. D: They need not be only from the film school. Q: Okay. D: I am saying that directors who have come from – non-film school directors… You know Sujoy Ghosh of Kahaani?13 Q: Yes. D: They are not schooled filmmakers; a lot of them are Ad filmmakers. A lot of them have never studied cinema. Some of them are actors who have picked up the camera. There is no hard and fast rule in creativity. Anybody can be a singer, if he has it in him. They can become a singer, and if they sing well they will be accepted. Q: But what is then the reason for the better quality of sound? D: No, overall audience awareness has improved. It has hugely improved. What has happened is that even multimedia or normal computer speakers have become of a higher caliber and quality. A headphone from a phone is giving you better quality than you ever got before. So, the outputs and the tools in people’s hands have become much more sophisticated. Hence they expect better quality. That has raised the bar by itself. Q: Yes. D: At the same time, it is showing up glaring errors as well, if any. LG. Q: So we can call it a day at that note. D: Okay.
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Duration: 01:13:48 Name Abbreviations: Dileep Subramaniam– D; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay– Q Other Abbreviations: Laughter - LG 2 Hum Tum (Me and You, Kunal Kohli, 2004) 3 Rockstar (Imtiaz Ali, 2011) 4 Ghayal (Wounded, Rajkumar Santoshi, 1990) 5 Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009) 6 Rush (Ron Howard, 2013) 7 Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, 2008) 8 First Blood (Ted Kotcheff 1982) 9 Gunday (Outlaws, Ali Abbas Zafar, 2014) 10 Syriana (Stephen Gaghan 2005) 11 Avatar (James Cameron 2009) 12 Ankhon Dekhi (Through My Own Eyes, Rajat Kapoor, 2014) 13 Kahaani (Story, Sujoy Ghosh, 2012)
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Q: Did you say that you mixed Lagaan2 in mono? N: Yes, Lagaan was the first film, well not the first film, which I did. But it was the first and only one for which I started the mix in mono and then spread it out to Dolby Stereo and 5.1. I think by that time Dolby and DTS was so well entrenched into the Indian theatres that the need for mono became less prevalent. Still, there was a lot - like for Lagaan we used to go and listen to it at a place that was two hours’ drive away from Chennai in the middle of nowhere, which had hundred fans in the screening, inside the theater. Aamir’s whole thing was, “No, no you won’t hear the dialogues, that’s why make it sharper.” It used to sound terrible - I mean mono films had that particular honky sound. That was because of the equalization, which was applied to the speakers. I could say, “No man this sounds terrible!” because I had come from a music background and it was just way too sharp and aggressive for me. And Aamir would say, “No! You won’t hear anything!” and I said, “Let me do it my way and then if we can’t hear anything…” So, we did and he said, “Oh! You can hear everything!” I said “Yeah! There’s no reason why you guys should make it so sharp that it literally hurts the ears.” Even in the 5.1 mix, there were a lot of times when he’d say, “No, trust me, this has to be louder,” and I’d say like, “no, it doesn’t need to be. I mean just let the dynamics be in space, you know.” Again, thankfully that happened because I came from a music background. I could understand dynamics and try and introduce them to something, which they would fight as a natural instinct. I don’t get to the case where I will say, “Okay, if that’s the way you want it, I’d like walk out and say, “Take my name off the front credits.” And he’d be like, “What the fuck! This is the first film this guy is doing and he’s asking to take his name off the front credits! What’s wrong with him?” LG. “Maybe he’s got something which we can’t figure out.” I guess it has come full circle because on Bhaag Milkha.3 Again, the mixing engineer wasn’t there throughout the whole thing and so I ended up doing a lot of the mix myself. I think it’s a film - since I sat at the board - it again had the
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dynamics, which were missing because now they’re so used to keeping it loud because producers want it. Q: Hm. N: That way. And it’s crazy, because it’s just way too loud. Hollywood used to be more dynamic and quieter. They’ve also gone really loud now. So that’s an argument, which I can’t use anymore with them. But the thing is, I mean, the Dolby was meant to be where you mixed it at seven, and it would play at seven. Unfortunately everyone’s now playing in it 4½ or 5 because in the multiplexes the walls are so thin that you’ll hear bleed in the next room. This aggressive mixing has ensured that it’s all gone out of the window. But yeah, it’s come a long way from mono to, I mean like— Lagaan was recorded on two DAT machines, now you’ve hard disk recorders. I remember going to an exhibition in England, and seeing this. They were for the first time… it was literally in a shoebox… they hadn’t even got it together, but I said, “This is the future!” Q: Hm. N: I put down a down-payment of it and I got the machine when we were shooting in Australia for Dil Chahta Hai4, which was way back and none of the Aussie guys had it. In fact, someone rented it from me I think and I made more money on that one week of rental than what they were willing to pay me for using it for the whole film. LG. But yeah, it became pretty standard soon. Now of course you have – 5.1 happened, and then 7.1 happened - which I didn’t really think work for me. Then you have Dolby Atmos, which was amazing to use. But again, I think they’ve brought it out a little too early. I’m looking forward to seeing what Auro does. Its codecs are really good, how he’s beaten the whole thing of comb filtering and all that is pretty interesting. To have that thing where it’s an immersive experience, as a sound designer it’s great because I can take the audience to a place where I want to take them. One of the issues over here is that they never have money for post in any case. With that, you’re going to need more time. And they’re not going to give it to you. It’s more time and money versus doing your art the way you want to. It’s going to be difficult. Let’s see! Hopefully! Q: In terms of recording media, such as magnetic, I think you also did magnetic recording, right? N: Well, I haven’t done optical, but yes, I was on the magnetic. In my early days, I’ve recorded more than a couple of commercials on Nagra. But in India, there wasn’t much of this culture of location sound. So we never went into the stereo Nagras and things. But mixing to two, that was pretty similar, you know. It was kind of a parallel thing because it was tape
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based. Lagaan was hell on that because of the temperature difference. In a single day – if it were a split day, i.e. a day-night shoot - it would drop from 50 degrees in the day to 4 degrees at night. So the machines used to freak out. At lunch, we used to actually have cars, with the AC’s running in there. The camera would go into one and the two DAT machines would go on to the other. Just to keep them cool. I’d have cloth, with Malmal (cloth fabric). You could just put these wet things over it, and you could see the heat rising from it. It also then became a thing of, “Wait a second! If we do this then the condensation is gonna play hell with the electronics.” Lagaan, I mean, it was on just that one film where my hair went white! Dealing with simple things like - the actors had no clothing. So I couldn’t have radio microphones on them. Thus, everything had to be boomed. I also just like the sound of booms better. Also, when I could wire them up, I would get strange things happening in that sand over there. An actor would be talking, and it would be fine. Then, he changed his track a little bit and bang! Sand would be getting in his…. It took me a while to figure it out but it was – basically there was just so much iron ore in the ground that it was creating a really RF interference. Q: Hm. N: It was hell, you know. LG. It was like, Aamir would say, “What the hell! I spoke the same line and how is the last take? Okay?” LG. I would say, “No idea!” I mean it was the only thing possible then. But it took a while to get to that conclusion, you know. That was quite a challenge on that film. The landscape was really harsh. But going back to it, yeah, so tape was – magnetic recordings used to happen, I mean the field of music, which I’d come from, was all still on tape. I think at that time from tape we moved on to something called an ADAT system, which was basically VHS tape but digital. Lot of people hated it. But I think for the price what it did - it gave us a lot of opportunity to edit and slip things in, you know. You could shift dialogues up and down to try and lift their voice issues with sync. Time code was a whole game changer because no one understood what it did. The early editors had no clue of what to do with it. They still don’t. I have just finished shooting The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.5 On that, the DIT guy was just unbelievable because Fox would want the rushes twice a day, lunch and dinner. It was just such a relief and a blessing to be, you know, have things where you could lock the cameras to the machine. I got a letter from the Editor saying, “We haven’t called the thing”. And I said, “Wake up!” “Now! We’re in space these days compared to if that was a Nagra thing, you know. There is no need for it, I mean, why waste even paper. I refuse to give sound now. I just burn a pdf file along with the thing on the drive, you know. She said, “I can’t hear the
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day being called out.” So I said, “It’s listed as D 5, so that means Day 5.” It’s not rocket science. LG. Q: LG. N: It’s been a change - it’s definitely been one. I think the thing with using digital recorder – you still do a mix of booms on one channel, radios on the second - and then as many isolation tracks as you can to give them more of a chance in edit. But yeah, I mean, from that to Digital Audio workstations has been such a huge jump. It’s bad news in a way because now, since directors have gotten used to it, they would want anything up to 600/700-channels, which is a cluster to mix. I’ve actually seen film school students send me their projects where they’re working with 300 tracks, each thing on a separate track and I was saying, “Why are you wasting this thing!” It makes no sense because it just makes life so much more difficult at the end of it. Even if you’re doing a 5.1 mix, you don’t really need that much unless it’s an action film or something. So I think technology - it’s been great - but it’s also like been a pain in the ass at times. I’ve had the director say, “I want that red box”, which we used to have, because then I can make it sharp and it sounds correct. I’ve actually put up that red box and not even switched it in and said, “Yeah, now see what a difference it is.” And he would just say, “Absolutely.” There has been no change in what you do at all. It’s just something which they feel that they know, that makes it better, whatever. Q: In terms of the texture – in digital recording it’s a different kind of texture, such as the layers of low frequencies that are captured more elaborately. What do you think about that texture? Is it different from the optical or magnetic recordings of the mono era? N: Yeah, I remember getting a Cooper mixer, which was specked out at 200K on the top end. The first time I used it, I said, “What is all the aaaa which I’m hearing”. It was just the cleanliness, which I hadn’t heard. Even in microphones now, you’re getting that extended range and things. So it does give you a lot more. Still, for certain things like guns and all, I like to use a tape machine because the transience and what analogue compression does to it, is completely different from what digital does. You just do not get the same warmth. So, in a way I guess I am lucky because I came from a generation of analogue whereas the kids now have no clue about it. They’ve never used it. They don’t know what it sounds like. They have no idea how sweet that third order harmonic distortion is, what it does. I mean they’ll say, “Oh! That sounds nice.” But they have no clue why. They’ve no idea what it’s like putting in onto tape, over-biasing the tape, using that stuff. It’s sad. It just died out so quickly that it’s just so difficult. But I
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think analogue will slowly make a little comeback in certain areas. In music for sure, because they still – that fatness of 70’s, 80’s, 90’s when they were using tape and without Dolby SR, just running at 30 and over biased - that just added a certain sweetness to it. You’ve got plug-ins now but unless you’ve heard them how are you going to emulate it? So the kids today have no clue what they are, you know! Q: Hm, absolutely. N: So that sweetness is gone. Digital makes sound a lot more sterile. But that’s the thing. I like to smear it up so that it doesn’t, and make it sweeter. Q: I’d like to ask you about the ambience. Ambience is one particular layer I’m very interested in because it has an under-rated importance in cinema. N: Yeah. Q: Ideally speaking. N: Well, you know what, in this country ambience is a tricky thing. Wherever you go you’re gonna hear freaking trains, train horns, traffic. That’s something people in the West don’t understand - how loud India is - you know. That’s just because it’s so loud out there. I mean if you stop and listen, you’ll hear traffic, wherever you are. We’ll hear crows wherever we are. So there are times in a movie when I’m doing sound designing, it’s also about taking them to a fantasyland. Typical Bollywood is pure fantasy. So for that actually where do I want to take my audience? What do I want them to believe? I love using silence. I think it’s a very powerful sound. Even ambiences, what I’ll do is - sometimes if there are night crickets on the scene at night and if there’s score in the thing, I’ve done things where I’ve actually pitched the crickets to the score and used it just to duck in and out - just a little bed where the music is doing the emotional thing for you, you know. Because it’s in the same key and not really aware but it makes a sense of familiarity, which keeps your audience feel like “Okay it’s night and whatever.” There are times when I wanted to be into what the music is doing. Then I’ll radically change the pitch so that it gets to where I can irritate you with it or I can make you just very comfortable with it. It depends on the film. I mean it depends on what the director wants and how I’m interpreting his vision and trying to tell my story with sound. Q: Hm. N: I don’t know if you’ve seen the film called Taare Zameen Par.6 But I got to that place two weeks before we started shooting. And I’ve actually recorded the kids in school, you know. I think that probably some of my
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best work is on that film. I got no nominations for it, which was perfect. They didn’t even get the fact that the sound had you so locked into the film that you didn’t even think about anything except the picture. It is actually the greatest tribute you could get. But at the same time you want to get recognized for your work and you’re saying, “What the hell happened over there?” Not even one nomination. Lagaan - same story. No nominations except for the National Award. But I think Lagaan going to the Academy Awards was a huge thing because then the people over here said, “Wait a minute! Unless it’s sync sound they won’t accept our film.” For some strange reasons, someone started this rubbish and ever since it’s there in a big way! But I’m glad because Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai were the first two commercial films, which were made with location sync sound. I’ve actually been in to Ritesh’s, the producer of Dil Chahta Hai’s office, and had another director tell me, “Oh! The sync sound doesn’t work.” I said, “Why do you say that?” and he said, “Well. I met the guy from Lagaan and they dubbed 90 percent of the film.” I just looked at him - he is a director who should go unnamed - and I really said, “You fat fuck!” Q: LG. N: To begin with, I did Lagaan and I’ve never met you. All your films are just fucking rip offs in any case, you know, of foreign films. So, what the fuck are you talking about? Q: LG. N: In Lagaan, I think we dubbed only two minutes and forty-three seconds out of the three hour and forty minutes, which was fucking great considering that we had Indian Air Force all around us, going up our ass. The MiG 21’s would come and buzz us and we couldn’t roll. Those places are loud, and since it was open desert landscape, the sound would go on forever for at least a minute and a half or two minutes. People like Karan and all told Aamir that sync sound doesn’t work and things like that. During Dil Chahta Hai I remember when, I hope this you can’t obviously think, but Karan Johar coming to me and saying, “Oh Nakul, fab job! I could actually hear all the dialogues.” I was ready to take a punch at him, and Farhan just pushed me out saying, “Nakul don’t. You will work with him some day. LG. Just calm down!” and I said, “What the fuck does he mean by that?” They had complete misconception, you know. No clue about sound. They still do not give enough weight to sound in this country. Some of the younger guys do. But old school people - no. They are still like, “Yeah whatever. You know do whatever you want with it. It doesn’t matter.” They still think it’s the star power that makes the film and not the
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script, you know, not the craft as such. But we’ve been fighting that change. I guess I’ll continue the fight till – Q: Yes. Like in Dil Chahta Hai, the first time we hear a room tone, where they’re sitting inside. For example in the indoor sequences we hear the room tones, buzz – electrical hum. N: Uh-hm. Q: That was the first time in Indian cinema. Did you deliberately…? N: It was just that the lights were noisy and things and we didn’t have material to clean it up like we do now. So, we could only do that much with it. The hospital sequences I did add sound to, just to smoothen them out. The hospital things were shot on Ganpati day with the “Visarjan” going outside and we couldn’t hear anything. So we had to loop it. Q: Hm. N: I mean, I remember getting there and I said, “Guys, you do realize that today is ‘Visarjan’ day and you know why are we shooting this scene where everyone is introspecting and quiet?” LG. It was just different. I remember getting the actors to speak over the music in the club sequence in DCH (Dil Chahta Hai), with Koi Kahe (song) playing, and they were whispering. Then I said, “Guys”. I went up to Farhan and I said that, “Dude you know what, to me their body language is wrong. When you’re in a club you’re leaning over to someone and you’re speaking out above the music.” Q: Hm. N: “I’m not seeing that.” Then we tried a couple of takes, and they refused to do it. I said, “What do we do?” He said, “I see your point, and yeah if you’re doing this, let’s try and change it.” I said, “Okay. Place yourself. In the middle of this I’m going to suddenly play the music,” and that’s what I did. I started playing the song. They said, “What the fuck, I can’t hear myself. What are you doing?” I said, “Exactly! This is what is going to go on in the background.” “We never thought about it like that!” So I said, “Right. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to roll sound, but we play the music first and once Farhan Akhtar thinks your body language is right we’re gonna cut the music and then you continue doing it that way.” They just got thrown. They kept saying, “We can’t be shouting!” Suddenly in the silence they just freeze, you know, “This is too loud.” And I said, “But guys, that’s the whole idea of this exercise has been that.” These guys didn’t want to do sync. Akshay and Saif. Q: Hm.
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N: At the kickoff party at Farhan’s place, they said, “No we’re not doing this. We’ll dub it.” Aamir luckily had just finished doing Lagaan. So he said “listen to it tomorrow”. And he said, “How do I convince them?” So I said, “Okay, we’ll shoot it and what I’m gonna do is I’ll give them a stereo reference of it. So I’m gonna have three booms instead of two booms. Left, Right, Center kind of follow the actors and things, and then tail off and let it come in here, let the middle boom pick it up.” Then on the muharat thing we did put a little short clip, which I recorded, and they came and said, “Wow! You can hear everything on this!” Q: LG. N: I looked at them and said, “Besides you guys are smaller than me. So what the fuck did you say you’re going to do me?” LG. But it’s the same thing. Anil Mehta was the DOP on Lagaan. I remember him coming to me on the second or the third day, where we had horses coming in and stuff. I had put out mics and you know, he’s saying, “Let me hear what’s all this digital nonsense and thing.” Again, he put on the headphones and kept on shouting, “No, no, play it. I don’t want to hear what’s live!” I said, “But I’m playing it! Do you see any horses running?” and he said, “What?” two-three times. Then I said, “What is your problem?” he said, “where is the hiss from the Nagra? I can’t hear the hiss.” Q: LG. N: He said, “This is very clean!” LG. So I said, “Yes.” He said, “Oh my god! This will be completely different.” To him it was how is this sound going to transform his picture. And he said, “It’s so clear that I can hear every little bit of sand. My God, the possibilities!” I said, “Exactly.” So we’ve just finished a film together after Lagaan. A small film called Finding Fanny.7 The other day, we were watching it as a rough thing and he said, “Oh you should put this sound there!” LG. I said, “Right. Now you do sound also!” LG. But it’s great because it started getting them to think. That’s what digital has done. You know the clarity of it has made people a lot more aware. Visually they’ve realized that sound can help you and back you up, if it’s a weak thing. Like, I’ve been told by someone that this scene you’ll have to do something to help me out, you know. So you do use ambiences to set a mood and tones. Q: Hm. N: Room tones and stuff - I don’t think Bollywood had heard before. Q: No. N: They had no clue about it. It was just noise which was prevalent there. Well, now with 5.1 and systems being as good as there, when you hear
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Hollywood films with HMI whine on them and boost the noises, and he’s saying, “Okay, if they’re not breathing,” there’s something to it because, there I think the director is more intent on the performance, and here the directors are more intent on the spoken word being grammatically correct. I mean, think about it. How many people talk to their people doing films? Q: LG. N: In real life? Very, very few. Q: Hm. N: You know what I mean? Q: Hm. N: It’s just non-existent. But that’s why I do the whole new wave of cinema, which is actually not new wave or whatever. It’s just like people with a little bit more sensibility are, you know, practicing their craft. Q: What in your opinion is the primary difference in the quality of sound between dubbed sound and sync sound recording? N: I think it’s very difficult to get the performance right again in dubbing. To me, the interaction and the timing of bouncing off with another actor is something you cannot duplicate in a sterile room with a screen and a microphone and no one else, six months or eight months after you’ve shot the film. You’re not even in the same headspace. I just finished Marigold. It was amazing to see people like Judy Dench. Even at 4:30 in the morning she wouldn’t go, she’ll stay there just to give her cues. When someone asked her, she said, “Well, how are they going to act if I don’t give them the cues. It’s all about performance.” It’s a level which I wish some of our actors would take, you know. Once they’re done with their close-up - yeah but it’s things like that which is... I was really fortunate because this had Bill Nighy, fantastic actor. Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, Cilia Henry, Richard Gere. They were all just so good at their craft, you know. I mean, they were Thespians to the utmost. Just the professionalism on them was so fantastic to witness. Ambiences do play a thing. I guess the first Hollywood film that I did was a thing called The Way Back, with Peter Weir.8 They loved it. I did 5 channel ambiences and sent it to them for the end section. He actually called up and said, “I loved what you did. Have you seen the film?” I said, “No I’ve been shooting, I haven’t seen it in the theater.” He said, “Well you should try and catch it because even with the background score playing and things”, he said, “throughout the film that’s the radios and then you used booms in India and like you can hear the difference. And the ambiences, which you’ve recorded, and even though the score is really kicking in there you can hear your ambiences and you
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can feel the difference with the boom.” You know it’s not that compressed cranky sounding radio. It just opens up completely, which was great. That is why he asked me to work on Dark Knight Rises9 because he liked the ambiences I’d given. I mean, he just wanted to give a sense of space. That is what I tried to give him. But again, as I said it’s really difficult because India is so loud that you do not have a quiet introspective space here really. So you’ve got to create that. I have travelled miles and miles in searches of ambiences just to have a library. I’ve been to Majuli, which is an island in Assam with very few people. Even there, I could hear the Brahmaputra and boats going up and down. So, when I went finally, I got some birds and stuff. Then just as I was getting ready, good! There was a thunderstorm! LG. Again it was like, “Oh Fuck!” and then it started raining! That thunderstorm was amazing because I’ve used that somewhere or the other. It’s just this rolling thunder! And since it’s on the plains it’s just different from cities where there is a lot of slack back from things. The sound is just different. Q: Hm. Does ambience come in generally when you do sync sound? N: Yeah. Q: Do you keep or you clean up that ambience? N: It depends. Sometimes, I do use it. Sometimes I don’t. I mean, on Dil Chahta Hai, I remember getting the ADs to go and lock up buildings being made. Q: Hm. N: Then, when I was doing the scene, I said, “No this is Bombay! It needs something.” And I actually went and recorded a marble cutter and they came to me and said, “But we closed this down.” I said, “Yeah, I put it back.” They said, “Why did you put it back?” LG. to me, it was the option of whether I needed it or not, you know. It’s everything to give you a sense of space and place. That’s what ambience is to me. Q: Hm. N: And everyone thinks, “Ah, yeah whatever!” They discount it. When it’s there, they discount it, and when it’s not there, they’re aware of it, you know. Q: This sense of place was absent in earlier films. Like – N: Yeah. Q: Like let’s say in films from the late 70’s and early 80’s.
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N: I just did a film called Son of Sardaar.10 It’s back-to-back background score. It’s a hardcore commercial Hindi film, which I said I must do just to know how it works! Q: LG. N: I was just like sitting back and laughing at it because the director, when he heard the ambiences he said, “Oh wow! This is fab, you know.” And Ajay came in and said, “Dude what are you doing? This is not an art film!” Q: LG. N: It was just a pump, which he wanted you know pupppup…(sound effect)… and he got really anal about it. He said, “No it sounds different.” So I said, “Well, this is a close miking thing. If I give it a little space, put in a little reverb –“ He kept saying, “Yeah, it’s almost there but it doesn’t remind me of the pump when I was a child.” So I said, “Boss, I’ve recorded the pumps over there. I can’t do anything more. If the pumps are different than they were in your days, then you know, get me a pump like that or I’ll source a pump like that, then we can do it. But do you really want to use that expense on this and waste your time so much on this? Then, of course, the score came in and then there was no pump to be heard or seen in that thing. LG. Yeah, even ambiences are there. I did use a few ambiences. I did use a little bit of room tone and a little bit of night crickets in that night sequence. Ajay did like that. He said, “Oh wow! It’s just made it a lot more personal.” Q: Personal. N: So they get it. But you have to push them. You can’t say put it here on their face. You’ve got to subtly take them through and hold their hand through it, you know. Q: Yeah. N: It’s just because they’re so not used to it. Q: Hm. N: But audiences are rather embracing this kind of sound. I think we do not give the audience enough credit in this country. The audience is way hipper. In Dil Chahta Hai, when Dimple picks up her bag, it breaks and she throws the thing, I had a little cat going off in the surround. I was doing the thing with the Kodak, the cinematographers’ lot and three DPs said, “Man I love that cat!” and I said, “Great!” Like, out of everyone else in this room, if even three people have got it, it’s more than I can hope for. It was stark, you know. Yeah, it’s great. Because that means someone is listening to what I am doing. To me, the advent of all this Atmos and all – when Atmos came they showed me a clip of Wasseypur. 11 In fact, I
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watched it again last night. When I saw it in the Atmos Theater, it was extremely disturbing to me because they had got the guns going off there! Then this ricochet is happening over here. I said, “Firstly that’s wrong space. Secondly, it was so loud that my attention was like – “oh fuck! What’s happening here? I got distracted from the screen.” So that’s a huge thing, which is going to happen also. I mean, with Malayalam things they like it panned here, left, right and everywhere. But I said, “Boss my attention is going from the screen. Why would I want to do that?” I dislike panning dialogues also. But a lot of people want it, “Oh no! But he’s walking in from there.” “Yeah! But he’s on screen!” Q: LG. N: I have used it where I’ve had a conversation starting from here, and then coming in. I’ve done it as an effect to get your attention to it or as a build up to someone walking into the room. I wouldn’t do it on a scene where it would just completely throw me off. Why would I want to lose my audience? Why would I want them to lose focus on what the film is telling? Q: Hm. N: I think the main thing between mono and 5.1 and whatever, at least in Indian cinema, was that the sound and the picture were never in sync. The dialogues were never in sync, which used to always bother me as a visual thing. That’s another thing for location sync sound. In sync sound, you’re always in sync. With dubs you’re not always in sync. Q: Hm. N: That throws me off! Secondly, because it was that high sharp mixed loud fucking thing, the music was there and the film was somewhere else, you know. So, there was no integration of the two as a package. I think now it’s a lot easier to bridge the gap between the two. Q: Hm. I think more and more films will be made in Atmos. How will the ambience be treated? How is it going to be handled? N: I think Auro is going to overtake Atmos. But it’s very similar in terms of things. I think it’s going to become an immersive experience. So yeah, clean recordings are going to become more and more apparent. Q: Hm. N: Luckily, there are still places in the world that are quiet. I carry a little thing with me wherever I go. Pop it out of the window and just start rolling sound. Q: LG.
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N: You never know when it’s going to be useful and what you can do with it. So sound library is also… I mean Lagaan was crazy and we used to have 4 GB drives. It’s now four terabytes, a minimum you know just on your libraries. Q: LG. N: It’s bizarre! Q: LG. N: And that’s over ten years! In Indian films I shoot normally in 1.6 to 2 GB of audio data per day. In Marigold, the first day I gave in 9 GB at lunch and I said, “Fuck something is wrong with my machine!” Q: LG. N: I went through three hard drives on this film. Normally I do a film and a half on a drive. It was amazing the amount they shoot, you know. I think with digital cinema having come in, the worst affected are the boom guys because no one bloody shouts “Cut!” and you can hear them shaking. LG. Three and a half minutes or four minutes on a 17 feet boom with a large shotgun microphone on it, it’s going to shake. Q: Hm. N: So I think with technology, with each new thing there’s a new set of challenges which you’ve to be aware of. Q: How did you come to sync sound? N: Well, it started off with me writing an article for an advertising magazine, which a friend had asked me to do because I used to do a lot of commercials. Again it was a question of dubbing them. I said, “Guys, why don’t you use actors instead of models to begin with? And then why don’t you just record the stuff on location so it’ll be in sync dear” and a few Ad filmmakers said, “Come on. Why don’t you practice what you preach?” So, I started doing some commercials with location sound. It was funny actually, because one of the early ones was for 100 Pipers whisky. They wanted a Scottish accent, you know. Can you hear the sound of the pipers playing? So the agency hired these guys and of course one was Australian. LG. Q: LG. N: I think the other was Italian or something and never had heard a Scottish whisky in their life. So after much of whisky, we gave them our alcohol inspired attempts of Scottish accents and that’s what they used. It worked! A few years later, the same guy called me up and said, “Hey! I’m doing a film!” so I said, “Good luck.” He said, “I want to do location
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sound on it.” So I again said, “Well, good luck. There’s no one doing it here, you know, really.” There were a few people who were doing it for Shyam Benegal. I think Ashwin was doing some stuff. A few other guys I think had done it. He said, “You know what, I don’t know these guys and they’re giving a lot of thing of what they want and how it has to be this silent. I want it real. So why don’t you do the sound mix?” I said, “I’ve never done sound in a film.” He said, “Well, I’ve never directed a film. So at least you I know. So I can scream and say what the fuck have you done at the end of the day.” LG. That’s how Bhopal Express happened.12 Q: Okay. N: There were a lot of the crew who had worked with Mira on Kamasutra13 and things. So they were used to sync sound. That’s how we just went about doing it. Actually, Bhopal Express had a whole bunch of people who were new. Homi Adajania was the director’s assistant. Zoya was on the film, Appu was on the film. Reema came and went. Yeah, that’s quite a few directors who came out of that film. Q: Who was the director of Bhopal Express? N: Mahesh Mathai, who was an Ad filmmaker with Highlight Films. Q: Technically speaking that was the first sync sound in India, right? N: Sync sound used to exist in India. Sync sound died when the Arris came in here. Q: Yes, of course. That was in optical era. N: Yeah. Q: Like in 1940’s, 50’s. N: Yeah. But I think Shyam Benegal was still doing sync. He’s one of the people who respect it - the way you get time and things. Q: Yes. N: That’s been the struggle of trying to maintain your integrity while battling the commercial elements of it. But yeah, I was really lucky that Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai came back-to-back with location sync sound. People finally said, “Oh! It can work.” Lots of kids from FTII who all leave unnamed, they’ve had opportunities to do sync on films, all shot in a bungalow, 13 kilometers of the track in Lonavala. Why can’t you do sync there? Q: Hm. N: The reason they said was because the crickets were loud, because it was that area.
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Q: LG. N: I can understand that at night. But inside the house in the day? What’s wrong with you? I think it was just a fear! Q: Hm. N: This we have to be overcome. Q: Probably it was in a way a sense of conservatism, isn’t it? N: Yeah. You can work well with Dubbing. Actually a lot of the FTII guys, who were old school, said, “You fucking took our work. Now no one’s going to give us jobs.” The only thing they did was they would be Audiographers. They would be there at the dubbing. Even now, guys use the term sound designer. Q: Hm. N: You’re not even there. You haven’t even heard a thing of the Foley. You’ve no idea what’s going on with the tracks. To me it's something, which I try and get into from when I get the script. Q: The early days of live location sound with optical recording and sync sound in digital era - they are different in a way. Probably because you can separate the tracks; but in optical recording it was all in one. N: Well, in optical recordings in those days I think Randhir Kapoor once told me, “We used to go and the first thing we used to do is touch the sound guy’s feet.” Q: LG. N: I said, “Why?” So he says, “Because if you didn’t hit the mark, your voice wasn’t there in the take.” Q: Hm. N: So the sound guy was very crucial and very key to, you know, with those big boom poles and all operated by optical. He said, “Those guys were legends!” On a film, which we did with Honey Irani, Anil Kapoor said, “I’m not doing sync sound.” I refused to do it. Preety actually said, “Unless there’s sync, I’m not doing it.” She returned her cheque. So I was hired again. Q: Okay. N: Yeah, it’s fear of the unknown. Q: Fear of unknown. N: Now, of course, since he’s done Slumdog Millionaire14 and whatever… it has to be sync sound. “Really? Are you the same guy who said that?” LG.
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Q: LG. Do you think that sync sound has contributed to that particular making of a change in the perception of sound for the audiences? N: I think it has, but it’s been so subtle that they haven’t even realized it because (hesitation) the moment the film is in sync, you’re looking at the lips, you know. You’re seeing the performance. It still throws me off. A Salman Khan film. Q: LG. N: Not to say that I watch too many of them, but yeah, it’s just a different genre which I can’t really get into. I can’t get myself to get around that. Q: Do you also use the same effects on sync or do you use Foley? N: I do use Foley also sometimes, but it depends. I mean, there are certain films where it depends on the footwear. I try and get my dialogue tracks as clean as I can, which means if I have to lay out a carpet and not get footfall then I’d try and do that. I’d rather get clean dialogues and worry about footsteps later. Q: Hm. N: Yeah, then we will Foley it. Bhaag Milkha, the horse sequences. I knew that I wanted it very low frequency because it was a boot, and him running. We did Foley here and in Poland. I added stuff to it. It’s a complete mish-mash of everything. But at the end of the day, it’s got to be the way I want it to sound. Q: Is it not possible to use the sync Foley, sync effects of the body? N: As I said, my primary thing on location is getting the dialogues clean. Q: Yeah. N: If it is a place in which I can’t do that, then I would use them. Q: Hm. N: in Lagaan, we did the Foley and then I actually went back and re-cut from the production tracks because it just didn’t sound anywhere as close or as good. Q: Yes, in Lagaan we understood the ramifications of perspective for the first time. N: Yeah. Q: It was not present in the earlier era. N: Yeah. Q: Like, if somebody is speaking from a distance, his voice should come from that perspective.
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N: Yeah. Q: That was a new thing. I think that’s now rather a dominant mode, isn’t it? N: It’s become a lot more… Yeah now you don’t even think about it. Q: Yes. N: You accept it. Q: Yeah. N: That’s the thing now. It’s like that with anything new. There’s always a resistance to change. Till you do it, you know, everyone’s going to fight you. Q: In expense of giving clarity to the voice, would you suppress information such as the ambience and other spatial information from the location? N: It depends on the film. And yeah, I probably would suppress the background to get the dialogue correct. I can always add that background in later on. Q: Okay. But if you have the possibility of multiple channels, like Atmos or Auro 3D, they will provide that. In that case maybe more information of the location will be available. Right? N: If I like the location and if I like the sound of the space of the place, I would be recording that separately too. Yes, for sure. I don’t roll when it’s a noisy room full of lights, with buzz and whine. It doesn’t do anything for me. It’s not going to transport my audience into any place except the headache, which I have been listening to, while I’m on set. We try to get it down. But in case they will just make a noise, they whine, there’s nothing I can do about it. You try and clean it up but it’s in a frequency zone, which is going to affect the voice. So you leave it. Then you take a creative call like “Okay, do you need to dub this? Is it bothering me that much?” Or “Can I let it go? Or should I mask it with some more ambience, or a different ambience?” Q: Hm. N: So these are a lot of things that you do in post. Luckily, since I do post for most of the films I work in, I mean for the ones which I’m on location of, it’s been good because I’ve been allowed to do things my way. Q: Don’t you think that there is a major emphasis on reality - a sense of reality? N: You won’t even know when I’m taking you on a journey in a... As I said, with Taare Zameen Par, it was all stuffed. It wasn’t recorded while
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we were shooting, but before that, in a school. So, it is real. But it’s not real from that day of shoot. Q: Okay. N: But I’m transporting you into that reality – I make a world of that, a make-believe world of that. It’s like cinema. It’s a make-believe world, which you sell. Q: Okay. So, it’s a kind of constructed reality. In that sense, I think it’s rather very understandable that there is an emphasis on real places, real locations, real stories, and real people. So, maybe people demand that sense of reality in sound, isn’t it? N: When I’ll make that sense of realism you won’t even know it! Q: LG. N: That’s what we do, isn’t it? We sell a dream and we make it up where… I mean it’s like Gravity, which won all the Oscars in its year. Q: Oh, yeah! N: It’s all green-screen and yet you believe you’re there with them! Q: That sense of believability, like in – N: I think the sequence where suddenly you get into the helmet and you’re inside the head and that sound transformation is fantastic. I mean that’s why they got that because everyone was just, “Fuck! Wow!” I mean, there wasn’t for a moment that you let yourself go. You’re in the film! Indian audience won’t even think about it in any other way. Actually, internationally also, you know. Bollywood is much larger than you think it is. The effect it has on people all over the world is very strange. I’ve realized that over the years now travelling and... I’ve had someone on the street shooting in New York come up to me and saying, who knew more about me and my work, than I did! Q: LG. N: I’ve then gone and given a lecture at this college, and I’m saying, “What the fuck is going on? How the hell do you know man? You’re a white guy in New York!” LG. Same thing happened in Philadelphia. You come and give a lecture at UPENN and just wow. You think about it, I mean why wouldn’t they? It’s one of the largest film industries in the world. Guys in New York and LA don’t have jobs. They’re sitting at home. There are even guys sitting at home over here. Q: Hm. N: It’s all about I guess, at the end of the day, what story you want to tell as a sound designer, and how and when creating it.
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Q: Talking about the story, this shift from mono to stereo to 5.1, 7.1 and Atmos is significant. N: Yeah, Q: Do you think that telling of story through sound is becoming less connected to the screen or…? N: Not really. I did a film called Harud15 a couple of years ago. Q: Hm. N: Harud has got no background score. It’s only ambiences. Q: Okay. N: I went up to Kashmir and they shot the film. It was chaotic. As any small budget film would be. Q: Hm. N: I actually took a 5.1 recorder with me. Q: Okay. N: I recorded ambiences for about a week, ten days. Even for a small film, which I did for NFDC in Assam, same thing, which is why I was up in Majuli. I just recorded a lot of ambiences to make it into that make-believe world of reality, yeah. So Harud had no things. There was one section that I thought needed music. But there wasn’t. So, I kind of played around with certain elements to give it a rhythmic pattern because to me, it needed that to take the story forward. Q: Once some places are exposed in front of my eyes, the places I know, let’s say Mumbai in The Lunchbox16 - you know how it sounds like. When you see it on screen, you expect more real noise from lived experience, right? In that sense, I find that sync sound can provide more information about the places. N: Well, actually it’s not sync sound really. Sync sound is there for the dialogues, primarily, you know. Q: Okay. N: Yeah, I think the ambiences could have been a lot louder. I remember an assistant of mine Steven doing KANK (Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna) with Karan Johar.17 He took me to see it and I said, “Dude, in fucking New York, I have not heard one fucking siren. That is New York! That and the sound of that subway - wherever you go you hear it. There’s not one siren in the whole film?” and he said, “No Karan’s actually asked me not to use them, to put it out.” I said, “But then it could be any city in the world!”
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specifically New York is so loud and that damn siren is everywhere you go. It’s almost like a sonic signature! Q: Hm. Yeah. N: So why wouldn’t you use it? There, again, I guess that’s the thing. As a sound designer, I would fight for that. But then again, that’s not a realistic film. So it depends on the film, you know. Also, it’s a thing of director’s vision. Q: Hm. N: I try and do my job where I try and give them something which is going to blow them away, so that they don’t have anything to say and let me do my job on it and take his vision to another level. Q: How do you perceive this change from mono to stereo to 5.1, 7.1 to Atmos? N: Well, you know, everything was in mono for television when I started off. So I actually called myself, my company – it was a pun on mono – I called my company Hearing Binaural, instead of Binaural Hearing. Q: LG. Okay. N: Because mono was very tunnel-visioned. Binaural was spatial information, which I wanted to put in, and I think that’s what I’m doing now. Q: LG. N: To me, that was the great jump from advertising to film. I think I learnt my craft in advertising, because you get thirty seconds to tell a story. So, you pay attention to each frame and what you wanted or didn’t want to tell. Film just gave me a two-hour picture to paint and just opened it up and it just became wider. Q: LG. N: So yeah, that, in a nutshell, is the thing from mono to 5.1 for me. Now, as things get better hopefully, it’s only going to benefit us. Otherwise, there are still some theaters where the left channel doesn’t work, the surround doesn’t work and things. Nothing you can do about that. The good fight is going to continue. Try doing your best so that it sounds as natural as it can. It’s all about immersiveness I think. Q: Hm. N: I think Auro is going to make that a lot more so. I’m actually looking forward to mixing something in Auro because Auro’s got two 5.1 levels. One at ear level, and another is higher.
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Q: Hm. N: So, it’s just a real spatial environment. Q: The way we perceive reality - of top, front, behind… N: Yeah. Q: But behind is a bit disturbing, sometime it distracts. N: Yeah. Which is again, that’s what we do in post. It’s like how much information do I want. I don’t want you looking back. I want you feeling it. How much is the right level - there are no guidelines to that. You’ve just got to go with your own instinct on that. I guess that’s why people hire me, because they trust my instinct on that. Q: LG. N: You can argue on that point. It’s a point-of-view; it’s an opinion. Everyone’s got an opinion on them. There is no guarantee that “Yes, this is correct” and “No, that is wrong!” Which is why mix theaters are very important that they be lined up properly so that… It’s happened to me in the past, where I’ve mixed something and I’ve gone and seen it in a theater and there’s no surround information. I’ve gone to other theaters where it’s the same print and there’s too much surround information. There’s nothing you can do about that. You can only be as honest to it as you can in the mix room. Q: Hm. Instinct. N: I mean I’ve also got a set-up here, which is facing the wrong way and all. Q: Hm. N: But it sounds great to me. Q: LG. N: I mean, to me, this is a real room. If I had the speakers facing that way, I’d get no information. It’s a great sounding room, I think, yeah.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:07:49 Name Abbreviations: Nakul Kamte – N; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 3 Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (Run Milkha Run, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2013) 4 Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Wants, Farhan Akhtar, 2001) 5 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden 2011)
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Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars on Earth, Aamir Khan and Amole Gupte, 2007) Finding Fanny (Homi Adajania 2014) 8 The Way Back (Peter Weir 2010) 9 The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan 2012) 10 Son of Sardaar (Ashwni Dhir 2012) 11 Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap 2012) 12 Bhopal Express (Mahesh Mathai 1999) 13 Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (Mira Nair 1996) 14 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle 2008) 15 Harud (Aamir Bashir 2010) 16 The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra 2013) 17 Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Karan Johar 2006) 7
CHAPTER 14 ALOKE DEY1
Q: As a background I would like to ask you about your coming to sound, and subsequently into the film industry. A: As a profession? Q: Yes. A: I really didn’t have that kind of a focus as such after my graduation. There was a good sound recording studio very close to my place, well known in Kolkata at that time. So I used to go there generally, but I never thought that I would get into this kind of a profession. Somehow I decided not to join any kind of work, like banking and all that stuff. Then I got to know about FTII, that there is a sound engineering course and all that; because I went to Technicians’ Studio2 where one of my relatives - Satyen Chatterjee, a famous sound engineer, used to work. Q: Okay. A: I just went there to see what normally sound recording is about and how they do it. At that time I think Satyajit Ray’s film was going on and they were recording background score. When I went there, he told me, “Okay you can come and see it from inside. See how we work and what we normally do.” Then he said, “If you’re interested, you can contact a few other people. There is a film institute at Poona.” That was the only institute at that time. So he said, “You go and meet few other people here in Calcutta, find out what it is exactly and if you’re interested then you can appear for the exam.” That is how I met a few seniors in Calcutta and they guided me really well. Then I appeared for the exam and got through. So, that is how it started. But, even before joining the FTII it was not decided what kind of field I would be working in. Whether it’s the music recording field, or the re-recording field, a dialogue recording field or the location recording field, now there are so many sections. Earlier it was only either the studio work or the recording section or music or dubbing or one went freelancing, which is location recording. At that time, there was as such no concept of sync sound recording for films, though actually it is a very old concept. People at that time were not using it as “sync sound”. It came
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much later in the films that I’m talking about. So, now there is another profession, that way. Q: But then, after finishing the film school you came to the (film) industry, isn’t it? A: Yes. To be very frank, my hometown is Calcutta, and hence I’ve been to those places where I met, as I told you before, few seniors were in NFDC. Q: Hm. A: I just went there during my tenure in FTII and saw them working. I felt really bad. I don’t know whether I should say it or not, it was not really a very professional kind of work they were doing - the way they were doing it actually. I thought that maybe that’s the way they do it. I had no idea then. So, that is the time I decided I would not come to Calcutta to do all of these works. Q: Did you start as a mixing engineer in the industry? A: Yeah, assistant mixing engineer. When I was at the institute I got the offer from one of the studios here called Anand Recording Studio. It was a re-recording set-up, basically. I joined there as a second assistant. The chief sound recordist, Kuldeep Sood, and his first assistant, Anup Deb, were also from FTII. So, I was the second assistant. I worked there for five years as a recordist. Later I started mixing on my own as well. Then, after that I joined Sunny Super Sound. I was there for ten years. Yes, from ’94 to 2004 I was there. So, initially there was no re-recording set up as such and everyone was recording in analog at that time. The chief recordist there, Mr. Suresh Pathuria, was also from FTII. He offered me to join Sunny and asked me to start it with a digital platform known as Pro Tools. That was the first commercial use of Pro Tools in India. So I started with that and I was basically doing music recording and song mixing. We had a big set up for music as well, which we converted to Dolby Digital mixing set up. It was only a Dolby set up, at that time Dolby Digital was not there. It was only Dolby SR., but 5.1 was introduced in India from there. That was the first studio and rather the first digital console in Asia as well at that time. I got that opportunity, and I utilized that. So, any platform basically is not an issue at all for me to understand or to work with. Q: So you started your career with digital technology, right? A: No, not really. I joined in 1989. Q: Okay.
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A: ’89 to ’94 I was in Sunny. That was a completely analog magnetic and rather a mono era. But, of course we also did four-track stereo. At that time, we used LTRT Ultra stereo. And then Dolby came. The four-track was on film with magnetic coating. We did a few films. In fact Maine Pyar Kiya3 was also in that format and as well as in Ultra stereo. At first they got Ultra stereo before Dolby. After that so many films we did in that format. Then, Dolby came to India with their SR unit, which is a noise reduction unit for music purpose. Gradually they introduced Dolby SR, then 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 and Atmos. In between, S-DTS and DTS also came. Now again, it’s Auro. So it’s a different format, different technology rather. Q: What is your impression on this changeover from analogue domain to the digital from a more aesthetic point of view? A: See, everything has got its advantage and disadvantages. In digital the way you work now, it’s much faster and everything is user friendly. Earlier, if I needed to change anything it meant that I’d have to go record that part or maybe get it from somewhere, transfer that on magnetic, put it exactly in sync with that film and then get it. It was a minimum of three to four hours of work, which is now three to four seconds’ work. That’s the difference. And since the machine is doing everything today, actually we are not using our memory. At that time, it was only a ten minutes reel though; it was not twenty minutes reel. But we used to keep every moment of the film of ten minutes in memory and we used to work like a machine. Now the machine is doing everything. We have got multi-track recording in music set up, which is really good. But people are misusing it. At one point of time, for the music director it is like, “I have recorded two hundred tracks for this particular song.” If you actually calculate, out of those two hundred tracks may be twenty tracks are good enough for that particular song. They are just layering one-sixty tracks unnecessarily and they don’t know why they are adding it. They have no idea or concept. Among them there are very few -- you can actually count them – those who are sensible, who can use those one sixty tracks as well. They are doing the right thing. But then the sensible people, they are also not recording two hundred tracks at the same time. They are quite confident about what they want. Q: Hm. What they wanted was kind of limited in analogue because probably you didn’t have the choice, didn’t have many options, right? A: Yeah, that’s what I am saying. The numbers of tracks have increased now. Earlier we used to do only mono mixing, okay? So, the dialogues used to come in a maximum of two tracks. One was the main dialogue track; the other one was the crowd. Now, the dialogue tracks are also like
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hundred tracks, two hundred tracks. Even music, even the songs, it was only one track they used to send earlier. It was a mixed track and from there only we were doing the final mixing. Now you are handling all the separate tracks as well to balance that, even a song, even background score, even dialogues, even effects - everything. So, actually you are handling too many tracks, but giving them the same output. Instead of mono you’re giving it in 5.1 format or maybe Atmos format, that is the only difference there. Q: Do you find that a bit problematic with so many tracks in hand? A: Sometimes it is. Because it’s not just that, there are so many tracks to handle. It is the decision, which you are taking - that how many tracks you are actually eliminating. So, rather than the creative aspect, you are trying to do something which is also creative. But you are eliminating tracks. You are wasting your energy, concentration, mood, and the whole flow, into that. Why is it so? Because in today’s time whoever is working here in a separate zone altogether, somebody is doing dialogue, somebody is doing effects, somebody is doing ambience, somebody is doing music – this complete co-ordination actually is the work of a sound designer. But sound designer cannot help it if the film is releasing, suppose on the 10th of this month, and the music director -- who is doing the background score is completing it on the 1st of the month. So one will have only nine to ten days to complete the film! Forget about the same track, sound designer will get and he will design it accordingly or the effects he is taking and he is scoring his music accordingly – it is not so. People who are well planned are doing that because they can afford to do so as they have enough time and their release dates have not yet been fixed. So, if you work that way you will definitely get a much better work because that coordination has to happen, whether it is today, tomorrow or in future. Q: But the number of channels in digital media offers more flexibility. How do you use that flexibility in terms of – let’s say the placement of sound? I mean - compared to mono, surround 5.1 offers much more flexibility, I think. Do you agree with this opinion? If you agree, then how do you handle it? A: See flexibility in the sense… earlier it was mono, you knew that you’ll have to accommodate everything in one track. The elimination process was there as well. You have multi tracks but your format is again the same. Instead of mono it’s 5.1. Since you have the option you have the opportunity, you can use your machine. You can use your tools you keep on increasing your number of tracks and later on you are just eliminating the number of tracks. That’s a wrong process. There has to be some kind
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of co-ordination between all the team members or whoever is working for that particular film. If that happens, I am sure taking the opportunity of the equipment or the tools, the result will be much better. Then the music director will also think about his dynamics whether in this kind of environment – where there is a dialogue, there are effects, there is some kind of ambience – what kind of instrument is he going to use. Otherwise, what is he doing? He is just doing the music recording without thinking of anything else. That same music, if it is the same frequency, is disturbing some other element. So he’ll have one option: either you eliminate music or you eliminate effects. So, whom are you giving the priority? The one you require according to your concept. It is not right always, but according to your concept you are giving that priority. But at the same time if he had the effects or if he had the music, the sound designer, he could have used some other tone, some other effects altogether. And maybe the same effects he can filter out. He’ll keep that effect particularly in that band of frequency, which will not affect the music. So, both can be accommodated together. But, if you have time to think about all that, only then you can really design your sound that way. Thus, for everything you need time. People think that, “Okay, my background score is over; my dialogue is over. Now we can finish within five days and complete the film.” It is not so. They may be getting their film that way. I am also doing it, there’s no option for me. But, I cannot utilize those numbers of tracks, flexibilities, what you are talking about. At that time I’ll have a time limitation, I’ll have to complete the job and give it to them because they are releasing the film. Q: How do you like to proceed with the multi-channel option in an ideal situation? A: That’s what I told you earlier. I’ll design the entire film in a different way altogether, it’s a different perspective altogether. I can create two hundred tracks to make one sound. I have that choice after getting the music or may be the dialogues. I may eliminate sixty tracks. But, that does not mean that I have used those two hundred tracks unnecessarily. I have used that to create that particular effect, the particular nature of effects. Q: What are the advantages of those multiple channels? There are so many channels in hand. How are they being used in comparison to mono? A: In comparison to mono? Q: Yes, mono mix. A: Earlier, in mono mix… Suppose, I am giving you the example of a song. See, your vocal and the rhythm tracks are accommodated in that, and then comes rest of the instruments. I mean, whether it’s a solo instrument
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or whether it’s anything else in that particular song composition. Now you have that flexibility that you can use multiple tracks. So, they are recording fifty tracks of only strings, thirty tracks of only solo instruments. But ultimately they are bringing it down to two tracks, four audio and 5.1 or 7.1 or Atmos or Auro into that format. Hence, whether it is two hundred tracks or four hundred tracks, it doesn’t matter at that time. But since you have those tracks you can actually balance which portion you want to keep, which of the instruments are at what level. That option you have. Earlier, you had only one mixed track. So, if you wanted to eliminate something you could not do that. Then again you’ll have to go back and do the mixing and get it back. Q: But space-wise, spreading out of materials or elements into more elaborate design is possible. Is it done that way? What we see is a spreading out of the sounds beyond the screen. A: Yeah. Q: 5.1 can allow you to do the work in that expansive way, right? A: Yes it does. You are surrounded by the speakers. So you can create that width - since earlier it was a single source. You were creating that same thing but from single point of source and with that you were trying to create that perspective from that point. So, that same kind of perspective you can create from different sources. But, I believe that if I am doing a film work, a film mixing, I am concentrating straight to that on screen. Since I have 128 speakers or 64 speakers or tracks rather, I should not create something by which the person watching the film will get distracted. The idea should not be that I just have 64 tracks to distract you or that I have created some sound from the 30th channel or the 29th channel. The idea is the whole surround: meaning when you are sitting and watching a film, you should feel that you are into it. The number of tracks or the number of speakers does not allow you to distract anyone while watching a film. Q: But then, numbers of channel are increasing every day. I mean… A: That’s what I am saying, when I said that 64 to 128. Q: What is the reason for the increase in the number of speakers? And how are they being handled? A: How are they being handled is completely subjective. See, this new format Atmos has come. Till today - if you count hundred films that they have already done, whoever has done them -- out of them you can actually count maybe only four or five films who have utilized that format Dolby Atmos properly to make you hear the right sound. So, 95% people are
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misusing it. My idea is not to create gimmick and show you that, “see, some ‘ferriwallah’ is moving around.”4 If some important scene is going on, that is distraction. Q: To keep that balance and to have a focus on the screen, making use of a number of speakers around you is needed. How to keep that balance? How to keep not being distracted? A: There is a ratio that you have to choose, in which you’ll keep what kind of sound so that you will not get distracted. The moment you will get distracted, the audience will also get distracted. So you’ll have to create that width, the dynamics to get it right: whether in terms of music or ambience or effects – it includes everything. Q: It is not clear to me as to why so many speakers. What kinds of sound elements are being distributed in these speakers? Why is this extra space there firstly? Why are so many speakers needed there at all? We could be satisfied with 5.1. A: Why do you need 5.1 then, according to you? Mono was there. All the classic films were done in mono. Then why do we need 5.1? Q: Yes, why? I am also not sure. A: So it’s the technology. Day by day, whatever technology is coming, you’ll have to get used to that and create. Utilize whatever new format has come in a proper manner. When I said 100 films - that included films made all over the world and not only those made in India. 95 percent of them are not properly utilizing the new format. That includes all top engineers, all over the world. They are unnecessarily creating noise and making it too loud. That is not the concept of 5.1 or 7.1 or Atmos. The concept is the same thing, which you said. Maybe you are inside the theatre and are enjoying the film. Why? Because, you feel you are there. So, to create that ambience you can utilize the speakers, nothing else. Q: So it’s primarily for ambience, right? A: Yes ambience. Maybe music, maybe music reverb, maybe dialogue reverb or perspective: you can use anything. There is nothing fixed, there is no law and there is no rule. It is up to you to decide what to keep and where. No one is going to teach you that way that you keep this element in this particular surround or this area. Q: Coming back to the rudimentary: what do you think ambience does to cinema? The element of ambience… A: See, there are two types basically. One which you can see on screen, like maybe it is night and hence you are using night crickets, or maybe a light breeze or whatever other elements you feel like using. The other type
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of ambience, which is not seen, is the one, which you’re creating. In one particular film, they are just showing a building, some roads and all that. But, you are using a train horn. It’s nowhere - a railway station. But, you are using it as a character and if you are actually using it in a proper manner, in a proper way rather, it should be coming at a maximum of three to four times. You’ll keep that in mind that they have used one train horn in that particular part and it really worked. But, if you keep hammering it a hundred times it would not work. They’ll say, “We have just put it to create some kind of platform or railway station kind of a thing.” And use of ambience – now people are choosing all these sounds, like even bird sounds. I have done so many films, I have got so many tracks and I have seen that some people don’t understand at which point of time which bird’s call should be there. There are a very few who do. They’re just putting the bird’s ambience, any particular solo birds. Those few people who understand that place it accordingly to register it. Otherwise, the rest of the people are just putting it as a track. There’s another bird track and there’s a solo bird track. In reality you can hear it during that period of time or that geography and nobody understands. So, that is creativity. That is another kind of audience. You’re actually giving another dimension to the film. Q: What is the basic difference you find between the uses of ambience in mono and in surround while working with each? A: Earlier, we were using ambiences most of the time not to keep any silence in the optical track because the optical track used to create ground noise and it could really be heard in the theater. To suppress that, we were using those sounds like birds and everything, since the rest of the things like dialogues, effects and music were actually occupying the entire space of the mono track. That is again a difference now. You have so many tracks that you can really create some layers and create a kind of a feel out of it.
Notes 1
Duration: 00:30:35 Name Abbreviations: Aloke Dey– A Budhaditya Chattopadhyay– Q 2 Technicians' Studio in Tollygunge, Kolkata is one of the leading Film Studios in Kolkata, India. 3 Maine Pyar Kiya (I Fell in Love, Sooraj Barjatya, 1989) 4 ferriwallah meaning street-hawkers.
CHAPTER 15 RESUL POOKUTTY1
Q: As far as I know from our film school, you used to work with audio restoration in the beginning. You restored the Mewar recordings. R: Yes, I did. Q: How was the experience? R: Looking back at it, I think it was one of my best schoolings outside the realm of films, film institute and studies in sound - the romanticism that we had about sound and its role in storytelling. The only restoration process that I have gone through was the best schooling that I’ve got. Q: Okay. R: I chanced upon those recordings of Mewar dynasty, one of the oldest dynasties in the world.2 I had a friend who was a Dhrupad singer and he was studying Dhrupad. This whole thing had come to me through him. I sent them a proposal and got the job. When I went to Udaipur, I chanced upon these recordings from 1940’s to the 70’s - recordings they have done over a period of more than twenty years. In those times, one of the best recorders was called a Phonograph. It was a Valve machine. These were performances that were done by the court musicians in front of the Maharaja. So they were essentially Dhrupad recordings. The Mewar court used to patronize one of the most ancient forms of Indian classical music we know today i.e. - Dhrupad. Q: Hm. R: If we date back to its history, we’ll find that it starts from Tansen. He was Akbar’s court musician. Now, I don’t know what happened and when it happened, you know. From Akbar, they came to the Rajputs. We know that the Rajputs were the only ones in Indian history who fought against the Mughals. Seeing his (Rana Pratap Singh) courage, they gave him his kingdom back. That was the history of the Mewar dynasty. Q: Hm.
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R: It’s very amazing, you know. Akbar was a Mughal king - he was a Muslim. Tansen was a Hindu saint and a poet who was practicing what we know today as the ancient form of Indian Classical Music. History changed its hands! It came to the court of the Rajputs who were Hindus. Q: Hm. R: By this time the Dhrupad family, Tansen’s family, went over the changes and they became Muslims. Q: Hm. Such as the Dagar brothers. R: Yes, they used to practice Islam and there were a lot of things that are combined. Historically it was very intriguing for me. At the same time, I heard a lot of music. Around 300 hours of music I heard over a period of two years and it sort of encouraged me orally. I didn’t understand many of it in terms of its classical nature and text and it is a very closed format, I mean, in a way to keep the sanctity and purity of the lineage you know. What was very interesting was that the existing maharaja’s father was a musician. He was a sitar player. He used to play Rudra Veena as well. He had a lot of interest in music. The last well-known brothers – the Dagar brothers - were known as the Dagar Bandhus. Moinuddin Dagar and Aminuddin Dagar were the exponents of Dhrupad as we know today. They used to perform one raag, for example, raag Lalit, and they would say, “This is how it is sung in Khayaal… this is how it is sung in Thumri, this is how it is in Tappa. This is how it is in this…this is how this is in that….” Q: Hm. R: “This is how it is in Southern India.” And then they would sing the Dhrupad rendition of the same… It was mesmerising, hair-raising, to hear how deep they went into every note. I thought it was the best schooling for me. What the maharaja had done was – he had Dhrupad recordings of one raag at one side of the spool. Then he called some unknown musicians, or probably they were known musicians at that time but quite unknown for me and for the musical circles. The local musicians, who were like you can say a khayaal singer, were called upon and asked to perform the same raag. Q: Okay. R: So, on the B-side of the spool, you know, you have the Khayal rendition of the same raag. It was a quarter track recording, on one side it records two tracks and when it is full, you can turn the other side and have another recording. The Maharaja was such a brilliant and evolved soul. He kept the original recordings as it is and he had made a listening copy of
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each recording. There were a lot of interesting conversations between them. I have heard with my own ears how the nasal sound of the conch came out of there singing. It is disbelieved even today. I have seen and experienced all these things first-hand. You can catch hold of the throat of a Dhrupad singer, but he can still sing. The notes are not coming from the throat. It is believed that the sapta swaras come from the seven points from the human body- from the navel to the uchi (top of the head). A Dhrupad singer’s riyaaz (practice) is all about developing these points in your body. They say when you are able to do that the Kundalini will raise and you see Brahma. It was a big realization for me that probably the Indian tradition of music first identified human body as a musical instrument and then a means to achieve emancipation or Grace as you call it in Christianity. The Rudra Veena developed and practiced in Dhrupad tradition is the closest to human voice in terms of sound. Q: Okay. R: So, they evolve. From the early childhood of 3 to 4 years till 40 or, 50 years of the lifetime, they go on practicing. Maybe you would do a performance at the age of 40, when you evolve that much in terms of your poetry, your understanding, your raag structure and more than anything the microtonal ornamentation of each raag, you know. They believe that in sa re ga ma, the sa and the re are meeting somewhere. So, the microtonal ornamentation of sa is meeting the microtonal ornamentation of re – a Dhrupad performance is about finding these lilting points. Q: Hm. R: When you are able to find that, that’s when you become a musician. You know that we are talking about serious and rigorous practice and finding oneself in each of your performances. I never come across anything like this in any other tradition. Q: Okay. R: When you reach that level is when you are performing. You’re listening to those people, you know. My two years of listening is solidified there. For me, it was not just a project that I was restoring. Technical aspects, yes. A good part of me was that I studied in analog medium, you know. Q: Yeah, hm. R: I knew it in and out by the time I passed out from film school. I only used analog in the film school and in this project as well. I only did one documentary in my life in analog, using the Nagra. When I came out, it was the transition period, the very early period of digital. So I’ve also learnt what is digital.
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Q: Hm. R: The basis of my knowledge comes from analog recording and analog technology and I know why something is the way it is - just a sheer experience of having this command over these two mediums. The peculiar nature of Udaipur is that there’s a lake - the Pichola Lake. From 14th century till today, the whole palace is built around that lake. The palace is some 5 or 6 centuries old. 80% humidity, and the magnetic tapes were peeling off from its base. So my initial thing was to restore those tapes chemically and to find the same recorder in which those original recordings were done. I mean, look at the vision of this man. He had two recorders - not just one, but two recorders, and they were Valve recorders. I had no clue about Valve recordings or machines because we hadn’t studied it. I knew only one thing if you switch on a Valve machine, everything will glow! Q: LG. R: If something is not glowing, then that’s not working. I connected both the recorders to see, “Okay! This Valve is glowing here, that is not glowing there! So just pull that part and put it here.” Like that I got one machine working and from there, I started dumping material on the digital platform and the whole restoration happened like that. I made an inventory. I didn’t know how to restore things, I didn’t know how to archive all these things. So, I made my own devices in my own way and I realized that there was no order. It was all jumbled up. So, I had to listen to every tape, restore all and made sure that it can be run in a tape machine. I handled everything very delicately and managed to dump everything to the digital medium. After a year, I got a call from the Maharaja again. He said, “Look there are a few more tapes that we found in another cellar”. So, I went there and I found out that those were all the missing tapes from that earlier order, you know. Q: Okay. R: Then I thought that it is very improper of me if I just keep it there. Okay, this man has the inclination to keep his father’s legacy, but it has to come out into the public memory. Everybody has to listen to these amazing renditions of our tradition. Fortunately, I got a musicologist come and have a look at all those recordings that we had. Then we convinced the Maharaja to launch a music label and brought out some of the best renditions of Dhrupad that we hadn’t even heard of. In today’s time, if a singer is able to master seven or eight ragas, it means you are a practicing professional singer, whereas these people knew thirty, forty raags, you know, the raags that we haven’t even heard of today. And their various
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renditions, you know, due to their own nature - the stuff that I heard was unbelievable. I was extremely fortunate. So, it wasn’t a job for me - it was a separate two years of my life different from films. Q: From there you came to work with sync sound, right? Was there another stage or a couple of stages in between? R: It is one of the things that I have done. In the film school I had formed two opinions, you know. That’s what the whole film school has done to me. Listening, of course, has come from the rigorous practice that we had. When I was studying, I used to wonder that when I see a European film or an American film or even a B grade film from Hollywood for that matter, I found those films were believable. They were closer to life. There was something about them, which I couldn’t figure out for a long time. Then I realized it was the sound in them - the way the sound had been done, you know. It has the ability to make certain people stir. It has the ability to make people believe that one can fly, you know, that one can do super human things. It was the sheer understanding of it. And I realized that it is mostly like, those films had live sound. Q: Yeah. R: When you have live or sync sound in films, everything has to work around the original performance that you have captured. I believe that there is a soul in the performances you capture on locations. If you are not using that performance of an actor, I feel that it’s like translating somebody’s work and what is lost in translation is the original itself. I mean you are treating an actor as a mime during the shoot. Also I’ve felt that we Indians and Italians for that matter have a very strong tradition of dubbing (ADR) in films. For us it comes from the great tradition of theatre, voicing by itself was a faculty of practice, so it directly had a place in our filmmaking. Even with all that, I would say it’s the biggest injustice that you can do to an actor and also to the audience, if you were not using the original recordings (Production Sound) in films. Q: Yeah. R: The audience is coming and buying a ticket to watch a movie because he is fixing an appointment with you. The least that you can do is to respect that, you know. We go for a musical performance and if Michael Jackson comes and plays a CD and does lip sync with it, we won’t like it. It is exactly the same thing for me. Going back to it, I always believed that either I should have been in Hollywood or I should have been a professional in the 70’s in India. I am in a wrong place at a wrong time. Q: LG.
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R: I need to change it. So I decided for myself that I would do only live (sync) sound when I come out of the film school. Period. Q: LG. R: I’ll not work in a film that I have to dub. Period. The second thing was that while we were working in the film school, the school always had a principle that you have to record the sounds for your films. Your film is special; it has your own sound. They will allow you to listen to the library sound but they will not allow you to use something from the library. Nothing from the library you could use. When you were doing the music recording, our professor used to knuckle our fingers if we went and touched the equalizer. Q: LG. R: Because that is not to be used. Q: Hm. R: “Go inside. Listen to the instrument. Make the mic hear what we are hearing. That’s your job.” That was the most important aspect. Make the mic hear what you hear, you know. I come from this very pure school of recording. Those two things were very, very solid for me. Coming back to the sound library, I realized that there are no qualified libraries for Indian sounds. There is nothing whatsoever. I mean, people had personal collections because they would keep using it and everything was centered around a mixing room. So there was no concept of a sound designer as such. Q: Hm. R: So, you would be the sound recordist who would basically do the dubbing and the Foley work and supervise everything and put in some sound effects for the narrative purpose of the film. Everything else was done in the mix room. Even today, the mix engineers, like in Hollywood, hold a pretty huge responsibility and a huge name and a position because of the similar work culture. A lot of things used to happen in the mix room. So, all these sound mixers who had a command over the craft used to have their own collection and there was no collection available on a commercial basis. When I came out, I thought about creating a library for Indian sounds. That was the idea behind The Essential Indian Sound Effects, my library of sounds. Q: Hm. R: These were the two things that I wanted to do. If you ask me about the kind of work that I’ve done, I did only these two things, nothing else.
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Q: LG. When we first heard your work in Slumdog Millionaire3, the thing that struck me personally was the multitude of sounds - layers after layers, which we never heard before. This was a new experience of understanding the locale, the realistic environment that an Indian city offers. How did you conceive that layering of sound? It was not there in mainstream Indian cinema at least. R: See, when I got the film, I remember me having a poster of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting4 in my room, you know, in my film school’s hostel room. So, for me, it was like, “What’s going on with me?” Q: LG. R: Before I started working on Slumdog, I saw Sunshine.5 I was shocked by the artistry of the film. I loved that film. I thought it was like a modern day Solaris and I heard the sound and I realized that this man is so good! This man has belief in sound and in its ability to move people. To work with him, you have to be somebody else. My task basically was to record sync sound in Bombay live on location. We had serious discussions on that. I had no clue about how Danny shoots and thought it was like a traditional film shooting. Just before this, I did a film with Aamir Khan, on location, in Bombay. A film called Ghajini.6 Q: Okay. R: To shoot with a star like Aamir on the streets of Bombay - it was the most difficult thing, you know. I thought I had mastered the art of recording sound on location with that film. So I went with that arrogance also. On the first day of the shoot, I was looking at things and I couldn’t fathom what was happening. There were four or five cameras constantly rolling, you know, and I was trying to record everything perfectly like we would do in a normal Hindi film. It took me a week to figure out what to do. Q: Hm. R: I thought I had to do complete unlearning with this film. Forget about how you professionally record a film. I had to change my whole understanding about filmmaking. For example, you and I are walking down the street and the human brain has the ability to ignore everything that it doesn’t want to hear. So, we are walking down the street and there’s a lot of traffic, a lot of honking and there are a lot of people and everything. But if we are in an engaging conversation, we will only be hearing that conversation. Q: Hm.
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R: But if you keep a microphone there, it doesn’t have the intelligence of the human brain and it will hear everything. My whole job, the whole idea behind Slumdog was how I can make the microphone hear in the way I wanted it to hear. Q: Hm. R: So, I was constantly analyzing how the human brain processes sound at a given point. “How is it doing?” I was doing that. I did this with a multi microphone and multi-tracking, which I thought was a disastrous decision in the first place because in the noisiest environment you would choose the minimum number of microphones since you don’t want the noise ratio to be high and keep it within good strength. Q: Hm. R: Coming back to the shoot, I did try to do professional quality recording for one week and I thought it’s terrible. I thought I completely failed at that. The whole film was an unlearning process for me in the sense that I had to forget this aspect of trying to record everything professionally correct and good. End of the first week of shooting I had taken some tough decisions. Second week onwards I started recording the soundscape of Mumbai. We were given a scene and we had to shoot in a given location I would record the soundscape of that particular acoustic environment. Within that the film is happening, within that I am focusing on the spoken dialogue. For me, it was not just the spoken dialogue but everything was of my interest. So, there was no concept of re-take or there was no traditional concept of taking a long shot, an establishing shot, then a close shot, then a coverage and all that. Those concepts weren’t there. Events were enacted out for the camera to capture, especially when we were working with the kids. Most of them were untrained kids from the slums and all that. We couldn’t rehearse and we couldn’t know of the camera positions, movements and everything. Danny decided the camera angles. There were two cameras, which Danny would constantly look at. I took the feed from those two cameras. In film schools, we always have looked down upon television guys, you know, and I did a lot of television when I passed out - very initial part of television when you are doing multicamera work in multi-track. What we had done was live recording, live mixing. You look at 7 or 8 multi-cameras, and they’re switching and you are doing mixing according to the camera switches. That came to my help. Q: Okay. R: I would mic up the whole area and I would be watching what was happening. I would also watch what Danny was looking at, what the main cameraman was covering. I had multiple microphones, multiple booms,
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multiple fixed microphones, lavaliers. I had a 7.1 DPA Holophone, which would capture the whole environment as it is for me. Q: Hm. R: Sometimes I did like 20-25 tracks of recording and I would be live mixing them. I’d look at them and mix them. I thought I was making disastrous decisions in my professional career. Q: LG. R: Then I thought, “Okay, this is like a small film which these foreigners are making and which would run in some festivals and nobody would watch it. My reputation will be intact, you know.” Q: LG. R: That is what I actually thought about that film. But when I saw the first cut of the film, I thought that it was something very special. Danny had a different idea. Danny came to India and he saw people working and how Indian films are done and he just loved it. After the film was shot and we went back, he said, “We will dub the whole film.” I said, ‘What?’ I just got the shock of my life. He said, “It’s so fantastic!” I said, “What is fantastic?” He said, “We will make them enact. You know you guys do it so well”. The microphone is just there into your mouth, “fantastic. Just dub everything.” I said, “Then?” “Then a new performance will evolve. Then we can pick and choose - this performance is good than that one, like that.” I thought this man was mad! Q: LG. R: “And what happens to the work that I have done?” I asked. “Everything is there, Danny. You just have to listen to everything that I have recorded.” I called up Glenn Freemantle, the Supervising Sound Editor from London, who thankfully has won another Oscar this year for Gravity and told him that this was what Danny was saying and that it was shocking to me. “So please pull up every track.” Then he came back and said, “No, we have listened to all the tracks. We thought the temp mixes were fantastic.” Of course, we had to dub a few scenes because of the diction. Q: Hm. R: I had a huge problem especially with Irrfan during the shoot. Whenever a line would come up for ADR, Danny would say, “I know what you’re going to say” - because I had told him exactly the same thing during the shoot. So, for me, Slumdog was not about how professionally or how well sound for a film could be recorded but allowing certain things to evolve that sometimes goes beyond the realm of your professional work. When I was sitting at the Kodak theatre on the day when all the nominations were
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played out, there was Wall –E7, The Dark Night8, and Quantum of Solace, James Bond.9 And there was Slumdog Millionaire. I mean, this was 12 million dollar film. I still thought that I wouldn’t win the Oscar because there was one mistake that I could still hear in the film on the very first shot. I could hear a wireless mic switching. Q: LG. Okay. R: Nobody heard it, but I heard it and I know it’s there. I thought I would lose an Oscar because of that one technical mistake. If I were an Academy member then I wouldn’t have voted. You get what I mean? Q: Hm. R: As if I would lose because of that mistake. It has happened. Q: LG. R: Whatever has happened has happened, you know. I kept analyzing, “Why? Why was I given an Oscar?” I thought, may be because of that one idea. Q: Hm. R: So, I keep telling students that you need to have an idea, a strong idea. The execution of that idea may be amateur, not so sophisticated, not well done, you know. But the idea will still cut through. Some of the biggest compliments that I got from people were that they could smell Bombay because of the way the sounds are being played out, you know. That, I think, was the beauty of Slumdog. A huge contribution was from Glenn Freemantle also - cutting and putting all the tracks together and creating a multi-layer aural experience. Q: But before Slumdog also, you have worked in films with sync sound. For example, if I can remember, Black10 and Ghajini. How were those experiences different from Slumdog in that sense? R: Like I said, all other films are very traditionally shot, you know. There was one camera. There was a long shot, there was a close-up and there was a mid-shot, you know. Q: Hm. R: Scenes were played out in front of you beforehand. We knew what was happening; we knew how an actor was behaving and what the acoustic environment was. For a film like Black, it was more sensitive. It was more about how low I wanted to hear and how high it could go. For the first time a machine like Portadrive was used, it was the first time in India that a 24-bit recording was tried out. Q: Okay.
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R: I chose that format of recording knowing the nature of Mr. Bachchan’s performance. Mr. Bachchan listened to a lot of classical music, you know. He is very operatic. His performance in Black seems very operatic. He just speaks so softly and suddenly he would go high. Q: Yeah. R: So I needed something that can accommodate a good dynamic range in dialogue recording. It’s also about touch, you know. Q: Yeah. R: These sounds were creating meaning. These were the meanings of the film. I wanted a system where everything, even the minutest of sound, could be captured, and the loudest expression can be contained. So I chose a Portadrive with 24 bit recording and 48 KHz and I custom designed a board with Cooper sound. I mean, that was the board that won me an Oscar as well. Q: LG. R: That is it. Also, for me, especially when I am recording, I am of course trying to do justice to an actor’s performance. Period. That’s the first and foremost thing. I listen to them very carefully when they are rehearsing and all and I choose the microphone according to what they are trying to do. There were situations where Bachchan would tell me, “Resul, I am going to use my eyes in this sequence.” I exactly knew what he meant - it meant that I want the brilliance of that track to be recorded as it is of everything that he is saying. I wanted it to be extra brilliant. I wanted the higher harmonics of his vocals to come through. I wanted them to behave in the wooden room. I wanted that to be captured. I wanted to capture that moment where spoken words interact with the air around, form its meaning that transcends time and turns into emotional quantum of energy that sustained through pieces of celluloid. So, I immediately chose Neumann 82 microphones, which you wouldn’t do in an indoor scenario. Q: Hm. R: See, I thought unconventionally. I mean, I didn’t know that I was thinking unconventionally. Now when I look back I find that it was unconventional because you wouldn’t choose a microphone that would give a tunnel effect in a situation like that. You would choose a shotgun mic in a situation like that. Q: Hm. R: But I didn’t want that. So I needed to have people with me who’d understand all this. My boom man Ghulam Sheikh was bang on there. If you would make a minute two-degree shift, my sound would change, and
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he knew that. Over the period, I have also trained people in such a way so that they are with me in the heart and soul of what I am doing. Black, for me, was all about meanings of sound and what would a person be hearing when he is deaf. I analyzed some questions like what is darkness. Is darkness the absence of light? If it is, then how do you capture darkness in cinema? You need to throw some light. Is silence an absence of sound? Do you need some sound at least to know if it’s silent? Is that sound just about the track noise because there is no silence in cinema, you know. There is always the sound of an SST. So, is it the sound of SST or is it something just above the SST that an audience won’t perceive? Why are we hearing a pin falling in a film, which you wouldn’t hear in natural life? There is something else. So, what is that which is working? Q: Hm. R: What is the conscious process that an audience goes through when they’re watching a movie? That is what I experimented with Black. I especially analyzed what it is! What is the difference between film and television, you know! I realized that it’s the rhythm. Television is beat. It goes with anything. It’s like the music that is going on there. It’s there television in a house is just there. It doesn’t bother us. But film is rhythm because it comes into you. Like I said before, when the audience have taken an appointment and come to you, they are coming with something. What is it that they are coming with? I realized that when you sit in a dark room and prepare to watch a movie, they are listening. They are listening to their own breath. They are listening to their heartbeat. That breath is directly related to what you see on screen. So, there is this conversation, which the audience doesn’t know of. What I did in Black is completely playing around with this rhythm of people. I released and I took it in. I manifested it. Some time with a lot of sound and some time with absence of sound, you know. I have put in a microphone inside a Shankh (conch shell) and captured what the trapped air inside a Shankh. I recorded pieces of ambiences and removed all the living elements from that ambience, and just kept that as an ambient track in the film. People heard those sounds and they haven’t deciphered what it is. But I know what I have done, and this is what I’ve done. There is an absence of life. I mean it has also helped me while I’m sort of trying to understand what deaf and mute people do. We were travelling from Chandigarh to Shimla during the shooting of the film. We had to travel in those small propeller planes. You’ve to walk to the airplane. There was this deaf and mute person who was with us as a trainer, when we were near the plane I asked him if he was hearing anything? He said, “I’m hearing some hmmm sound”, which meant he is hearing but the sound was attenuated and muted. When he was at the
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location, we just moved an HMI light around his face. We asked, “Did you see anything?” He said, “I saw some flash, something passing.” So, there is something or an impression of something. I did play with those impressions. I closed ambiences, I opened it, I switched it on, switched it off. Sometime just with spoken dialogue, spoken words, just picking up how vibrations would behave in a particular place. Just spoken words had to be designed at places. I seriously worked with that in Black. When it came out, for the first time in Indian cinema, people thought that good sound could also bring good production value. Q: LG. R: That set the ball rolling for me. From then on, I haven’t looked back. I was struggling till then, even though I have done similar or better jobs, difficult jobs. It is not about doing a difficult job. It’s about that small little step that you’ve taken on the way, which would completely shift and change the way people think about things. I mean it is over many years that a film like Highway11, for example, that has caused such wonderment again, you know. The Times of India wrote during that weekend that “Go watch this film for Sound Design.” So, it took someone 15 years to capture the imagination of the audience, you know. I’ve been working on the aural literacy of the Indian audience. That’s the only thing that I’ve been doing. Q: Hm. I have experienced Highway on headphones. Even while watching it on YouTube or some other online medium access in Denmark (it is very difficult to find Indian films even in theaters in Denmark) on headphones, I understood that the landscape is presented to me through sound using a multitude of layers and a rich amount of ambience. It’s not only inspiring, but also a kind of a reference of how sync sound can be used, and for the use of ambience. So again: how did you come to that presentation of sound in terms of these rich layers of ambience? R: See, in Highway I was analyzing landscapes again. When it’s a road movie it’ll move from one place to the other and it travels through six states of India. Of course, the ambience has a huge role to play. It starts from the very rough and rustic Haryana and then travels down to the cool valley of Kashmir. Now the question is, what is silence to you? Does silence mean no sound? Because of Dolby and digital projection, there’s no SST anymore these days. The SST now is the ambient noise of a multiplex. It could be the adjacent cinema, it could be the AC noise or a wrong surround speaker that is fluttering away, you know. It could be anything. Q: Hm.
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R: All the times we had SST - we could bank on it. We knew that 45 dB ground noise is going to come from the SST. Now we have no clue. So, everything is silence and a variant. Then I thought about what silence in cinema is. Silence in cinema is something that you have to arrive at, it doesn’t exist. Silence doesn’t exist for me. I have to arrive at it. That’s what I’ve done in Highway. For me, silence is landscape. Sometimes I’ve built so much in that landscape, I masked it. Sometimes I just thinned out everything. I would show you the snippets of that landscape ambience, you know. That is what I have done from state to state, from moment to moment. I just sculpted aural elements and sometimes I just put it all together so that it is cluttered with a sense of rhythm. Sometimes I just took everything out. So I’d just gone in and out of the characters’ mind, just played with that even during the kidnap scene at the very beginning. It’s like BOOM, the first gunshot goes overhead and I switched off every sound and gone inside the girl’s mind. How we were able to shift focus from one thing to the other. What do you want to see in a picture was another question that I was dealing with in Highway. What do you want the audiences to see? It’s driven by sound and I was trying to anchor the picture with sound. That is done through sheer sculpting of ambient sounds. It can be anything. It need not necessarily be culturally true. It need not necessarily be the sound of that space. It was anything and everything. It could be wind, it could be some chanting, I picked up anything and everything and thrown it around. We did a lot of recordings. The sound of the truck for me was, you know, I wanted that to be hugely alive. So I did multiple microphoning and just went around with the truck and recorded. The truck was talking to me at many levels, at points. I did it a bit commercial or with a popular sensibility, you may call it. The film per say was a very dark film. I mean, if you look at the one line subject of the film - the story of this film revolves around getting abducted, which means sexually abused. It’s not a mainstream subject, you know, and I wanted the film to be accessible. I wanted people to come and watch it. So, I kept the first half of the film thoroughly realistic. I removed the music - so much music was there. I mean, the kind of economics that work for Rahman, when I remove one piece of music, people think, “Hello, 1000 dollar gone, man! You just muted 1000 dollar, hello!” Q: LG. R: I just didn’t listen to anything. I said, “Do you want people to come and watch this movie? Or do you want this movie to be a music video?” So I made the second half of the movie like a musical. The darkness of the movie is still there, but it’s held back. It doesn’t come across to you as a
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shocking dark movie, but as a film where you feel this can happen to you too. That was the approach in Highway. Q: Coming to a more conceptual or theoretical question - may be a little bit philosophical - but I think I must ask you this question. What do you think does ambience do to cinema – the role of ambience not only in cinema in general but also in your own work? R: Ambience, just to life, for example, why you feel about anything in a particular way in a place? It’s because of the ambient sound. Q: Hm. R: Why do you think you feel calm when you go and sit in the seashore? Why do you think you are calm when you look at mountains in a valley? There’s a Japanese saying, “All deep things are silent.” The ocean, the mountain, and the desert - everything is silent. What happens when we go there? I believe that we hear longer expressions of sound in those places, you know. When you’re in a city like Mumbai or Pune or Kolkata, you feel jittery. Everything is like you know that you’ve to do this, or you’ve to just finish that. You are hearing shorter expressions of sound. You are also hearing high frequency sounds more than low frequency sound. This is not so much of a frequency issue but an expressions’ issue. When you are listening in the valley, birds are longer calls - they are not short calls. All longer expressions of sound are going to put you at ease. We have a constant psychological interaction with what we are hearing from outside, whether or not you are listening. Our body is constantly interacting with what is around us. I’ve come across a very recent study wherein they found that the cells in our body, every cell in a body, are spinning on its own axis the way the earth is spinning. It is termed as some Matrix. I forgot what it was. When you feel pain in a muscle in a part of your body, it means that the equilibrium of the cells in that area is lost. So you apply external heat or something and you put them back to its original spinning frequencies. That’s the modern pain management treatment. I think ours is 8 Hertz to 432 Hertz. This 432 Hertz is a very very strong frequency. That is the equilibrium frequency of this entire universe. That’s the base frequency. If you hear any piece of music that’s tuned to 432 Hertz, you have peace, calm. The new researches are going towards that. The base frequency of all the musical instruments is not 432 - it’s 440 now. Many centuries ago someone has said this and we’ve moved away from this, you know. Q: Hm. R: The old Stradivarius violins that we know today were tuned into 432. There is a whole school of thought that is trying to go back to this base
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frequency of 432. Once you go back to it, everything is at ease, everything is at peace. So for me, it’s a variation of every ambient sound that you are hearing. Your body is constantly interacting with that, and you feel in a particular way in a particular place is because of what you are hearing there. I constantly analyze this. It is this experience that I try to put across to my audience. The difference in cinema and life for me is that I make them “hear” in cinema what they don’t generally hear or listen in life. Everything that you hear in a film is being consciously put in there. Nothing comes accidentally in a film. Everything someone has thought about consciously and put it at that level, at that distance, at that frequency in that place, you know. Geometry is being defined. Today we are talking about 3-D sound you know, immersive sound. For me, sound is already immersive in nature. Sound has this beautiful quality of allowing oneself to go inside a picture. For me whatever happens in the picture – whether it is the so-called three-dimensional, is two-dimensional. It’s stretched from left to right. Your eyes scan it from left to right. So, it cannot go to the three-dimensional plane and that plane is only a projected image, you know. When you see things in real life, it is a two-dimensional picture. But when you hear something, it is already immersive. So the kinds of new experiments that are happening with the sound format in cinema is about what you can make of an already existing immersive element. What is the three-dimensional experience of sound? Is it making an already immersive element more immersive or tangible? But this can only be done with ambient sound and it is not real. The immersive experience that you hear in a cinema is not real. It is making an already immersive element more projected towards an outwardly immersive experience and making you believe that it is as an ever more immersive experience. The real essence of an immersive element is that it is already there and it is constantly interacting with your body. Q: How do you differentiate between the two perspectives when you call it “realistic” and say, “This is not real”? For example, you made a statement that although you wanted to fasten the pace of Highway, you wanted to keep a realistic representation. The immersive quality of sound is not real you said. R: No, that’s not what I said. See, they call a three-dimensional sound experience like a Dolby Atmos or an Auro 3D sound as immersive sound in cinema. They call the three-dimensional sound in a tagline for commercial aspects – as immersive sound. I was talking about that; and you know realism doesn’t exist in cinema. It’s the real problem of cinema; there is only realistic portrayal of things that make you believe it’s real. Q: Hm.
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R: I’m saying sound is immersive. It doesn’t have to be extra immersive as the tagline says. And what according to them is immersive? According to them immersive is a height layer that you are listening to somewhat in one plane, which is the plane of the picture. Okay? My point of view is that sound is already immersive. Even in a mono film, in a mono track also it is immersive because we have always played with sounds that are outside the frames. You look at Tarkovsky’s films, you look at Bresson’s film - they only did that. It had created meanings. Bresson would sweep a time, years, with just one footstep, the way he did in L’argent for example.12 He would sweep time with just one sound of a slap. We as filmmakers always thought what is the sound outside the frame, which can create meaning? We were always working with images as sound. So, for me, sound is immersive in its very experience of it. It’s spherical in nature. It is already allowing the audience to go immersive. Then what is the “immersive” nature of this three-dimensional sound? Are you making an already immersive element more immersive? Or are you going to give me a geometrical expression of sound? What are you doing? If you are going to give me geometrically specified things, I’m saying it may not be real. It is not real. Q: Hm. R: But it is an experience. For example, you hear a sense of height in Auro 3D. They divide the screen into two. There’s always been a 3/2 aspect of the picture screen where the sound is coming from. They have managed to divide that into two planes now. There is a height layer, there is a plane almost on above the screen and goes up over the head. Q: Hm. R: So, what is it that it is doing? It is giving me a sense of height. If I’m in a room, I’m sensing reverb coming from the top. If you are actually in the real experience, you will be hearing it like that. But you are not sensing it like that - you are not perceiving it like that. I’m saying even in a room where I’m just playing with a two-track reverb like the way I played in the last sequence of Highway where the girl is narrating about what happened to her, I just played that. You are still sensing the height. So it is already immersive. Then what are you going to do? What are you doing for making it to be extra immersive? Is it the sense of height? Or is it that I’m able to point the sound there, there or there, (pointing at different direction in the room) as you are doing in Dolby Atmos? Or am I able to pull sound out of the screen? Those were the aspects that I was talking about. Q: How do you see this particular transition from mono to stereo, a small history of stereo, and then to surround and into Atmos?
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R: It’s driven more by business. If you are seriously looking at the philosophical aspects of sound, it’s there. It is there already. Everything else is an exposition. It is a filmic exposition of what is already there. You’re just making me more aware of it. When I do a film in Dolby Atmos, what I feel more kicked about is that I can pull that one layer of ambience just off the screen. Imagine a situation, if you are in the water and there are water lapping’s, which I could put out of the screen, which goes into the first two objects in Dolby Atmos. I think that’s a great possibility, you know. I can just put something up there, in that plane. It’s a great possibility. Like I said, I am building the canvas, the landscape. I have more planes now. Those planes are already there. We have always worked with that. In film, some people have only worked with those planes. I’m just giving a physical expression to it now. That’s what the technology allows me to do. Q: In mono, the sound was coming from behind the screen. So it was more or less connected to the screen space. In stereo, the speakers were a bit widened and the sound was coming from the two corners, more or less. But in surround, sound started to come from the behind as well, while in Atmos or Auro 3D it’s not only surrounding our behind, it’s even on top of our head. How will you explain this transition and widening of the space? R: Like I said, it’s more physical exposition of our experience. It’s like what were we as the human race? We were hunters. We were more tuned to the sound that was coming from behind us because we were hunters. That’s why I respect Bresson the most, what you see is what you don’t hear. What you hear, you don’t see. I worked fully with that concept in Highway. What you see you are not hearing. What this immersive format is trying to do is exploring this possibility of human brain that we are 35% more extra sensitive to the sound that’s coming from behind us. It has a danger in storytelling because suddenly you are elsewhere you know. Q: Yeah, distraction. R: No. How you are able to control this and yet create the feeling that you are enveloped in sound is the possibility of the medium. People have experienced that to a great deal in Gravity, for example.13 Q: Do you have any comments on this extra space - off-screen space? R: That’s what I’m saying - we always worked with them. Sound design is all about that extra space, those images were not there on the screen. We have always dealt with off-screen sounds. Now I am able to concretize it. For me, what sound does to a picture? When you see a picture, it is abstract as an image, it has abstract meaning or there is subtility to that meaning. Let me put it the other way. It is very intangible. Picture
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becomes tangible the moment I start putting sound to it. So, what am I doing by putting sound? I am concretizing the meaning of an abstract image stretched from left to right. You see, now with the new sound, with the new format, I’m able to define geometrical space. I can geometrically play sound. When I’m building that canvas, I can build planes because I have so many sources. Q: Hm. R: The theatre is no more the two dimensional picture that you saw. It’s a whole Parabola. It’s a whole thing that makes the screen. It’s a whole space above you, around you. It’s a whole thing that converges. You are sitting in that Parabola as an audience. I am tossing you around in that geometrical space that I’ve created for you. Q: But this geometrical space was not present in mono. It was merged with – R: It was still there. It was deep, it was in one plane. It was either left or right or far away. In mono the sound was only about whether it was far away from you or was it closer to you. So, we only explored that distance, you know, what is away from us on a horizontal plane. The vertical plane was never experimented. We experimented a little bit though. Even then, the sound was in the horizontal plane but it’s all around you in the surround format. But now we have the height layer and objects that connects you to that. So you are putting the audience into a framework and the triangle that forms with a three-dimensional picture from the twodimensional plane, it just converges within the mind space of an audience through the planes of sound elements we build in this imaginary envelop. So, in picture there’s a triangle, there’s a prism, there’s a cube like this top - like that you know. Even the two dimensional picture, it’s like that in its real meaning. Q: X, Y. R: I don’t know if it’s an X, Y. It’s one corner of a prism. Q: Okay. R: So you are sitting here - that’s a two-dimensional screen. From there it is converging – top, bottom and the sides. So you are seeing a horizontal projection of a picture. If you are watching a three-dimensional picture, you see this angle is formed – convergence. Q: Okay. R: One side of it is a prism. So you are placed against half of the picture prism. From there, I have an envelope like that going behind me and I have an envelope like that going around me. So I’m in a three dimensional
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Parabola in terms of sound. The possibilities are huge in terms of the physicality of sound in cinema but I am still working with that one thing which is what is off that screen which is already immersive. Q: More surrounding speakers means that off the screen sound can be more malleable. Do you think that off the screen sound can be more flexible for designing? R: What is the immediate meaning of that? The immediate meaning is that, you look at that square or rectangle. I can pull that square close to you with sound, just with sound and nothing else. Q: What does that do to the audience? R: They would sense it. Just giving you a small example - imagine that the characters are in water, in the sea or in the middle of an ocean. Say, there’s a wind, you’ll see water ripples, and so the sounds of water lapping. I imagine that the camera is at the water level. Q: Hm. R: There’ll be waves that are coming at you, to the camera. Where will that wave end? If you are a person who is watching that, it will end and go beyond you. So it will extend, lend itself out to the outward plane on the screen. I can place it in that exact position now, diametrically opposite to the camera. I can define that space. Where will the wind go? Do you ever hear the wind in a sea? Q: No. R: Unless it just blows in your ear. But there is. There is a space for that. There is an atmospheric sound, which I can place now. I can pull that out of the screen. Q: But we couldn’t place in mono. R: It was all collapsed into that mono source which would have made it into a mush. Now, with these formats every sound is palatable - every sound has a meaning. I did a recording for a Hollywood film called Gandhi of the Month with a famous actor from Hollywood.14 It’s going to come out soon. I was recording that film in 96K. I was experimenting with the possibilities of 96K, you know. The concept of noise just vanished for me with that, with the 96K capability. Everything is a palpable sound there’s no noise, there’s no mush, there’s no muck. Everything is a sound, which has direct or indirect meanings. So I recorded the whole film in surround sound. I edited that sound and went over to Hollywood to mix that film because I couldn’t mix it here. Nobody had the 96K capability. When I went over there, we remained in 96K till the final mix, then I had
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to go in the analog set up to record the final mix track at 48K for Dolby mastering purposes. Q: Hm. R: I found there was only one studio in Hollywood, which was like the last analog setup with digital capability. I realized that everything is a palpable sound. I started understanding what is number of bits and what does a Fourier analysis do, what a recording system is doing. They are just doing a Fourier analysis. What they are doing is playing with my hearing. There’s no hysteresis anymore like in the analog magnetic medium. There is a hysteresis happening in your ear response. What is it doing? The system is eliminating the number of bits that it doesn’t want or it can’t hold. You have everything in a 96-24 situation. You have more information, you know. It can hold far more information than it can otherwise have. So, when I convert it down from 96 to 48, it’s just leaving out some similar information, which you think is not required. But I am still getting more information than I would have originally gotten. That’s why there is no noise in filmmaking anymore. Everything is sound. Q: LG. R: It was such a huge revelation for me. That is an immersive experience for me. I am going right inside that frame, every frame that I am watching. Q: Does it not give the sound designer or the sound practitioner a greater responsibility to handle sound? R: Oh yes. I mean you have to constantly analyze what is happening, what it is doing. See, what is sound design all about? I am manifesting human emotion everyday with whatever sound that I am putting in. I want them to feel a particular way. What is that feeling? I have to experience that first. I am actually transposing my experience to them and I believe that they’ll experience the same way that I’ve experienced it. So, for me, my experience is the primordial thing, most prime thing. If I experience it then I am sure that the audience will experience it. I have a strong belief and a connection. Q: Take the example of this film Gandhi that you were talking about. If you mix it on mono, how will you do the design? As you said, the surround recordings that you were working for in this film have almost a lack of any noise. How will it sound like if it’s mixed in mono? How will your methodology work in that sense? I’m just trying to understand the very conceptual difference in perception between mono and the surround. R: It’s very simple. It’d become a pointed source information on a simple layman level, become a point of source. What does the ear do then?
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Q: Hm, exactly. R: The ear will ignore what it doesn’t need. If it’s too much information coming from one source, the ear will ignore. That’s what the system would do. When you’ve recorded something in 96-24, you’ll bring it down to 4824 or 48-16. Q: Hm. R: What the number of bits does is that it does not keep the information that is similar. The information that is least needed is being left out because there’s no capability, there is no space to keep it. This, I feel, is directly related to the ear response. Ear is also doing the same thing. What happens in a surround situation, in a surround format? When all the channels are with 85 dB SPL, what happens? What would you hear? Q: I’ll hear the spatial representation, not only coming from one source but different sources. R: Everything is zero dB. Will you be hearing everything as zero dB? Where is your attention? What did Dolby do as a system in its encoding process when everything was 100%? It left out a few things that the ear wouldn’t notice at all. It was very intelligent coding - encoding and decoding system - because the information has to go into 24 frames, you know, every bit of information was recorded between the frames, in between the sprockets of a filmstrip. So, you have one block, four blocks in one frame. It had to eliminate a few things. When you are doing linear PCM encoding, like in a CD for example, or in a DVD like the way DTS does, it doesn’t have to do that. It doesn’t have constraints of space. Now let me just take this question backward. Why do we still feel those old recordings are beautiful than these latest digital recordings? Why does analog sound so beautiful? Q: Hm. R: It had a problem. The problem was the sweetness. Magnetic recording technology had its own issues. Optical recording technology had tremendous issues. The lowest level of optical recording was fighting against the noise floor of the system, for the photographic noise, the running noise of the photographic medium. The Valve couldn’t move below a certain frequency. Below 80Hz probably you’ve never heard in films. It also couldn’t vibrate beyond a certain number of frequencies. Similarly, the magnetic head couldn’t be thinner than certain thinness. So, in magnetic recording technique, it’s all about a varying magnetic flux as per the incoming sound energy. You know there is something called hysteresis, where the curve starts - it goes up, comes down. It’s like a dolphin’s face, like a penguin in more of that sense, I’m talking about the
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graphic representation of a recording process. So the hysteresis, a magnetic flux, is a curve. Because of the hysteresis curve, whatever is recorded through magnetic medium had bend at low end and high end. It did bend itself. If you look at the ear response, the logarithmic curve quite like the exposure curve in film, it also has a logarithmic expression. It’s quite close to the hysteresis curve, at least in shape, if not anything else. So, the analog sounded somehow very close to our ear response, close to reality. Q: Hm. R: But when the digital technology came in, there was no hysteresis, nothing. We were very plain and simple, blunt people - 20 Hertz to 20 KHertz people. Faithfully recorded and faithfully reproduced, which we are not used to. “Hello, what are these new things that I am hearing?” So, all the digital recording sounded clinical, even though that is the faithful reproduction, it was not something that we are used to. Q: Hm. R: It’s like you listen to a concert in person and you listen to the same concert played through a system - it’s too different. Q: Hm. R: What is missing? Q: Information is not missing. R: What is missing, in the second case, was the reflected sound. Q: Okay. R: So, what happens in a digital recording? They are all in zeroes and ones. How does the sound come through from all those zeroes and ones? Our ear makes some approximations. It is like persistence of vision. Have you ever heard of a CD forwarded? Do you hear blocks? Do you hear that sound? You don’t hear it when you play at normal speed. So there is no persistence. All the corners are bent. So you hear what is called the persistence of hearing. So, everything is an approximation. How good you are to make that approximation is how everything is, the perception of everything is about. So when all this information is collapsed into one - so much information and some information are similar – which will add up into a mush. What you listen from a pointed source, it needs not necessarily be. That dog is a pointed source but it is spread across a spectrum, you know. It’s pointed because it is giving me a sense of direction. It is only a sense of direction. It’s hinting me about a geometrical space. That’s what the new formats are trying to do. You asked me what an ambient sound does. What does it do? Let’s analyze its
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functionality. What is sound in cinema? For me, cinema by itself is a continuum of time and space. Q: Hm. R: The sound is a temporal element and ambience is directly the time. Any piece of ambience that you put, it immediately gives me temporal information. I’m not coming into the anthropological aspect of it. Let’s keep that discussion aside at the moment. Temporal element, simple. It can be time of the day - day or night. It can be seasons. It can be spaces. It can give information about an acoustic space – a cave, a hall, a stadium. So, it’s constantly reminding me what is the space and what is the temporal element related to that. If you are able to conceive this as an element of design, like the way a brush stroke is designed, I mean it’s the concept of painting. There can be color, there can be hues, there can be light and shadow, or there can be strokes. We can pick up anything. You can pick up any of these aspects of an ambient sound and conceive it as an element of design and work with it. But this is something that you don’t experience. I mean you don’t realize it in real life. But you are constantly experiencing it. What do we do with ambient sound in cinema? We are trying to de-codify our experiences and putting it across to you as a new experience. We do it constantly from a pointed source to a geometrical space. That is what technology allows us to do and that is a transition. Q: Do you think that temporal aspect of ambience is transformed into a more spatial aspect in surround sound? R: Oh, yes! Like I said, I can have a sense of height in a room or sides even floors in the new format I developed for the film 2.O, called SRL 4D. Q: But in mono, it would be just the temporal aspect of it highlighted. R: It would just be an immediate meaning. Q: Yes. In surround sound it becomes not just an immediate meaning but something more beyond that. R: I can emulate a perception just by the way of hearing. When you go to a cinema hall, I am actually making you listen by virtue of hearing. But in real life you are just hearing, but not listening. Q: Hm, yeah. It is to make the audience attentive or to make them coming to their attention? R: Everything is brought to them. “Okay, now feel this way.” This is what the space is; this is what the thing is. The pin has fallen, you know. I am making you feel every time, almost creating an address system for every shot. I need not necessarily be true to that image, only look at works for that image. A glass fall may not be the most correct or the most perfect
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sound of a glass falling. What suits that picture is the right sound. What we are constantly doing with sound is we are making you believe in a way. We are making the audience feel that there couldn’t have been any other sound but this and that is very subjective. As soon as I am able to make you feel that there couldn’t have been any other sound, I’m done. That need not necessarily be the correct, the perfect, the true, or the genuine sound. Rain need not necessarily be rain itself. It can even be sugar falling on a paper. Q: LG. R: We cheat all the time. We are business people at one level who are constantly manifesting your emotions. We are constantly cheating you to put you in a make belief world. Q: In that sense sync sound is more faithful than dubbed sound. R: See, sync sound is something that is directly related to an actor’s performance. What do I sense from a sync sound? An actor’s performance. How he or she is reacting to an acoustic environment. There are three things that I’m dealing with – there’s an ambient noise, over which an actor’s performance, and the behavior of an actor’s performance within that acoustic environment. If I don’t have an understanding of these three elements, I can’t be faithful to an actor’s performance in the act of recording it. But I keep manipulating it even in a sync sound situation. I do de-noising - we don’t want those “unwanted” sound - noise is a relative thing here. I might add more elements. I have done a less than 2% of denoising in a film like Highway. Q: Okay. Less than 2%! R: What did I do? I added more elements. I bent things around - an already embedded temporal element, you know. So, you didn’t perceive what is actually embedded there. I masked it. When I needed to take it out completely or didn’t want the audience to hear that embedded space, I denoised it. What is the possibility of an ambient sound in cinema apart from the immediate meanings of ambient sound? I can control the drama. If I just take out ambience completely when two people are talking, I can isolate them. Or I can just throw them into the ocean, just by putting every sound possible around them. So, philosophically speaking, I have the ability to close and open spaces, which an audience will immediately perceive. Q: Hm. R: You will immediately feel it. We make the audience feel it immediately. It is over a period of time, in real life. Even though we’re working with
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very direct immediate temporal element, we basically, are shrinking the possibility of that temporal element and are constantly expanding time and shrinking it. We are constantly playing with time. I think the only person who understood this is Einstein, when he talked about relativity. Q: How do you see the future of working with sound in cinema primarily giving attention to the sense of spatialization at the hand of a sound practitioner? R: It’s like what I said earlier - only the formats are going to change. I am going back to what I said in the very beginning. Sound is already immersive in its experience. You don’t have to do anything. That’s what we Indians believe in - primordial sound. There was one thing called Aryanaadam - the first sound, which is “Om”. There was something preceded by silence and followed by more silence. We are the only civilization who believes in it. My Oscars speech was about that. I come from a country and civilization that has given the universe a sound. A sound preceded by silence, followed by more silence and that sound is “Om”. That’s why I thrust upon that. Today, we are sadly the only civilization in the world, which has completely forgotten where we came from. Q: Probably the kind of loud monitoring in studios doesn’t allow you to think - they don’t allow you to realize or maybe respect the silence, which is beyond that immediacy. But I am slowly worrying a bit as to whether I am taking a lot of your time. R: No, it’s ok. I mean you’ve come from very far. My conversation should be useful for you. I don’t know if I am making any sense at all. Q: Yes, of course. R: I hope it was worth it. Q: Very much. These questions often appear in my mind and they don’t find a satisfactory answer, but just more thinking. Meeting you and talking to you is like putting light on these questions and trying to figure out the contours of the questions. Then the answer is appearing slowly. That’s what I’ll be working on in my book - to frame these answers and talking to you will be instrumental in finding that direction. But I think not only the way sound is made in the industry, probably these thoughts, these concepts and ideas – not only technical thoughts but philosophical thoughts - I believe, are also necessary at a certain point. R: Whatever I am speaking to you probably is not related to my daily practice. But when I am doing something, I am aware of these things. I am doing the things in a certain way because I am aware of it, you know. My
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awareness came from the practice. I am consciously doing it and sometimes I go purely by instinct. I want that sound. Some sounds come to me when I watch some visuals and for me, the whole film becomes a search for that one sound that has come to me. I don’t theorize it then. Q: Okay, you are instinctive. R: Yeah. I was recording in deep jungle in the middle of the night when I was doing Saawariya.15 I was just standing in a pond and recording and I was listening to the sound – in stereo. It was post-midnight, you know. I started listening and I realized that every creature in this universe has a frequency plane. There were layers and layers. There were the crickets and other creatures, the layers of people all on the ground. There were other sounds, which were slightly off the ground. There were sounds, which were slightly above the ground. There were sounds of the wind that were surrounding me and there were expressions of that wind, like the leaves rustling and everything. So, there’s this whole globe, which has its own sound and every creature has been given its own frequency layer. It’s in such a beautiful harmony, you know. I have my place when I am aware of that harmony. I suddenly heard one fish just plonk out of the pond. I was recording near a lake and it just came out. Suddenly, all my assistants vanished. I noticed some movement across the lake looking at me, like two glowing eyes. I was not bothered by it. He probably looked at me, stood there. I was in this communion, and it retracted. Suddenly it starts to drizzle and I wound up; that’s when I realized my assistants were not with me. When I came back to the car I found my assistants were shivering in fear. They said, “Sir, there was a tiger there! You don’t listen to anything we say. We won’t come to work with you. We’ll die!” I said, “Nothing will happen.” When I was recording and I was aware of this whole thing this whole universe, this whole earth, I realized that this whole bloody huge piece of mass is spinning on its own axis. And it’s also moving in its elliptical path with a huge sound, which we are not hearing, you know. The whole energy is the sound. When I became aware of it, I’m a part of it and being one with that, in that state of mind there is no relationship between a pray and a predator, maybe that’s why the tiger retracted or he found no threat or any meat in me. Saawariya was inspired by Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer based on Dostoevsky’s book White Nights and it was about four nights.16 So, it was extremely important for me to find those four nights in the film - one prior to the rain, and one post rain and the night that is snowing. The biggest kick for me was that to find these four nights through sound. When the film was released, somebody called me from New York and said, “I heard so many things. And I am hearing, I know what you are working with.” For me, at that moment the
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conversation was complete. I am trying to make these conversations in all of my films. If someone in some part of the universe hears that and calls me back and says, “I’ve heard it”, then that conversation is complete for me, you know. I am aware of what is binding us in a very molecular level to a level of the universe. That’s what makes the planet Earth so special, so damn special. Q: Absolutely. R: It is these understandings of me what I’m trying to transpose. Q: Another question coming to my mind now is the sense of place. Saawariya is rather a fictional place. R: It doesn’t matter for me. Q: Okay. R: Take the concept of romantic poetry - there was a night, two lovers met, and there was moonlight. Now, where the fuck the moonlight comes from, I care a damn. Q: LG. R: There has to be a “Kalpanic” (imaginary) thing in our life, that’s what dreams are made of. If there is no imagination, what are we left with? Why do we have to put meaning, why do we have to specify? Where does the abstract come from? And what is the sense of art if there is no abstract? Where is a sense of the other? I was most disappointed when Saawariya didn’t do well. And more than anybody, it affected me the most. I thought this way - what Bresson has done, what Visconti has done, and what Sanjay has done within the realm of Indian Cinema. What is Indian entertainment? I am going back to Dhrupad. Every entertainment in our country, in our civilization, is centered around a temple. Every practice is musical or otherwise. Classical art was practiced around a temple. It was rather called a temple art. Everything emanated from that. The other end of it was the folk tradition. Everything emanated from the hut, everything emanated from the roots, from the earthiness. These two things can never meet. They can only go parallel and we know that two parallel lines never meet. But they will meet at infinity. It is your and my purpose to find that infinity. The Indian entertainment industry as we know today is evolved from a dance-drama tradition, which is so profound for me. You know Uday Shankar has done a Bengali cinema? Do you know about Kalpana?17 Q: Yes. R: I have seen it with my own eyes, you know. I have grown up in a small village in Kerala, where every entertainment was centered around the
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temple. Every activity, the festivities were around the temple, you know. We all lived under a tree. Every temple had a tree. We sat under the tree and exchanged ideas, exchanged life. We saw, and we enjoyed everything under a tree. Ghatak said, “Go and find your tree.” That’s what the opening shot of Meghe Dhaka Taara18 does to me. Everyone has a tree, Valmiki found one, Buddha found one, the Prophet found his own tree, Guru Nanak found his own tree too. Every sage, every wise man found it. It’s a part of our living. Every sense of that comes from it. So, when a very alien Russian novel like Saawariya with a story of two lovers meeting over a bridge and falling in love, came, that was something I was waiting for. He transposed that against the dance-drama tradition of Indian cinema. I thought it was fantastic. It is so damn difficult to take Dostoevsky, to control him, to put him in these pockets. He is not palpable. I think it was too much of an art school film. You take Four Nights of a Dreamer, you take Visconti’s, and you take Saawariya. Tell me which one you liked. Tell me very culture specifically. Would you like the non- committal European subtleties and the grace? I want to achieve grace, like what you see in Christianity. That was a more direct meaning of Visconti and the Hollywood version of it, or something that is very based on dance-drama tradition. I think like an Indian, I like the subtlety of the Europeans, but that is very academic. Q: Yeah, it’s a question of choice. It’s also a question of taste. But from that tradition, dance-drama tradition, I think, since I have seen the film, Saawariya has a mis-en-scene that might be a little distracting in some sequences. R: See, I am not bothered about what I am seeing. The discussion is not about what you see or how you see. Q: Why did it fail? R: It failed against kitsch. Q: Hm. R: Om Shanti Om was kitsch.19 Q: Yeah. R: It was not a film that could have been pitched against kitsch. For me, that’s not a failure. Q: Commercially which are the more satisfactory films for you in that sense? R: It’s like that one question that Danny Boyle had asked me when I first met him. “So, which of your films should I watch?” I told him to watch any film. There will be me in it. I have put myself in every film that I’ve
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done. Be it like a pathetic Sanjay Gupta film or it’s the most artistic film of Buddhadev Dasgupta, I am there in it. I oscillate between them and I like that. It’s just far more difficult to do a mainstream commercial and to make it work because people are coming with fixed ideas. It’s damn easy to please artistic audiences because they have no fixed ideas. Anything may work with them. A mainstream audience comes with a fixed idea. You have to break them. It is a far more difficult job. You need spine to do that. Only one thing works there – which is commerce. Where do you find your artistry in that? That is why a film like Musafir20 or Zinda21 works for me, you know. I made it work. Q: The recent films are embracing sync sound more and more. R: I will say this with the same seriousness with which we did it in my early times. I am still working on it, to bring in a change in listening pattern. At the risk of sounding old I say this, It is not the same enthusiasm or seriousness with which we went about changing the perspective. Everybody is struggling for his or her own space; it’s no more about a paradigm shift of perspective. There was something new then. There was certain sanctity. Today it has become a convenience because you don’t have to call the artist again for dubbing, it has becomes a glorified pilot recording for 90% of the films. There are very few people who are doing live sound work - there is still a lack of rigorous practice. Why would people go and watch a film like Highway again and again? I am still getting Facebook updates for the film. That’s because they sensed something. I did a Scandinavian film called Liv & Ingmar. 22 The film opened in Oslo. People gave a standing ovation to us after the film was done. Many of them walked up to me and said “We’ve never heard Liv Ullmann like this.” They were bang on - that is exactly what I had worked on. I wanted to hear her the way I hear her. She was my fascination - the only woman whom I was in love with. Rather two women I was in love with, apart from cinema, when I was at the film school. I never thought that there is space for anybody else in my life. For those three years that I was at the film school, I never gave that space to anybody else in my life other than cinema. Two women swept my imagination - Liv Ullmann and Monica Vitti. I was meeting her, I was sitting with her, I sat in Bergman’s house, and I had lunch with her. I couldn’t imagine what was happening to my life. Q: LG. R: I wanted to hear her - an intangible beauty - with my imagination. I recorded her specially and a bit differently and I worked with every word of hers. I tweaked and corrected. They said, “We have never heard Liv
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Ullmann like this.” It’s like saying, “Hey we never heard Lata Mangeshkar like this ever before” That, I think, was the biggest gratification of my artistry. She is so real, she is so endearing - that came from the sound alone. You must watch it. I have redesigned sound of Bergman’s films in that film. There are snippets of Bergman’s films, which were in mono. I played them in surround. I re-shaped every sound. I went and stayed there for a week and understood what a Scandinavian landscape is. I heard the Baltic Sea. It was different from the Arabian Sea. It was a huge unlearning. See, temporal elements are so different in terms of its texture. Baltic Sea is very frothy; it is sticky. It’s the same sea sound. It may not have any difference in meaning, but it has a different sense of perception. Q: Did you find the urban sounds different from those in India? R: There is too much order. It immediately reflects the society to me. Everything is in order. Everything is in chaos in India, complete chaos. Q: LG. R: If you come to Bombay, a symphony of sounds is waiting for you. It’s the way you find your way in a city like Bombay. But there is an order in that chaos. For me, the whole Indian filmmaking is finding that order in that chaos. Q: But what can explain the use of so much music and the dance sequences? Okay! I understand the history of background music… R: It’s there in Hollywood also. There is wall-to-wall music. The thing is how you deal with it. Now what is the problem with music? Why do you have so much of problem with music? What is wrong in it? I have a problem with it, for it gives me immediate emotion, the immediate drama. Whereas in filmmaking we want to control the drama. The whole experience of film is that we are dealing with somebody’s lifetime, where the narrative structure is going up and down. I want the audience to travel with it. The music doesn’t allow me to travel with it at times. It just takes you in. Go inside, go, see this now, you feel this now types. The whole idea of filmmaking, every masters of filmmaking have tried only one thing – how to control the drama. Ozu controlled it by just placing the camera. Kurosawa would find it in cutting. Jancsó would find it in movement, Tarkovsky found it in movement and sound. Everyone is controlling drama or simplifying it. Here we don’t simplify it. Hello, this is it! Q: LG. R: That’s what mainstream Hollywood also does, but in a very polished way, very sophisticated way. Sophistication is a society. We have no sophistication. We are just plain and simple people. But there is an order
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within that chaos, if you want to find it you got to go deep within us, like the way a Dhrupad singer finds the wandering notes. My whole artistic endeavor is to find it. Q: Order, okay. But then, you have ambience in your hand. R: Oh, I work with anything. I work with sound design, I work with sound effects, and I work with ambience. I work with Foley. I did a film called Chittagong.23 It is a recent film. Everything is created in the studio. I did a period film called Pazhassi Raja24, for which I won the National Award. Not a single strip of sound in it I recorded from location, or anywhere. Nothing - it came naked to me. I created everything in the studio. So, everything is my tool. You may probably get more insight about me if you read my book. How and where I come from, you know. It’s called Sounding Off.25 Q: I read about it on the Internet. Is it available in any shop? R: You’ll get it in any bookshop. You have to go to the autobiographical section, because unfortunately it is being termed as an autobiography. You may not find it in the main display. You can also order it on Flipkart, you’ll easily get it. I have discussed at length about the Indian film industry, you know. It will help you out, especially for all these questions that you are seeking answers to. Q: Well, I think I really wasted a lot of your time, valuable working time. But then, I guess you probably also enjoyed talking to me in a way. R: LG. A small break R: What I’ve tried in sound art is trying to understand what is motion. When does a still film become a moving image? What is the sound doing? What is a temporal element? There was this visual artist friend of mine who was working with still images of the Bombay riot. He shot those images with a movie camera. But it was still. He just placed the camera and was shooting still images on sticks. It’s from one image to the other, to the other. It’s a 15-minute film and it slightly moved only after may be 7/8 minutes of it. Q: Did it become a moving image then? R: Suddenly, the still image had become a moving image. Anyway, what the film is talking about is a different thing. But what came to me is that there’s a very thin line between a still image and a moving image and that thin line is where you start perceiving it. When does this still image start moving? That’s a very thin line also. If that is the case, then what is the temporal element of that? So, I’m watching a still image, which is frozen
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in time. It’s the 1992 riot, you know, those images. So, what is the difference between a still image and a moving image? The time is frozen in a still image and is the temporal element frozen when I’m watching that time, that still image? Q: Hm. R: Or is there a temporal element? Q: I think it creates a premise for a perception of temporality. R: What is a temporal element of those images when I’m looking at it now? So, that is what I worked through. Q: With the sound? R: Yes, with sound. It’s not about sound, it’s about the impressions of it. What I did was I took this picture and I watched it repeatedly and realized that, “I’m watching the 92 riots!” When I’m watching that, I’m reacting to the sound. I’m hearing 100%. So, the temporal element of that picture is the sound that I’m hearing now as well, the same tone. Q: Hm. R: It’s quite similar to what I spoke to you earlier in the day about breath being connected to the images that we’re watching. I took this image to many different places and watched it. I’ve recorded it while watching. Q: Are they different spaces? R: Spaces - yes. Inside a studio or in a room. Q: Wow, very interesting. R: In different ways, different places which have their own time element. I have asked people, my Foley guys, to just watch it. I recorded the first watch. This guy moved while they were watching it. By end of the day, I was left with 15 or 20 such watching sessions – a full 15-minute audio. Then I extracted impressions of one’s feelings about those images and created a soundtrack out of it. I drew some shapes. Suddenly, when I squeezed and processed it trying to extract things out of it, some loud thumping sound, which I had heard, which had accidentally gotten recorded during one of the projections - it reminded me of train sounds. It had nothing to do with trains. Q: Is it the texture of the sound? R: Hm. So our perception is extremely complex, if you analyze it. It’s so beautiful and so complex. You can draw meanings out of it. You know a pinhole camera, right? Q: Hm.
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R: If you’re seeing an image through a pinhole camera, what is the sound that corresponds to that image? Things like that. I’ve done three or four of such small works. The series is called The Song of an Island. Three such series are there. They have been shown in galleries like MoMA and other places. Q: Okay. R: It was shown in Rome. It ran for almost three months at Galleryske, Bangalore. So I’ve been practicing sound art. What I essentially do in cinema is actually that. I did a Marathi film this year. Those guys said, “Look I don’t want music in my film. Sound is music. Whatever you do is what I want. If you want to use music, please go ahead. I won’t question that.” Q: What was the name of the film? R: A Rainy Day.26 I was scared. I mean it’s the biggest gratification for sound in this country, but no music! Are you sure? I realized that natural sound is so boring beyond a point. I mean, in the whole film it is raining. This whole film is somebody’s dream and it is raining in the whole dream. So, two hours of rain, rain and rain. Rain is a constant sound and beyond a point it is like white noise. How will you keep the audience interested? What are the impressions of rain? I had gone into that. Basically, that whole film was sound art for me. I can just take any sequence from the film and show it to you. At the beginning of the film, there is complete thorough raining - the most natural sound. Other than that, the film is completely recreated sound, you know, but not electronically. Q: Hm. R: Sound that are being processed, modified, extracted from natural impressions of sound, even voices don’t make sense too much. Q: Is it possible to watch this film? Rainy Day? R: Yeah, possible. I don’t know if the DVD is out, but it will be running somewhere. I just won the Marathi Zee Cine Award for that film. I realized that only regional cinema, and not mainstream Hindi cinema, has the guts to do something like that. Indian cinema today is actually regional cinema. It is the spinal cord of Indian cinema.
Notes 1
Duration: 02:01:19(1) & 00:10:07(2) Name Abbreviations: Resul Pookutty – R; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG
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See: http://www.app.eternalmewar.in/collaboration/music/dhrupad/tradition.aspx Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle 2008) 4 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 1996) 5 Sunshine (Danny Boyle 2007) 6 Ghajini (A. R. Murugadoss 2008) 7 WALL·E (Andrew Stanton 2008) 8 The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan 2008) 9 Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster 2008) 10 Black (Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2005) 11 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 12 L'Argent (Robert Bresson 1983) 13 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) 14 Gandhi of the Month (Kranti Kanade 2014) staring Harvey Keitel among others. 15 Saawariya (Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2007) 16 Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson 1971) 17 Kalpana (Uday Shankar 1948) 18 Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960) 19 Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan 2007) 20 Musafir (Sanjay Gupta 2004) 21 Zinda (Sanjay Gupta 2006) 22 Liv & Ingmar (Dheeraj Akolkar 2012) 23 Chittagong (Bedabrata Pain 2012) 24 Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja (T. Hariharan 2009) 25 Pookutty, Resul, and Natarajan, Baiju (2012). Sounding Off: The Memoirs of an Oscar-winning Sound Designer. New Delhi: Penguin. 26 A Rainy Day (Rajendra Talak 2014) 3
CHAPTER 16 AJITH A. GEORGE1
Q: I would like to start with a little bit of background about your coming to sound in cinema. How did sound interest you? When did you start working with sound and why was that? A: Okay! So… I am basically from Kerala – a village near Cochin, I mean some 100 kilometers from Cochin. It is called Thiruvalla. I have less connection with the industry also, but I will come to that later. I was closely associated with church choir activities and all. Though not a member of the church, yet I always used to wonder, “What this guy is doing, sitting there?” And I always used to wonder, “Oh God! How could he manage to learn so many notes?” So, every time a programme happened, I would be somewhere next to him as an observer but you are not allowed to go there. Q: How old were you? A: I was in the 8th or 10th class. But you were never allowed to go there. Okay fine! This became a curiosity. Like every curiosity that is there well within you, this was going on and I was doing my studies and all. After graduation, there was a big dilemma. Someone said that you should go for computers, BCA. During that time LBA Centre was conducting some kind of courses on computer applications and all. I was a little inclined to doing my LLB, because I thought that was my line. My uncle is John Sankaramangalam. One day, we were just casually talking. Something that is good about him is that he is a person who can identify your weak points. He is very good with that because of years of teaching. He had casually thrown a point at me saying, “there is nobody from the next generation in our family in the cinema industry. Are you not interested?” I said, “I am not a musician. I am not a painter.” So we presume that you have to have either a music sense to become a sound engineer or a musician to become a sound engineer. Either a painter or photographer can become a cinematographer. Or writer can only become… I mean the biggest difference between today and 25 years ago is that, that time we did not have any knowledge of this. When we take some examples like John
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Abraham or… John Abraham was also from my college. He was a writer, an arts club secretary. He used to write stories and all. So, only those kind of people can become… It is like a monopoly of those people. Then, he said, “Okay, there is a department called Sound Engineering, you do not have to be… Just try and see if you get it then fine, otherwise do what you want to do.” That is how I just landed into this. It was very unlike a lot of people who say that it was a dream when they were born. Very accidentally I had come into this particular profession. I cleared the entrance and went for the orientation. After going for the orientation class in FTII, I was completely confused because people were like bombarding. I was like, “I don’t know any of this. What am I going to do here?” And you could only see students with beard and all, some intellectuals with completely lost looks. I did not belong to all these. How will I fit in, I thought. But somehow, I got through in the interview also. I still remember, Narendra Singh was the external expert. He asked me a question on the last day, “Ajith, why are you keeping quiet? You are not talking at all when all the other people are talking.” I said, “I don’t know anything about this. I have no clue what these people are talking about. I was quite confused listening to all this. So I am shocked.” He just looked at me for some time and he just left. When I got the admission, I was still confused whether to go or not, whether this was going to suit me. The name is Sound Engineering but it was completely… That is the biggest problem. The name is too confusing, Sound Engineering… LG. That year there was one Sound Engineering student who came from Orissa. She thought this is another kind of an engineering course and in the group discussion stage she said, “I am not joining, I will just go through the whole process but I will not join because it is not the course which I expected.” I came back. The confusion was still there and I was thinking should I join or not. The biggest question then was that if I don’t join what will be the excuse that I will give to my parents, my uncle and others. That became a big point in front of me. Every time I was thinking, “What is the excuse that I will give.” I went to Pune and got admitted. I had seen a few of my cousins writing entrance examination and failing. One of my cousin brothers was a painter. He was very desperate to get into cinematography but he never got. We started thinking that all the neighbours will start saying, “He is overthinking.” I was wondering what to do. Again, I spoke to my uncle John. He said, “Don’t worry. Just go to Trivandrum. Devadas is there. He is the chief sound recordist of Chitranjali Studios. Just go there, have a look at it and then decide.” So after two days, I went to Trivandrum and met this legend in sound. He is no more now.” Q: What is his name?
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A: P. Devadas. He has done lot of films for Adoor2 and Aravindan.3 So, I met him and introduced myself. He said, “Sit. You want to have tea? Okay… Give him one tea.” I was shivering. I mean you have only seen his name in films. That was the first time I was meeting someone so famous. Then I asked him, “Sir, I got admission in Pune Film Institute but I am confused.” He asked, “What happened?” I said, “I don’t know anything. When I went there, the way people were expressing, I don’t know whether I will be able to cope up with that.” He gave me a statement and that was a triggering point. He told me one thing, “You are going to study, right? The Institute has chosen you and they need to teach. Always go with the pot empty so that you can collect more. If you go half full or full, there is nothing more that you can collect. You are empty. Go there and you take everything in, collect everything. Then you decide. Because you have three years of time to decide if you want to do something else.” This literally triggered me. While I was returning, I thought, “Correct. The Institute is supposed to teach me. Why should I go to an Institute after knowing everything?” Q: Yes, like an empty pot. With innocence. A: I don’t know anything. But FTII, definitely I will tell you… Whatever I am … One, I should thank Mr. John Sankaramangalam, second is FTII. that is where I saw the world of cinema. I had never seen a Tarkovsky film or a Bunuel film. I had never got an opportunity to see earlier. But there, I realized that cinema has got another dimension. It was a big eye opener. Like after sleeping for long, you suddenly wake up. Every day, I was watching cinema even though I did not understand. I was like, “okay, something will happen.” I was an observer and assisting a lot of seniors in their projects. That’s how I learnt. After passing out… That was the biggest transition time. 1995 was the biggest transition time from analog to digital. We had gone to Chennai on a study tour. Somehow, intentionally I was thinking that I should work in Chennai, in an industry which speaks my language. I wanted to do at least some films in my language. I always thought little differently. Everybody is going to Bombay, why can’t I go to Chennai? That’s as an equally potent industry, even though it is not as big as Bombay but capable. So, we had a study tour to Chennai. There we went to Media Artists, Real Image. We visited quite a few studios. We went to Prasad. I found out that they need people. I spoke to S. Shridhar, who was the chief engineer of Media Artists. We had a long discussion. He said, “If you are interested, join.” In Prasad also, Arun Bose sir said, “If you are interested, join, because we have some openings.” I said, “I will tell you.” That time the confusion was that… During the entire second and third year, I used to go to Bombay for some
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work of sync sound, location sound, where the payment was quite high. You got 800 to 1,000 rupees for a paid work. If you join a studio you only get 4,000 or 5,000 rupees as a beginner. So, all these confusions were there because you couldn’t anymore depend on your family for giving money. Then, I was there in Bombay for sometime doing some work for Satheesh P. M. and Namita Nair and one day, I realized that this is not the stuff I want to do. Resul only took me to Bombay and handed some work. I told Namita, “This is not what I want to do. Somehow I am not seeing myself doing this. So, I am going to South. I am going to join a studio.” Then she said, “Why don’t you join Sahara? Why don’t you join…” Anyway, it was like a new experiment. Let it start from where I want to start. I went to Chennai and Senthil Kumar, the owner of Real Image. Before coming to Chennai only, I had a conversation with him. That time DTS revolution was happening and Real Image was the only studio where DTS revolution was happening. I went there. Around 11 – 11:30 am, Mr. Shridhar came and introduced me, “So this is Ajith. He would like to work.” Then Senthil told me, “You want to join? When you want to join?” I said, “I can join from the 1st of March.” It was March I think. That is how I joined Media Artists and Media Artists is what I am now. One thing I believe – I used to share this with all the students of the Film Institute – where you work, your first work… or where you start your work, it determines your career. It’s very, very important. Q: Yes, because you develop a certain sort of network, a certain sort of method, approach… A: I mean, it is like… going to Chennai was a struggle. I realised that after going only. Chennai was completely filled with Adyar Film Institute pass outs and you were always like an alien. Nobody talks to you, you cannot understand the language and nobody can talk your language because they are only Tamil. My only asylum was VGP Studio where Balram and Hari were. They were FTII passouts. Till 5 o'clock, somehow I used to manage at Media Artists then go to VGP stay there up to 11:30 – 12 am and go crash. That was my routine. I still remember meeting Mr. Balram before I joined Media Artists. One night, we were having an usual session. I told Mr. Balram that I am confused. He said, “No, we won’t work together. Your speed and my speed will clash. It is very difficult to gel. Prasad is like a government office. Don’t go there. If you join there, till up to the age of 56 you will be where you are. You can’t do miracles over there. Media Artists is the most technologically equipped place but the question is how well will you gel with Shridhar. He is a passion driven man. It is only his passion which made him a sound recordist or sound engineer. He doesn’t sleep. He only works on and on. You have to have that speed.
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Otherwise you will fail.” That’s something… because I always wanted to do things like… I don’t have that patience. That was the transformation of me. Because that’s the only studio in India where I would be lucky to say that… people from Bombay used to come and wait, for Shridhar. And I have seen only one engineer in India like that. I heard this about Mangesh Desai. People used to wait for him. And Ramanathan sir in Chennai… People used to wait for him but I have not seen them. But I have seen this with my own eyes. People used to come and wait for H. Shridhar’s time and date. And Media Artists in the initial days of DTS was the only one studio in India to do DTS. We were doing something around 7 to 8 films a month. 24 hour work was happening. Q: That was 2000… A: No, that was 1996-97. That is the studio where music recording was happening, mixing of films were happening, stereo mix was happening and 5.1 mix was happening. Everything was happening in digital. Q: So you started in the digital realm? A: I learnt everything in analog and I had only seen a DAT machine, which was digital, in the Institute. But, the day I came out I started working on ADAT, Hi8 and MODs. A: How did you adapt yourself? Q: Very simple. If you know recording, if you know what sound is, this is only a tool. If you believe or if you are inclined to a tool more, then you are lost when you don’t have that tool. This is only a tool. Any recording machine, any recording format is only a tool. If you know the sound, like, this is how a violin sounds like, then this is just an intermediate chain where you are printing it or where you are archiving it. Any recording machine is just an archiving machine and if you depend too much on that… That is something which I follow in my life. It is like a new phone coming. If today you have this phone, tomorrow another phone will come. Within 4-5 hours we adapt to that, we start using it. It’s as simple as that because every machine is man-made. If man can make something, man can learn that also. That’s what I believe. I don’t rely too much on machines and I don’t have this adamant passion about some machines. Q: There is a change of texture. For example, in magnetic recording you have a particular kind of texture and the materiality of the recording, like, tape. But in digital, you don’t have that sense of materiality. Everything is invisible. Everything is binary. Everything is like… Maybe in the earlier days, as people argue, digital sounded a little dead.
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A: See, I want to tell you one thing. It is a kind of adaptability and we are getting used to. If you buy new shoes, for the first 3 days it is little problematic for your feet. But on the 4th day, you are comfortable. We all still believe… and all the engineers in India who are working professionals, people inclined towards sound - all of them accept the reality that anything recorded on magnetic tape cannot be replaced with digital sound. That is purely because of the tape saturation and there is some kind of an algorithm which is working inside. But that is one part. What are we trying to achieve? We are trying to achieve this. That is where your skill is. You know bass guitar used to sound like this if you recorded it on magnetic tapes and you are always trying to achieve that. And that trying will go on till your death, till you are in this field of work. That is your reference. You have a reference… It is like how you tune a guitar. There are so many gadgets to tune. But after checking with the gadget, you take out the gadget… Ah, now the tune is right. It’s your ears. For any engineer who is in the field of cinema or music, - forget about everything - his primary gadgets are his ears. Tune that properly and then everything else are just tools. Today, you will have an analog mixer, tomorrow you will have a digital mixer and day after tomorrow you will have a workstation. It will just keep on changing. But if your ears tell you don’t… I will tell you one thing. I don’t go by the meter. I don’t believe in it. If it hits red, let it be. Who cares? My ears are saying that it is not distorted. Till my ears say that there is problem, I will go on. Or till my ears say that the level is low… I won’t say, “Oh, it is sitting at -32 dB”. No, I don’t believe in that. That is what drives me. That is how I want to put it. I don’t know whether it is the right way but it is my way. I don’t go by these meters. People have now started saying that, “Without outboard, without gears, how do you record? How do you mix?” One day all this is going to go! We have to accept the reality that all the outboard gears cannot be afforded by any studio now. So you have to mix in the box. When you are mixing in the box, you know the limitations. With those limitations, try to achieve what your ears feel right. You are always trying to do that because you can't say this bass guitar sound should be like this. There is nothing like – “this is the mix!” A mix which is good for me may not be good for you. It is purely a psychological… And there is something called mood. You do a mix of a song today. Tomorrow morning you come and listen, it will sound trash. Day after tomorrow you will say, “No, mix 1 was right. I did some screw up on the second day, so I should go back.” This is how it is. It is how you perceive and the perception depends on your mood. I mean, there are so many other elements that are also
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involved in it. That’s what I believe. I don’t know whether that is right but I believe that. Q: But there must be some basic differences between the analog realm and the digital realm… A: Unfortunately, now, we have to accept that we are working across time. If you are working in an analog scenario, you need at least 20 days to do a mix. If you are working in a digital scenario, you need only half. So, there is an immense compromise you have to do on that because you are working in a film industry where the release of the film is announced before the shoot starts. There are so many problems that happen in between and finally they come and say, “We have to release on so and so date.” For example April 14th or Deepavali or Christmas or New Year, these dates are fixed because when the school closes you need to have maximum releases. Fortunately or unfortunately, we are in that world. We cannot run away. So you have to catch that, you have to do some compromise - that compromise is this sounding compromise from analog to digital. Yet, you always try to achieve that. Because we all know that HF Transience is more in digital so you do bandpass and all that to match. Still, I am telling you cannot… You are only trying to match… still… With all these plug-ins you are only trying to match. You will never get the same. It is like from celluloid to digital media. What are you trying? It is not that you are trying to achieve celluloid media. Digital is not trying to achieve celluloid media. You are trying to match how you see. It is very unfortunate that people are saying that we are trying to match celluloid media. No, we are not. You are trying to match how your eyes see. It’s very unfortunate when people talk like that. You are not going to match celluloid media because… that means there is a stop… after that? You will still be doing researches and K-factors will increase. 2K, 4K, 6K, 10K – it will go on. What are you trying to achieve? You are trying to match your eyes. How you see, how you see colour. Q: If you match your eyes, do you think there is a question of reality? The way we perceive reality, that comes into being. Do you think the digital produces more real images and sound than analog? A: See, I just wanted to ask you one thing. There is a big debate to be made on that particular point of achieving reality. To one extent, we are trying to achieve reality in cinematic ways. Otherwise we would have stuck to 8 mm. Why did 16mm come? Why did 35mm come? Why did Academy Wide come? Why did Cinemascope come? Why did 3D come? Why did Panorama vision come? Because visually we are trying to match a 180 degrees vision. Similarly, in sound also we are doing that. From
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mono to stereo to LCR to Surround to 5.1 to 7.1 and now Atmos and Auro. So, what are we trying to do? We are trying to simulate the character or situation. It is in the market and we are in the market. Right? The element of trying to achieve reality is also there in cinema. At the same time, there is something called drama or a cinematic element in it. Otherwise, we will not cut for magnification - we will shoot everything with a 50 mm lens. We are cutting to magnification because of focus of attention. There are certain dialogues that have to be told on close ups. There are some actions that have to be shown on close up or mid-shot. Grammar of cinema is also applied into reality. So, it is a culmination of both. The grammar applied to reality gives the audience a feeling of being real. We are always trying to follow that. So, digital is 4K revolution. Sitting in 2018, it seems that by the end of 2020 almost 30% - 40% theatres would be closed. So, where your viewing is going to be? It is going to be on your phone because these G-factors are also increasing. 2G, 3G, 4G – it is going to be more. So, streaming and bandwidth is going to be more. This is where the biggest dilemma of the engineer is. For which format will he mix? Are we mixing for cinema or are you mixing for a tab? It is a big dilemma. Q: Yes. I asked this question to many sound engineers and they said that they downmix… A: This is all absolute bullshit. Once you have mixed something with some dynamics into one format, it is impossible to go back. I am telling you this after having the experience of working on 450 odd films. You cannot… because I parallely also do a lot of stereo mixes for audio. It is quite difficult to do a TV mix from that stereo mix. Certainly you have to compress… it is very difficult for you to accept. You are doing compromise. What will happen is - this is my view – that you will assign one of your assistants, maybe one of the chief assistants, to do this. This is something that I have been doing while working in Media Artists, where Mr. Shridhar used to do the 5.1 mix and I would do the stereo mix for theatre, LTRT mix and mono mix. You cannot. I mean, suddenly you lose judgement because you are hearing something so crystal clear, loud and everything and then it’s gone. Q: Do you think that the phone experience will be less immersive? A: Obviously. With new headphones and all it is only a simulation. There are so much of metadata to be encoded with the data. If you want to listen to it correctly, there are so much of metadata to be encoded. Otherwise, this decoding process will never happen. If the decoding process happens properly, then the listening process happens properly. That means a lot of
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data has to be encoded and decoding has to happen. Now the biggest challenge is, it is not only on your phone. There are people watching it on stream TV, on iPad, in Tablet. So, for which format are you mixing? There is no standardization. Channels have their reference level standardization. Some follow -23dB, some follow -27dB. Broadcast has a different standard, YouTube has got a different standard. Your Kindle has got a different standard, and your Hotstar, Netflix and streamings have got… so for what standard you are going to mix to? This is a big question. This is the biggest problem. The new age media is going to take over the whole industry in a span of 5 years. I can ask you one simple question. How many home theatres were there 3 years ago and how many home theatres are there today? One, equipment has become cheap. Two, theatres have become expensive. Three, the amount of time that you have to spend on the road to go to watch a film is different. Here you have everything. Where will you compromise? The dark room experience. Cinema is… you get 100% satisfaction only if you go to a theatre, sitting with the audience in a dark room simulating that you are sitting alone. Q: Yes. But there is a question of noise reduction because in cinema you have the sounds reflected from the wall. You have the theatre experience that you are sharing a social space with other people. But in phone or iPad or smart devices you will have your earpad… A: Isolate. You see, I will tell you one thing… 20 years ago and 20 years down the line – we have made lots of compromises. We used to remember at least 200 phone numbers. Now, can you remember at least 10? We have compromised. Like that, we will compromise that particular thing also. You might have some 5,000 friends on your Facebook. How many of them do you know directly? If you meet them on the road, you don’t know them. I don’t know them. But he is a friend of yours and you are a friend of him. This is the world where we are now. Everything is virtual. There is nothing real. It is like a big virtual reality world, we are heading to. So, cinema is also going to be like that. The content is going to change to ones which you can enjoy alone. You don’t need all these kind of social connections. So, there is a rewriting process that is going to happen. You don’t know… I mean after 3 years you don’t know what is going to happen. Imagine a situation where there was only one channel called Doordarshan. We used to wait for everything on Doordarshan. Even the advertisements we used to wait and see. Now? There are 300 channels. The moment an ad comes, you flip to another channel. Q: There is also a question that technology companies, for example Dolby Atmos or… they are investing heavily on development…
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A: See, to be very frank, they are very intelligent in investing their money and time not only on cinema. They are also investing on these small gadgets also because they know the future is there. Basically the theatre is always, what? It is a marketing platform. That is the space where you can generate the content. So, theatre is a platform they generated in Atmos, Auro or whatever it is to generate an Atmos content so that they have a right on that content that already has an Atmos element in it. If that is given to smaller media or emerging media, you can still emulate with this Atmos app. So, it is purely a marketing strategy. Until and unless you say something big, you don’t get it. You cannot go ask them for a content or ask them to do an Atmos mix for TV. To get that content there you have to go to a theatre. So many theatres, we have 300 installations, your film will sound big. It’s a marketing strategy. Ultimately they are aiming at the small new age format only. Now they know enough, there is not much research going to happen. Maximum they will come up with… now it was 128, 64 and all… Now one more format is coming - Atmos 16. It is a 16 channel format. That is going to stay for a long time because the metadata content needs to be encoded for Kindle, Netflix all this where the app decodes for your headphones. So it’s basically marketing strategy. Their research is more on home video now. Q: Well, this is the context. Now, my basic question is the status of reality inside cinema… Cinema has a particular world. It is a manufactured world, constructed world but it derives not only narratively but also content wise from the real locations or real people, real situations and they transform it within a cinematic narrative. So what is the status of reality in these various platforms? A: Let me ask you a question. Did you ever think of a cinema like Matrix4 30 years back? And Avatar5? 30 years back? No, Why? Q: Because there was no vision about how this can be achieved and secondly technology helped to manufacture those kinds of imageries and sounds that are being produced. A: So, the answer is that. You will adapt to all that since the technological support is there. The motion picture… the motion capture technology can replay easily all artistes. The Computer Graphics area is developing like an ocean. That development is majorly used not for cinema. It is majorly used for games. When we talk about cinema, when we talk about sound, we always ignore a terrain that has dominated the world - which was not there 10 years back.
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Q: But game and cinema has basic differences. In game, you can have as many unrealistic situations possible. But in cinema if you go unrealistic, people will not accept it. A: Yes. But do you think that cinema is real? Q: Cinema is not real but it’s… A: Cinema is always trying to play with your dreams. Q: Yes, it does. A: 70% of the cinema - I am talking about mainstream cinema or successful cinema - are all playing with your dreams. You always like Amitabh Bachchan hitting one person and 5 people dying. That’s your dream because you have a grudge against the system. There is a hero within you that is complimenting a hero. That is why you clap in the theatre. What is the psychology behind that? Clapping in the theatre and booing in the theatre. You clap when something which you wanted to do youreself, you see being done on the screen by somebody whom you like. That is the magnanimity of cinema as a format. It just catches you. It just takes away from you. For 3-4 days that character is well within you because your imagination… “he should have done that”… Because every day you are meeting 150 people with whom you can relate some characters of the film that you watched. If cinema cannot relate to your life or your surroundings, then there is no sense. Q: Absolutely. That is the question I am asking. That reality which we see inside cinema, if it is not relatable it will not be successful. A: Hm. The pattern of relations are changing. The relation 10 years before was what? After 10 years is what? It is changing gradually. Obviously cinema is also drifting with that. That is why I gave you an example of a film like Matrix. You adapted. Avatar was a box office hit, one of the biggest hits of the world. And Spielberg made a film called Jurassic Park.6 You don’t know how Dinosaurs look like. It is all imaginary but still you accepted it. Right? That is cinema. It’s make-belief. It makes you believe. I forgot the name… 180 seconds, the flight takes off and crashes – the crux of the film is that. That was told in 2 hours. It’s only an episode of 180 seconds. A flight takes off and crashes. Q: Yes. So to create the reality, to make that belief system, relatable and believable and authentic you need some components, cinematic components, and apparatus; apart from music, which creates mood, you have voice, effects and ambience. So… A: Predominantly DME: dialogue, music, effects. Q: And then ambience…
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A: Ambience is a part of effects. Q: Okay. But bodily effects like Foley effects… A: Effects are many. Effects you can categorize as diegetic and nondiegetic. Again, the diegetic can be categorized further. Then there is another element called design element. It is an ocean. I mean, you can subsegment many but predominantly it’s a group of effects. Q: Now-a-days they are kept separately as ambience tracks. Apart from effects tracks, there are ambience tracks because of the multi-channel, multi-track capability… What do you think ambience does to cinema? A: Ambience is trying to give you a simulation of where you are. It’s basically cheating. Cinema is cheating. Ambience is complementing your cheating. Cinema as a technology was developed by one of our weaknesses – persistence of vision. Otherwise, can you imagine still frames… You are shooting stills. Only stills, but played back at tendency of our eyes to sustain that vision… basically cinema is cheating. How well, how good you can cheat the audience defines how successful you are. That cheating tendency will continue. The ambience is another way of cheating. You are shooting inside a set. You slap ambience with that and you make the audience believe that you have shot in Los Angeles. It depends on how well you can cheat. Otherwise, cinema doesn’t exist. The reality factor cannot be represented as real. You are trying to cheat the reality to the audience. You are only trying to make them believe that you are inside the bus. The bus is not moving. You are doing some CG of passing but the bus is static. And you are making the audience believe that the bus is traveling by putting bus sounds, passings, some visual elements, additional visual plates, audio plates. Q: Dubbing was one of the finest examples of how cinema can cheat. Dubbing is a 100% cheating technology. You believe that this person is talking on the screen. Then, sync sound came. In sync sound, you record what you see. You don’t dub. That means whatever is there, you are capturing it and you are giving it directly to the audience. So, at least in terms of reality, the way this character was speaking, the way he speaks, his voice, his presence, that’s not being cheated. How would you explain that? A: I will tell you before dubbing there was a big cheating called playback. You are believing that Amitabh Bachchan is singing but it is sung by somebody else, Kishore Kumar. But you are believing it is Amitabh’s voice. Q: That is playback but in sync sound?
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A: In sync sound, playback is going to happen. Q: But films are using less and less music. A: That is okay but I am talking about an Indian context. Song is an integral part of Indian cinema. Unfortunately, we are living in an Indian context where music is an integral part of all our festivals and cultures. Cinema is directly connected to our culture. We still see a Hollywood film as a Hollywood film. You change the characters and do it in India, you have to have our flavors otherwise it will not run because of our cultural inheritance. All our festivals are directly connected with music. It is a direct connection. All our movements are rhythmic. The way I talk, the way you talk, there is a rhythm. There is something called a rhythm. Before the invention of music or recording technology, etc., how did all the harvest songs came? They all used to sing in tune and in tempo. How? It is there well within because the way your heart beats, there is a rhythm. So you cannot run away from that. So, as Indians, this particular thing has been used in our culture, too much. The problem with Western culture is that it is more of a mixed culture. The two World Wars have completely toggled their civilization. You take America. Who is an American? America is entirely migrated by people. So, what is that culture? Got it? That is why, apart from the West, limited to few countries, their culture has got few element of music. Our culture is still not that diluted because of many things. We still follow… Okay… Typical example is Mahabharata. An element of Mahabharata7 is there in Indian cinema. You take anything. You can’t run away from that. So, we cannot make a film like the West does. That is a Hollywood film. That is made for them. We are watching that film as a Hollywood film. Even though it’s a real incident, I will not buy that here. That is their cinema. Q: But there are many films that are being termed more realistic. After sync sound came and digital surround sound came, people, critics, filmmakers are terming this. It is more realistic. How do you define? Why is it more realistic from its predecessors? A: This word realistic is a debatable word. What is real? Something real to you may not be real to me. It’s a perception. The word real is similar to what I said earlier: a “good” mix. How do you measure a good mix? There is no measurement. It is like real. How real? How do you measure the reality? Q: Yes, but they still are terming it. A: There are a lot of terminologies. See Tsunami, it’s a new terminology. Right? Maybe 50 years before there were nothing called Gigabyte or Megabyte – a new terminology. A term which is used in a different
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context, in different form is called reality. See, we are trying to achieve something real. Look-wise it should be real. Acting-wise it should be real. Performance-wise it should be natural. Everything put together you say that, “yeah, we are achieving something called reality”. Q: This sense of reality that you just mentioned, is it contributed by sync sound, surround sound and digital technology… A: To an extent sync sound, because that is where you capture the performance. That was missing when you dub. The problem of dubbing is not only that. I think if we notice properly, a dubbed film – all the dialogues sound like you are talking in the same room and in same way. Q: Yes. There is no perspective… A: Forget about perspective. There is no texture change happening. You feel like he is sitting in a box and talking. You are just adding some reverb. Apart from that reverb, you are putting the ambience level little higher. You are manipulating. You are trying to simulate that he is changing. Right? That is completely taken over by the sync sound scenario. But we have a problem. You live in Berlin, right? How quiet is Berlin? Q: Now-a-days it is getting noisier. A: Where are we? Our average noise level just outside this compound will be 70dB. So your SN factor is less. When you go to Europe, it is something around 40dB to 45dB. There is something called a 30db boost on the basic noise structure. In that noise structure you are trying to achieve the sync sound. That is the crux of what we are facing. It is not the technology or the technician. Fundamentally, we are living in a terrain where the basic noise level itself is high. I don’t think any country in the world will have these many crows, these many diesel auto-rickshaws, these many vehicles and in that you are trying to catch sound. Unfortunately, the biggest underlying point is, even if you know the dialogue properly, in the theatre if I don’t hear the dialogue properly, I will get disturbed. But this disturbance will never happen for an English film. The reason is psychological. If I get disturbed and not understand the dialogue, the person sitting next to me will think that I don’t know English. This factor also counts. The moment you are watching a Hindi film and if two dialogues are not heard properly you start booing. you are trying to achieve reality doing all this. In a one-to-one conversation, we listen to only 70%. But on screen if you listen to only 70%, the film bombs. That’s the sad part. You can’t blame that because at the same time you are in the film industry. The Dolby and everyone are trying to work on
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algorithms. At the TV industry, they look at the dialogue legibility factor as prime element. Let the dialogue be heard. Q: But new films, they also use more ambience because there are several channels available. A: See… Few years before there was a big debate on why sync sound, why Hollywood films are soft… I still believe that if it is a sync sound film, you cannot make it too loud. The latitude is always determined by the level at which your dialogues are happening. If your dialogues are at this level, you can place the effects down and place the music almost at par. If the dialogue is at 3dB, correspondingly everything will be at 3dB. That is how you define the latitude curve. So, Western or European films are predominantly sync sound films. If you look at the scripts or you look at the films, they are not dialectical films. They are visual films because visuals talk more than the dialogues. In our context, it is just the reverse. Even if you understand that the child is crying the artist will say, “Oh, see, the girl is crying.” Three times he has to say. This is the way we are. In the West it is the reverse. They have very less dialogue. It is visual presentation not the dialectical presentation. So, they can keep the film low. Added to that, they are sync sound films. In case of sync sound, you cannot push it above a particular level because all the noise, all the coloration, everything happens. So, they keep the ambience level a little high to mask the noise from the dialogue. It is another way of cheating. “To get something, you need to loose something”, like that. To mask that, you need this. Here, we used to mask with the music and with the effects. Very simple! Fundamentally the making process is different. You can’t compare how Hollywood makes and how Indian films are made. The process itself is different, the style is different. None of them talks loudly, they are soft spoken. Even at home, they speak softly. Here it is not like that. We speak at least 10dB louder than they do and the moment you are on the road, at least 10 times you have to honk. For what? Nobody will listen. It is basically to show your frustration. So, how do you come up with this? It is like how you are accustomed to certain things. Q: But digital technology enables to record very low frequencies - below 80Hz for example - which analog technologies couldn’t do. How does this new capacity to record the full range of the frequency spectrum from 20Hz to 20KHz in a relatively flatter response affect film sound production? A: This digital recording technology or the sampling or all these technologies - what are they trying to achieve? Nothing other than trying to match the ear. Visual, what is it trying to achieve? The eye! How do you hear a Timpani? You want to record and hear it in the same way. For
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that, you need more lows. Or a thunder! 10 years before, the way you heard a thunder in theatre is like (imitates)… Now, you hear a thunder with proper subwoofer. Q: Yeah. But in mono mix it was not possible. A: It was not possible. So, we used to adapt to that technology and say yes, this is a thunder, right? Agreed. Even though it is not the same sound, you were still agreeing. Q: Why did we agree? What is the tolerance level of the audience? A: Tolerance level of the audience is… It is like you are making believe because visual element is there. Sound always came late. Otherwise, cinema would have been together. It came here because theatre was together. The fundamental emergence of cinema is from the theatre. Right? Theatre was with sound, with accompaniment of music. Cinema came with silence but still we adapted, with only some music playing. You never heard a footstep or a car passing. You adapted. It is the adaptability factor. “Okay, fine! I will agree to this.” It is like you are strictly nonvegetarian, but you are in a town where there are only vegetarian hotels and you go, “It’s okay! I will eat vegetarian food.” It is that kind of adaptability. You go to a movie theatre 10 years before or 20 years before, you hear whatever it is, muffled sounds and you adapt to that because you know that the medium can only reproduce this much. But now, you will not accept the same film. Sitting at home if you get a microphone recording, you’ll say Golden ‘80s, Golden ‘90s. If you make a song like that now nobody is going to listen to it. We all preach but we don’t practice. Q: In that sense since there is a screen and there is a story to tell, there is a reality that needs to be simulated. Since it is a completely make-belief world, sound’s potential in cinema is much suppressed. When I listen to a sound, there are various associations with it. But in cinema, we have to fix one particular association. Otherwise we’ll get distracted. A: Because, cinema… Basically where is your focus of attention? Q: Screen. A: The screen, the story and the performance. These 3 elements are very important - the story and performances happening on the screen. So, the filmmaker has to always keep the attention of the audience focussed like this. It is like a racehorse. The moment the horse sees left and right, it will have a tendency of going this way or that way. You are masking your audience in the theatre as whatever they are seeing on this 70’ screen, they have to believe. So, we start cutting out. There is supposed to be train line
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but I cut it out. You might be inside the train. In real situation, the train sound dominates everything. Maybe in one introductory scene, before the main dialogue starts, you keep the dialogue over effects of train sounds and slowly push down. That is where you start playing with psychoacoustics. Psychoacoustics is like you believe that it is there. If you don’t hear also, you will say, “Yes.” Cinema is a game of psychology. If a story has to be properly communicated to the audience, I have to have a good psychology implied on that. I have to work on elements to catch the attention of the audience to make them believe whatever I am saying. So, you have to cut off. Even though there are so many elements you can put in, you will omit all that. You will just focus the audience’s attention to the narrative. Q: So you cut real ambiences of location to make it a cinematic location. A: Yes, cinema is cinema. At least, you are hearing some ambiences now. What was there in the 80s? There were no ambiences. Whenever the music comes, the ambience is cut. When the dialogue comes, the music is gone. Q: So, as we listen to more ambiences, relatively, than 80s and 90s, what does it contribute? Do you think that adds to the sense of realism? A: Yes. Q: It does. A: It is adding or supplementing to the cheating. As a filmmaker, you know that you have not shot in Los Angeles. You have shot in a studio in Bombay or a flat in Bombay or a flat in Bangalore. Can you tell that to the audience? Then also you put noise, LA ambience, some flight, everything. It's only make-belief. You are only trying to make-belief. One simple question: if I am going to do a Dinosaur film and if I am going to put a new sound for the Dinosaur, will you agree? No, no, Dinosaur sound is exactly what we heard in Jurassic Park. That is the sound. That is cinema. That sound has become your reference. Q: There are films that are shot like a documentary. Many films are made like that. Sync sound borrows from some sort of documentary approach. A: Basically, the culture of sync sound came from documentary. An extension of documentary is sync sound on cinema. All the sync sound elements started from the early Films Division and Doordarshan documentaries only. Not at all in fiction films. It was there, but it vanished. Why? Because it takes more time for the artists to prepare and learn the lines. The biggest problem was happening with the diction. You take India, you take Calcutta. One part of Calcutta will speak Bengali in a different way than the other. The other part of Bengal, near to Assam and
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all, speaks in a different way. In the same state, there are 4 dialects. The artist is from one side. All these errors would cumulate to the producer in extending the shooting days. Cut this and he says, “let’s do dubbing”. That is not the case in Europe. It is all rehearsed, practised. They have extensive rehearsal sessions before the actual shoot starts. It’s more disciplined. We are not and that we have to accept. That disciplinary pattern is not here. Now, all the artists have started singing because you have got Melodyne. You can make anybody sing. You don’t need to be a trained singer. It’s is an unfortunate thing. Was it possible 50 years back? Q: We call it Indian cinema but there are many regional voices, like Malayalam cinema is different from Bengali. But we still term everything Indian cinema. Do you think it is problematic or is it fine? A: It is not a problematic thing. Q: Why? A: India has these 25 states. And India has these 25 cultures, these 25 languages. It is not a problem. Q: There are differences between Malayalam cinema and other Indian cinemas sound-wise, right? A: Yes. The culture is different. The loudest of the cinema is Telegu. They speak loudly. Yesterday I met the Registrar here. The moment I met him, I thought he is a Telegu. Today, he introduced me and told me, “I am a Telegu”. Because he speaks loud, you immediately identify the person. Q: And what is the quietest part of Indian cinema? A: I think it is North-east. Q: Is it very understandable that you locate it in a Malayalam sound? Is there something like that? A: Yeah, definitely. Q: Tamil sound… A: Yeah. See… You take Madurai. It is a part of Tamil Nadu. Madurai culture is completely different from that of Chennai since Chennai has got a mixed culture from all the states. It’s like Bombay. Bombay has no culture now as there are no Marathis. Similarly Calcutta. It has become a mixed culture. If you want to see the proper culture of a particular state, you have to go to borders. Not the cities because cities have mixed culture. Q: Does cinema consider these differences and cultural specificities? A: Obviously. Otherwise, it won’t work. If you don’t have that dialectical slang, it will be rejected. That’s very very important. I have worked a lot in Malayalam cinema. If it is a Malayalam film based somewhere in
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central Travancore, the slang is different. If it is Trivandrum, the slang is different. In the Calicut side, the slang is different than that in Kochi. I am talking about a small state which has 4-5 dialects. Q: Yes. In the dialogues. But in the context of ambience also, it will change. A: It will change. Q: So, ambience will make that cultural specificity audible to the listener. A: Not to that extent, but we try to. Now, unfortunately, the background music has now become foreground. You don’t call it background music anymore. It is foreground music. So, before establishing the culture through sound and all, music has got established. It has stamped. Yes, this story is in Calicut. Q: Right. But, if there is no music in the sequence? A: This has to be established. Otherwise, you will not relate. Because the visual is there, you only need to complement the visual. You don’t need to play too much as there are some visual elements that clearly represent this particular terrain. If you want to shoot Agra, somehow you will take a shot of Taj. At least a shadow. Immediately, you will relate to it. Q: Do you also need audio information apart from the visual? A: Yeah, but predominantly what communicates to you? The visuals. They communicate to you more than the sound. Q: Yes, directly. A: Directly. Q: But more in a subdued level sound… A: Sound supports. Q: If there is no visual or let’s say there is a static shot… A: You have to predominantly play with sound. You have to. How else do you establish? Either visually or aurally. That is must. Q: I have not seen much of Malayalam cinema apart from Adoor, Aravindan, John Abraham and of the later generations, Shaji N. Karun among others. I have seen and heard almost all of Aravindan’s films. He is my favourite. A: Yeah, he is my favourite also. Apart from Adoor, let me tell you, Aravindan is my favorite. That is more of our reality. There is a translation element to his cinema. Q: But why do you like him rather than mainstream filmmakers?
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A: That’s a big question. Mainstream films have some elements of superheroic activities happening which cheat us. Q: So, in your personal terms you don’t like films that cheat. A: Clearly. I don’t. But, unfortunately, I have to work on those films because that’s my breadwinner. I have to work but I don’t like. I don’t like this superheroic syndrome in cinema. Somehow, I don’t relate to that. That is why I told you that I like more of this Aravindan thing because it is very natural. A suffering is a suffering, pain is a pain… Q: So it’s more realistic. A: The story is more realistic. Q: They still cheat. A: That is in the making process. But the story is realistic. You can relate to that. Once I was talking to Shaji N. Karun. He made a film called Piravi.8 Q: One of my favourite films. A: Why it became your favourite? Q: Because I can relate to it absolutely. A: How? Q: Not only because of the story but also the presence of the father. The way he is there waiting for his son. Just like my father. A: I will tell you one thing… As a filmmaker we all should understand that. It is basically a real incident that happened in Kerala. Piravi. The Rajan Kola case, the Rajan murder case during the Emergency time. It’s a real incident. You show the film to any Malayalis, they will immediately say it is Rajan Kola case. The same film has been taken to Sri Lanka. Immediately, the Sri Lankans related the film to LTTE issue. Q: Universal. A: You take it to Europe. Second World War. This is cinema. In Europe, they don’t know anything about Rajan. But it’s a real life story. It’s a real story being told so well that it becomes universal. Q: So, do you think that good cinema are those… A: …which are accepted universally. Q: Even though they cheat. A: No. That is why cinema has no language. Cinema itself has a language. It is not the spoken language in cinema. That is what has to be taught in a film institute. What is the language of cinema? Unfortunately, most of the film schools nowadays just teaches software. You are only making
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operators, not filmmakers. That’s sad. This Pro Tools, Nuendo, Soundscape9 you can learn from outside. You don’t have to come here. What is the advantage of coming here? To learn the language of cinema. But that is lacking now. All the film schools are lacking that. Q: And the digital revolution at the universities will not solve this. A: No. They are only going to make operators. Q: And that’s the predominant scene of Indian education system. A: There was a dubbing engineer in our studio. All the clients used to say, “Oh, he is excellent!” But I was wondering what excellence he has got? I don’t know. I didn’t like the tone of the sounds he used to dub and all. But the clients used to say that he is excellent. Then I called one of the associate directors who was closely associated with the dubbing and all and asked, “Don’t feel bad. Just wanted to ask you… Most of the people are saying he is excellent…” Oh! The way he operates the machine. That’s because he has mastered the keyboard shortcuts. And he is like (imitates). The client sitting next to him is like… So, then I asked this associate director, “For what purpose have you gone there? Your purpose is to dub properly, modulation has to be right, the tone has to be right, sync has to be right. That sound has to be right – not the speed. You are carried away by this.” This is another cheating for self-promotion. So, where we are heading to is a big question. Whether it is digital or analog or this or that… That is exactly what I told you. If you know what sound is, you can achieve that with anything. So, learn sound. Tune your ears. Tune your brain. Everything will be right. It will happen right. But if we don’t tune our ears, if you don’t listen... First you become a listener. Listen, listen, listen, listen. You watch a film once. After 5 days you watch it again. It’s a different experience. Then watch it again. It’s a different experience. If you watch for the 10th time also, it will be a different experience. That is cinema. But what makes you watch that film again and again is more important. That is why a film should be watchable. Right skill and content, aesthetic factors, all cuts into line when we ask this. Q: Like I can watch Nizhalkuthu10 many times… A: If you watch Stalker11 even 10 times, the 11th time also it would be a different experience. Right? Mirror.12 I noticed this last time… Because our brain works in some other way. That is why those films are classified as classics. Like Seven Samurai.13 Majority of the world is talking about some classic films. There has to be a reason. Lot of people are saying that you are very good. I should think what is that good in you. So many people are telling that you are good. It’s the same in cinema also. If the scholars are telling that the film is very good, he is definitely more
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intelligent than me and is saying that the film is good. What is that good in it? That’s a search. It is not on Wikipedia or Google. Self search. These Wikipedia and Google are biggest spoilers of our community. You have answers for everything. Only information and not much knowledge. So sad. Q: I stop here on that note.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:23:34 Name Abbreviations: Ajith A. George – A; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 Adoor Gopalakrishnan is widely regarded as one of the leading film authors in India. He pioneered the new wave in Malayalam cinema during the 1970s. 3 Govindan Aravindan, or G. Aravindan was an iconic Indian film-maker who primarily worked in the Malayalam language, and was deeply rooted in Indian culture, arts and aesthetics of painting, music and performing art. 4 The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski 1999) 5 Avatar (James Cameron 2009) 6 Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) 7 The MahƗbhƗrata is one of the two major epics of ancient India composed originally in Sanskrit language, often attributed to Vyasa for the authorship, but it has many versions, interpretations, and ammendments over 2400 years. 8 Piravi (The Birth, Shaji N. Karun 1989) 9 Pro Tools, Nuendo, Soundscape are timeline-based applications for postproduction sound on DAWs. 10 Nizhalkkuthu (Shadow Kill, Adoor Gopalakrishnan 2002) 11 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky 1979) 12 Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky 1975) 13 Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa 1954)
CHAPTER 17 VIKRAM JOGLEKAR1
Q: Perhaps I should start with my curiosity about your coming to sound and later joining Dolby, with a little bit of personal background. V: It was kind of an accident because I was working on a lot of these either state funded or independently funded projects - mostly documentaries, and some of the filmmakers that I had started working with were Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani.2 I got into these projects because they were music related projects and I wanted to continue my association with music. That’s how I got interested in these projects. So, I worked with Kumar Shahani on Khayal Gatha, which was a project on music.3 I started with Mani Kaul, I met him first when I… I had actually met him at the Institute (FTII) earlier, but I started playing Siddheshwari Devi’s old recordings when he was doing research for that film.4 So, frequently I worked with them on a few projects and one of the projects that Mani Kaul was doing, Cloud Door5, was a German co-production and the requirement was that we needed to provide them with a Dolby soundtrack. In India, there was no facility to do a Dolby soundtrack at that time and we did all our work at Media Artists and we got in touch with Dolby and asked them what we needed to do and how we needed to proceed for the post-production. Through that interaction I got to know a few people at Dolby. Then the mix engineer Shreedhar took all the tracks and went to a small studio in London and mixed this film in Dolby SR. So, through that process I got to know a little more about what needed to be done for mixing films in Dolby. And when Dolby decided they wanted to get involved with Indian post-production, I was like a touch point. They asked me who to meet, who to talk to and eventually they asked me, “since you have done this before, do you want to explain this to people, who are interested in doing this, how to do it?” I said that I will be happy to do that and then I went and did a training with them in the UK and came back to India and started meeting filmmakers and studio owners, people probably were interested in doing multi-channel sound. Eventually, Prasad Studios at that time showed a very keen interest in setting up a facility for surround sound and they were the first ones to set up a Dolby mixing facility. So, we had a few
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people coming from Dolby, UK to install it and that sort of helped me to understand how these things are done. We did a few films there. First few Indian films were mixed at Prasad in Dolby SR. After that another studio came up in Mumbai called Empire Studios. A. G. Nadiadwala had set that up and he also wanted to do Dolby mixing. So, that started. Every year we had 2 or 3 films in Dolby and then it kept going on. Prasad opened a second studio, Sunny Super Sound opened in Mumbai and slowly other big studios started converting to do multichannel mixing. It was slow earlier. You know, from 2 or 3 films a year, we were doing maybe 5. Then suddenly it picked up, everybody wanted to… It is a chicken and egg situation. People said, “I will mix in Dolby but where are the cinemas?” We needed to have cinemas to be able to show those films. So, cinemas started coming up. There was a company called RNS Electronics. It basically was a Dolby franchise. They started converting cinemas to Dolby playback. Once we had enough number of cinemas, it was not difficult to convince people that this sounded better. Also, what helped was that some of the first films that we did were huge commercial successes. They were musicals, they sounded great. So, people associated the technology with the film. One of the first films that we did in India was the Hindi version of Speed.6 That was absolutely the first film done in India. Then we did Rangeela, which was a big success.7 Then we did Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge8, we did Pardes for Subhash Ghai.9 All these films were big hits. Q: Rangeela is considered to be the first Indian production mixed in Dolby surround, I think. Was it Dolby surround? V: Yeah, it was Dolby SR. So Dolby keeps changing… I mean, there is a brand and then there is a technology behind it. Dolby SR is a technology Dolby Surround is a brand. But, Dolby Surround was used at that time more in the context of Pro Logic. That was more for Home Theatre and Dolby SR was a technology used for cinema. Soon after that the technology changed. SR was a matrix-based technology with noise reduction and then soon it changed in India. I mean, it had already changed elsewhere. In India we waited for a couple of years with Dolby SR and then it became Dolby Digital, which was putting digital sound on film. And in the early days there were a lot of competition because there was a competing technology, which was DTS. So, DTS was putting a timecode on the film and there was a disc that went with every film, which had the sound on it and they had a different compression algorithm. Dolby was using AC3 at 384 kbps and DTS was using a different compression and there was always this thing about whether Dolby sounds better or DTS sounds better. Some people preferred Dolby sound to DTS and in the south they were very successful in installing DTS everywhere. Dolby was
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very strict in implementing certain things. They wanted people to change speakers, amplifiers, everything that… DTS was not so stringent on their requirements and it was seen as an easy path of conversion from mono to surround sound. Thus, they had a huge success in south India, whereas Dolby was more successful in north India. It’s probably due to the companies behind them at that time. RNS Electronics was strong in north India and Real Image was strong in south India and that’s how it went. But when digital cinema came, all this became irrelevant because suddenly you didn’t need compression, you didn’t need another delivery mechanism. Sound was uncompressed PCM on the DCP. All that rivalry went away. Q: And do you also work with calibration and installation of Atmos? V: I did, initially. When we launched it in India, at that time we didn’t have any… Because the cinema engineers were still working for RNS Electronics. Dolby didn’t have any engineers and hence I worked on the first few installations. After that, basically the RNS Engineers came on board because they started working with Dolby. So, I didn’t need to do that anymore. First 2 or 3 studios and maybe a couple of cinemas I calibrated. Q: What made Mani Kaul to mix his films in Dolby? V: No, most of his films are in mono. The only film which is in Dolby is this German co-production and it was really their requirement. In their technical requirement they had said that they needed the film delivered as Dolby SR. It was part of a package of films and they wanted to distribute in Europe so they needed Dolby SR, which was a prevalent format at that time. Q: Okay. Why did he prefer to mix in mono, generally speaking? V: At that time there was nothing else available. I don’t know whether he ever thought of mixing in surround sound but actually he didn’t really have a choice. There was nothing else available in India. Q: Naukar ki Kameez, I think was in ’99.10 By that time Dolby was here quite extensively. V: Yes, but I don’t know if there is a Dolby SR track of Naukar ki Kameez available. I mean, they could have done it in Dolby SR but I don’t know for sure whether they mixed it in surround. Q: His aesthetics of sound in cinema is based very much on temporality and kind of what he calls post-sync. What is your impression of working with him as a sound person?
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V: For him everything was integrated into the movement of the experience. He didn’t use sound as a separate element. He would use sound as one of the elements of transition. So, it would be, maybe, an actor walking into the frame, then a camera movement that would happen, and then a sound would enter and go out. It was a co-ordination of all these things together. It was never just an intervention on the soundtrack and he drew his inspiration from Indian music a lot. He thought a lot about how a musician changes from one note to another, how a dancer changes from one gesture to another. He thought in those terms when he moved from one sound to another, how to introduce a sound underneath another sound. What way to introduce it? Whether to enter without being noticeable or to be very, very noticeable, whether to break from something. He played with all these things as if it was music that he was playing with. And even the way he worked with dialogues it was not so much… Obviously the text was important in it but he didn’t want the actors’ emotions coming into it or acting coming into it. He wanted it to be rendered flat so that it could be perceived and then experienced. He would push actors to take that emotion out of it or take their intention out of it. He worked with them so that they were rendered in a certain way and he would look at the rhythm, he would look at the sound of the voice, he would look at the pitch. He would treat it like a sound. LG. While the text was important, it was also important in what rhythm, how it came in as a sound. Where it stopped, he would make them repeat words, he would make them start in a lower note and go in a higher note. He played a lot even during dubbing, with dialogue. Q: Did you do mostly dubbing rather than sync sound? V: His documentaries are completely sync sound and then there are voiceovers in the documentaries. It is not like he preferred one to the other. In his fiction films it was dubbing, because, again I don’t know whether it was a choice or he didn’t have a choice. In Nazar11 he tried to do sync sound but the locations were so noisy and the way he shot, it was impossible to use the sync sound so he ended up dubbing and it was something that he wanted to explore. If we had silent cameras in those days, he would have maybe preferred doing location sync sound and maybe he would have worked on location with the actors to see what could come out of it. This way it gave him the choice of working with them elsewhere and anyway lip sync was not a concern. He would often have actors in frame and the dialogue would be from an actor who is out of frame. So, the lip sync did not matter or the line would start with the actor out of frame, a part of the line would be with the actor in frame and then he will exit the frame and say the dialogue. So, it didn’t matter. It was flexible. He could place the dialogue anywhere he wanted. He worked in
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such a way that he didn’t have to get caught up in the flow of dialogue. The great example is in the Idiot.12 There is a play of entering, going out, outside characters speaking while you are looking at somebody else, things that repeat themselves. Q: With the coming of digital technology, in terms of recording, recording on the field, recording within the set, the recording system, as well as the spatial dynamics of sound, in surround sound and further into Atmos, it is often observed and argued that the aesthetics of cinema has transformed. Do you agree that this transformation happened or do you consider there was no transformation at all, aesthetics-wise? V: I think it was not just sound technology. It’s whatever was happening outside has evolved and that has made things simpler. But, I don’t see a big change in terms of the way people think about sound or not just sound, about how they put films together. I think things have become easier. Earlier you had limited footage. So, you only shot what was extremely essential and you planned for it and every shot carried a certain importance. Today, as media has become cheaper we are able to record a lot. So, we keep covering from every angle and we keep recording more and more. Not necessarily all of that gets used and there is no thought in that coverage, anymore. the shot taking has lost a little bit of that seriousness because you can always redo it, you can always get it from some other angle. So, what is happening today is that we are acquiring more and more content and then we spend a lot of time trying to make something out of it. Earlier that thought was put in before acquiring that content. We were making more decisions before and we were making decisions quicker. Today we keep postponing those decisions in postproduction, in editing, in sound design and in mixing just because we have more tools that makes things easier. Earlier, we had to run a film for 10 minutes and mix it. You couldn’t go back, you couldn’t punch. You had to redo the whole thing. There was no automation. Today, you can redo things a number of times, you can go back frame by frame. You can do sub-frame, sample, accurate editing, non-destructive. That means I can keep doing and undoing things all the time. So, I keep postponing my decisions. Earlier, I had to make my decisions and that had to be a good decision. Today I can keep postponing my decisions till I get what I want. In that sense things have changed. But, what people have done with sound hasn’t changed as much. It has brought more realism, it has brought more dynamics, it has become more spectacular. But, it hasn’t become necessarily more meditative, it hasn’t changed the way people put sounds together or the way people use sound with picture; technology hasn’t changed that as much.
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Q: But, at the same time sync sound has emerged as one of the mainstream… V: Earlier, you couldn’t do sync sound really due to the fact that the cameras were noisy and the lighting equipment was noisy and the generators were noisy. Today, there is a little more discipline on the set and people take the actors’ performances more seriously and they also feel that it’s a waste of time capturing that performance later somewhere. So, unless it’s absolutely necessary they won’t spend time dubbing and would rather get it on location. Those things have improved. Today, it is possible to do sync sound. A lot of people make the choice of doing sync sound or not and that’s a stylistic choice. I don’t have a preference. I think there are certain directors who get better performances out of actors in dubbing and they will continue to do so. they are very efficient on the set, not spending that time doing sound because they know that they can recreate that later in post-production and I am happy working with them. But, I also feel that there is something that you lose if you completely disregard the actors’ performances on set. There is some part of it that you lose, which you will never be able to recreate. You will get something else which might be different but that something that you had on the set will be lost because it was part of that action. That body and the voice that was together in that picture has some quality about it. So, I would never suggest to someone to not record sync sound. I would say, “Do sync sound and when you can’t, maybe, replace it. Where you feel that you will do ADR and improve that scene, do that.” You make that choice on the editing table when you listen to the dialogue and think, “okay, this can be improved in ADR, that’s why I will do it in ADR.” So, do sync sound and keep a certain percentage of the budget for ADR. That’s how I would approach it. I don’t have a preference either way. Q: Do you think that the coming of sync sound, coming of surround sound, further adding of channels, they add to a sense of realism? V: People think that’s what the purpose is. I don’t think that’s necessarily the purpose. With all these elements we can create a different kind of realism. We can blur the boundaries between music and ambient sound, for instance, by using this technology. We can get them to be closer to each other. We can create a more homogenous experience, I think, by using technology. Not necessarily making things more real but by questioning whether this is real or not. You bring it to a point where you want to know whether I am in a dream or whether I am awake. Or whether this is a sound effect, a car approaching, or is it music along with a note. So, instead of creating realism, if you create that ambiguity, that also can be achieved. It’s just a tool. We see the obvious. we see that I can make
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this more real because I have a wide frequency response. But, I can also at the same time make it more unreal. I can create footsteps with a musical instrument and make people think, “What am I hearing?” It doesn’t necessarily have to be realism. You can use it in whatever way you want. Today, all that it’s allowing you to do is that you can reproduce what you can imagine. So, the realism is one part of it. That’s just one possibility. Q: But, the question of believability is there. I mean without producing a sense of believability and presence… V: Actually, what we do is, we are fooling people all the time. Most of the Foley sounds that we make are not from the same things that you see in visuals. Everything is make-belief. The entire art of Foley is making you believe that sound is what is actually happening on screen. So, we are fooling people into believing and people believe very easily. You synchronize two things together; people believe that they are together. So, you have to bring it to a point where you make people believe something. That’s one way. But, you can also take that away if you want. So, yes, we are creating realism but that is not the only way we can do things today. It can be more interesting and some people do that. Like we are taking Mani Kaul’s example. He would create ambiences but his ambiences, even the mono ambiences that he created, had 4 or 5 things happening in them. They were never static. It was never the same thing repeating itself like a loop. It was one thing going into something else through a connection of some rhythm or some tonality or something else that transitions from one to the other. He just moved from one thing to the other all the time. He didn’t remain static. He rarely used ambiences. He used specific sounds that moved from one to the other, to the other. The rare times that he had used ambiences, they are also moving from conversations to conversations. There’s a musical note here, there’s a drone there, there is an animal sound somewhere, there is a parrot, a peacock, a horse. All these things are happening simultaneously. He did an interesting thing with us for one of the films that we worked on. He told us that we needed to create musical phrases of a short duration - 8, 10, 12 seconds something like that and it should not have a definite beginning or a definite end. It should not move from point A to point B and should seem like it’s middle of a phrase somewhere. And it should not have one single instrument and should move from one instrument to the other. It did not have to be specifically melodic or rhythmic. It could be both. So, it couldn’t be just one. It had to have a melodic movement and a rhythmic movement. Thus, he set certain rules of how we were to make these phrases. Keeping those rules in mind, we moved those phrases across a few sounds, few instruments, through rhythms and created these various phrases. We created around 40-50. I
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don’t remember exactly how many phrases we created. And we had not seen a single frame of picture till then. Then, we started screening the film and he would ask us to play these pieces and we had to trigger them off from a particular point. Then, he would say, “okay, bring it to this picture and let’s play it from here.” And we would actually put off the picture to see what worked. I realized that this is something that he has been doing. He did this exercise with us but he has been doing this in his films all the time. He creates small sound phrases and he moves them from one rhythm to another, from one pitch to another, from one tonality to another and creates transitions and they are not necessarily sound transitions only. They are picture transitions, covering a sound transition, covering an actor’s movement to a zoom, to a trolley movement, to a cut, punctuating the end of a dialogue. Q: But, why did he not use ambience? V: See, he would use ambiences in a way that they were not ambiences. He didn’t like to have end to end ambience. So, even in a market scene there will be silences. He was not scared of having silence punctuating sounds. Lots of filmmakers and sound designers, whenever there is a pause, there is a silence, they get worried that nothing is happening! He didn’t want to have back to back paint of ambience on the shot because shot was not the only element. He was looking at the whole sequence. So, he needed to bridge things between shots, he needed to move from something to the other. And he might use sound for some of those things, he might use something else for some of those things. he was looking at the complex movement of a few things. So, just having one continuous ambience was not inteneded. And he didn’t believe in perspective also. He didn't want to have a background ambience and a foreground activity on top of that. Whatever he had to say in the soundtrack would come to foreground and then go to background for itself and not to create a perspective. Q: I am just curious about his disinterest in perspectives. Is it coming from a certain kind of ethos, a certain kind of methodology? V: There is an article that he has written about this issue. I think it comes from one of his interviews. He has explained it much better than I can explain it. He thinks that perspectives were not a very Indian thing. He was very interested in Indian traditions, the Indian miniature painting and Indian poetry and Indian music and the Indian arts in general. So, for him, perspective is not something that we used as Indians. It might be used in temple architecture but not in our paintings, not in the same way as
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perspective is used in Western culture. He has explained this much better in one of the articles. I will find it and send you a link. Q: But many other filmmakers, for example, so-called social realist filmmakers or the kind of practices that were termed as alternative cinema, like, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, followers of Ray and all – they were continuously using sync sound; not only sync sound but also ambiences far more nuancedly than mainstream Hindi or Indian cinema. V: True. They are all different types of filmmakers. There are certain common things but they all have different styles. And I think in Mani Kaul’s case, his narrative movement was nowhere close to their narrative proper. He would actually either break the narrative or turn it around or did something to leave it for you to complete. Q: Yes, I agree, like Indian Classical Music. Coming back to the implications of technology: the coming of digital technology opened up multiple channels. Suddenly in the hands of the practitioners there are many, many channels. Do you think that they did not know how to use them and they are slowly settling down into using… V: I think now they are pretty much confident and using it effectively, today. Initially what happened was that we didn’t have a sound designer on the crew, we didn’t have a sound editor on the crew. So, the sound recordist who did location sound would also record some effects and bring them to the editing room and they would get put into the tracks by the picture editors. There was no sound post happening in the earlier films. Often the question was who is going to add all that stuff that is going to go to the left and right and surround? What can be put in surround? The mix engineer would first ask, “The dialogue going into the centre channel obviously, but what am I going to put in all these channels?” So, you had to have ambiences, you had to record stereo ambiences. Somebody had to go and record those stereo ambiences and the location recordists had to learn to record them. Thus, they became sound designers. In India, rather than having a separate post unit working on the post production, it was the location recordist who got involved in creating all these elements for post and he became the de facto sound designer or the post supervisor. In a way it is a good thing because it is actually one person who is looking after the whole thing and that person is not necessarily a post specialist. He is somebody who has been on location, seen it first hand, experienced what something should sound like, which is a good thing. It is just one vision being carried through the film, which is unique to our industry, I think. And this seems to work well. There are people who know they work better
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in post production. Some people who know they can do both. Some people know they can do location recording better and thus stick to doing those jobs but they oversee everything else. So, they will be the sound designer or the post supervisor of that film but they might be doing one job mainly and then supervising another team who will do the rest. A good location recordist would cover all the location tracks and then have 3 or 4 people working on post, cleaning those dialogues up. He would record those effects but get somebody else to edit those and then sit and supervise the sound editing and bring that to the mix room. It is working quite well, I think. We have these different skill sets and people adapt to whatever role. It is not so clear cut as the Hollywood film industry, where there is a location sound person, there is a dialogue editor, a music editor, and an effects editor. Slowly the thing that got added on was that the location recordist started doing the other jobs. They started bringing more content and that became part of the surround mix. In the early surround mixes, we were really looking for a figure who was going to take charge of this. In India, it was the location recordist who picked it up and continued. A lot of them have set up small sound post rooms, which they use for their films now. But in the early days it was a problem. The only thing people were putting into surround or the other channels were music and if there was an action sequence, there was a little bit of panning. You know, cars going left to right, punches and things like that. Surround was used mainly for doing the songs, the action sequences, the outdoor sequences. For the indoor sequences, people didn’t know what to do and that continues to be a problem. Q: Room tone? V: There are two kinds of room tones. Some people created room tone in the studio by using reverbs. In the mono era you could get away with just one reverb unit in your mix room that did all kinds of reverbs. With surround sound, people started using more than one type of reverb and more reverb units. The thing that changed was that with mono, even if there was a problem with dialogues, you could mask them with effects and music because everything was on one channel. With surround, the main change was that any defect in the dialogue was heard clearly because it had its own channel - the centre channel. And the music was on left and right. So, that was not masking any dialogue or distortion in the dialogue. Hence, one had to get better dialogue and the dialogue recording had to be cleaner. Then there are gaps, when all the noises are cut out, like a lot of directors instruct their actors on set even while doing sync sound. All that stuff needs to be cut out. So, you need a mono fill, which is also a room tone. People started taking those things more seriously. They would add a
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mono fill so that they would bridge the gaps between the words and the dialogues or put it underneath to get a seamless dialogue. These things improved over a period of time. In earlier films, you can find all these mistakes. Over time, people have learnt to make it consistent, record better dialogues on location or in dubbing, get some room tone to mask the gaps between dialogues, add a centre fill basically. Q: Were those room tones not recorded on location? V: Even now, it’s a challenge to get the whole unit to keep quiet for half a minute or a minute. They will keep doing something else, which will be more urgent for them and nobody wants to stay quiet on a location for half a minute. Every half a minute sounds like half an hour. It’s a challenge recording room tones on location, even now. But, people are used to that idea now. What editors or sound recordists started doing is that they would roll sound when the shot was ready and they would say “sound rolling” only after 10 seconds. That way one got 10 seconds of room tone before the dialogue or the action started. There were tricks that were used to quiet passages or other dialogue to fill up or loop that room tone. People are still stealing room tones. Today, with technology I don’t think we need to do so much of that. You can steal enough room tone or you can create room tone that will fill up what was on set with various plug-ins and tools today. I would still record room tone as much as possible on location but it is not as critical as it used to be maybe 5 or 10 years ago because editors have gotten better at cleaning, stealing and recreating room tones. Q: What do you think, generally speaking, ambience does to cinema? V: Well, it gives it context. Specially, if you are located indoors and you have an exterior ambience, rather than being a set, it becomes a real location. It gives it a context, it tells you what’s happening outside. People who use ambience effectively are people who inform you more about what the picture is not informing you. It’s giving you additional information. It can be just information, it can be emotion, it can be a change of time. It can be many things. Q: You mentioned ambient sound and music and how they are combined together. They intermingle with each other more often in Dolby… V: Not just in Dolby, in general, I think if we could bring them closer and there are certain filmmakers who use it very well. You don’t know whether it is music playing or whether it’s an ambience. Mani Kaul often used steady, held tones in his films or he would use background score. He would use some background music, really distant music as an ambience. In Siddheshwari he has used extremely distant music. Some of the pieces are so distant that you can barely hear them. But, they create an ambience.
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He created that Benares ambience from various things - from metallic sounds, from rhythmic sound, from drones. He created the music that came from far and he brought you into that. Because of that you become more careful in listening to them. You look out for them. If they are on your face and if they are just realistic, after a while you sort of tune them out. When ambiences are very realistic, they are not very useful. If they are used for something else they become more interesting. Think of all the American serials where you hear the siren and the fire engines and all that. That’s just stamping it with a signature of that city. That doesn’t do anything more to me. It’s in all kinds of films. It depends on how the sound designer thinks about the ambiences. In films like the Matrix13 or in Kieslowski’s films, the way he uses music and ambiences, which are very close to each other. He will use a ship horn, which will sound like a musical horn, and then some music score will start.14 Also, when music starts as part of something that’s there in the frame, it’s more interesting than background score which guides you to that emotion, which you should be having while watching this scene. Again, it depends on what people use these things for, what people use ambiences for, what they use music for. Q: In surround sound and more increasingly surrounded speakers, like Dolby Atmos, there are 128 speakers. From 5.1 to 128.2 or something like that… V: It is not just the number of speakers. The number of speakers is actually 64. It’s just number of objects, number of tracks in a film. Q: Does it not add to the possibility of using multilayer of ambience? V: Yeah, people are becoming more specific in their use of ambiences. There might be just a generic railway station ambience, which can be used in the bed, 9.1 bed. But you would select objects that would become layers in that ambience. So, you will select maybe 4 or 5 different conversations and place them around the room. The beauty of this is, rather than hearing them as a generic murmur, you are hearing snatches of voices and know where they are coming from. You might tune into one or the other. You might change your attention from one to the other, depending on how I play them. So, instead of creating just a murmur of voices, I can direct you to this side or that side of the conversation on that platform. Then I might want that incoming train to be another object, so it could come from front to back or back to front and I might have the announcement of train on multiple speakers and I might place that on multiple speakers within the room, with the delays in them to make it really realistic or give you the sense of the length of the platform. I can create all these different layers
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with a bunch of generic railway station ambiences. Or, if I am in a forest, I can have a generic wind ambience that moves from here to there in a channel based system. I can then add to the specific birds that are flying from one tree to the other, add bird calls, flutter, monkey jumping, the branch that is breaking, the leaves that are rustling to specific speakers as objects. This is how I can add multiple layers to the same generic sound. Henceforth, I create a more specific, active ambience rather than making it a generic one. Q: Active ambience. It was not possible in mono. V: It was possible, but it moved from one thing to the other. Today, it can be simultaneous, there is multiplicity. You are actually getting sound that is rendering simultaneously across multiple speakers and I don’t have to choose to play either this sound or that. Earlier, we could play one, two or three sounds and then I had to move on to something else. Now I can play 50 sounds to you at the same time, in different volumes, in real time. The simultaneity of that is nice. Q: How does this simultaneity contribute to the experience? What does it facilitate? V: Earlier, I had to think in terms of where my speakers were. So, what it does to me is, it frees me from thinking in terms of channels or how I am placing the sounds. If I am imagining a scene, I am completely free of thinking about the technicality of it. I say that I need this sound to come from here and make that decision. I don’t have to worry about selecting something else that would have to take precedence. Earlier, you had to always play between effects and music. You had to choose one or the other in your left and right channels. Today, we use screen-wide arrays in Atmos and what happens is if you want to create a very realistic soundeffects based soundscape on your screen, you put that in your left, centre, right speakers and you hold it there. When your music comes in, it can come in your screen arrays, screen-wide channels and you don’t have to necessarily push down the effects to hear that music because it’s coming from separate speakers and it’s blending with the effects that are happening on screen. It sort of stretches the screen image to something wider. This is one example of simultaneity helping you to hold more things together. You can have multiple layers of sounds together coming from different places but getting mixed in the theatre, in the auditorium, in front of you, in that space. Not premixed and given to you. They are mixing it in a live space. Q: Also, this expansion of space beyond a screen creates diegetic spaces and non-diegetic spaces and often beyond the story. For example, a bird
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flying over your head may not be part of the story but does it add to the diegesis? V: It can be used in different genre of films in different ways. I saw a film, The Woman in Black.15 It is an English horror film, which uses it so well. There are footsteps happening on the floor above you, that gives you an idea of the parallel activities that are going on in that space or in a simple car shot where two people are speaking, you hear the reverb from the rooftop of that car. You know that you are in a small enclosed space and thus you necessarily don’t need to create a vast soundscape. It can be inside of a helmet of a Formula 1 pilot. It can do even that. We did a film with Red Bull and you can hear what the pilot is hearing in his headphones because you feel like you are in that helmet. You hear the car, the wind, the instructions, the radio. So, it doesn’t necessarily need to describe a huge, vast landscape. It can describe really small things in detail as well. Q: Part of the story. Not beyond narrative. V: So, what Walter Murch does in The English Patient16, do you call it a part of the narrative or do you call it beyond the narrative? Or what he does in Apocalypse Now.17 Q: It becomes a part of the narrative. It adds… V: It’s not necessarily describing what’s happening in that scene but it’s a part of the narrative in the larger scheme of things. It doesn’t necessarily relate to the frame that you are seeing all the time. Like Bresson said, “no, you don’t have to… let the eye see one thing and the ear something else.” Give the ear something else. Otherwise, you are merely describing or anchoring or authenticating what’s happening on picture. Is that the role you want to give to sound? Q: Absolutely. Great and epic classics in literature, like War and Peace18 have many large passages of descriptive accounts. Tolstoy is writing extensively, pages after pages, describing the war scenes. But they are not necessarily part of the core narrative. It’s classic because those descriptive accounts are given so much attention and care. V: I would like to relate that to what Mani Kaul used to say about the epic style of filmmaking. Again this is part of one of his interviews where he speaks about Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema and why it is an epic: that the narrative makes space for other things that are happening around, the historical point at which the country is at that time and it relates to other things. It’s not just the narrative of people you see but it’s a wider narrative. It connects to a much wider picture and that’s how it becomes an epic style of narrative. Again, it is probably better explained in his words. I will send you that link. He thinks of Indian cinema, whether it is
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commercial Indian cinema or arthouse like Ritwik Ghatak’s as an epic style. He even connects it to that Suraj Barjatiya film19, where the girl steals the bride’s shoe. And he says that the sequence stretches for 10 minutes. That’s not a part of the narrative but it is very much a part as well. He says this is how we extend our narrative. That’s a very Indian way of filmmaking for him, whereas the western narrative would like to bring the narrative forward, you know. We break into a song and dance in between, keep the story there and move to something in between and then come back to the story. The story in itself is not that important and most people know the story, they might know the end also but… LG. Q: LG. Because all the stories are part of a network of stories. They are all Mahabharata. V: He thinks of this as a very Indian way of storytelling. Q: Yeah, it’s a very, very useful way to think. I would also like to add here that Satyajit Ray comes from another tradition - the European tradition, and the American tradition. Still he is using non-diegetic, off screen sounds, to expand the narrative in a way. He is not at all just European, he is also Indian in that sense. Throughout my project, I was always curious about the incricate effects of technological developments on cinematic aesthetics. Why Dolby Atmos was created? And how will future cinema be watched and listened to in smaller mobile devices? V: The thing is that we are not stretching in one direction but in both directions. On the one hand, we are going from HD to 2K to 4K. We are going from, what I call, more pixels to faster pixels. We are going from 25 frames to 50 frames to 60 frames, 120 frames. So, we are going to more pixels, faster pixels and better pixels with HDR and Dolby Vision. On the picture side we are expanding and we need to be able to enjoy all this. We need a large screen laser projection. That is where you will watch Star Wars. You are not going to watch it on the phone. You will go and watch Star Wars20 there on the big screen, in Atmos sound. Or Mad Max21 you will watch on a large screen. So, there are certain things you will want to watch on a big screen. There are certain things which you can watch on any device. We are extending on that other direction as well. Today, you don’t need a home theatre to enjoy that. There is an Atmos decoder built into a Lenovo phone, there is an Atmos decoder built into a Yoga tablet. You can use a soundbar with Atmos decoder under your TV that would bounce the sounds off your walls, off your house and your ceiling and give you Atmos experience. So, the idea is that you create one experience, you create one set of sounds and then you send metadata which is specific to that delivery mechanism and which enhances or downmixes using that
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metadata to the capability of the delivery mechanism, to the capability of the device. So, you create one experience and you allow that experience to be translated across various screens, whether large screen format to a laptop to a phone to a tablet to a soundbar or a broadcast set top box. That is a right way forward. You don’t want to keep remixing. Look at the delivery requirements of a sound studio today. They have to do 20 different mixes. They have to do mixes for airlines, radio, television, BluRay, DVD, CD release, a music release and for a broadcaster's loudness spec. How many times will you mix a film? Mix it once and create metadata and that will do the job. Send the same information to everyone and let them downmix to the capabilities of the mechanism. Q: But there will be a difference in the mode of consumption. I mean, the way the experience will be consumed in cinema hall or on headphones. V: It’s not bad. The headphone experience is a very personal experience. So, you can actually get a very good personal experience using headphones with an Atmos capable device. It is far from what stereo headphones will give you. Far better. You can switch between two pieces of content: Atmos encoded and normal stereo. You will immediately notice the spatiality of the Atmos content without… I don’t have to tell you which one is which. It’s not subtle at all. That’s a personal experience and going to a cinema is a social experience. Because you are in a large space and you are going to have fun with a lot of people together - that’s a social experience and both can be optimized. Q: But, the changeover from mono to surround is something very drastic. Don’t you think so? V: Yeah, it was drastic. It changed the way people thought about sound. So, it went from mono to stereo to surround and it had a lot of steps in between. It didn’t happen immediately - it was mono to stereo to matrix based surround sound to discrete surround sound. There were 4 or 5 steps in between and people realized that they could do more with each of those things. So, when they went from mono to stereo, suddenly they realized that this is much closer to the way we hear things since we hear things with two ears and we can actually create distance. Perspective was created in mono on the basis of level and frequency response. In stereo you could create space much more easily and also give it a sense of distance. You are able to add more information. You could create phantom stereo where you had a voice in the centre and the musical instruments on left and right. So, you could recreate a soundscape as it happened in front of you. With surround sound, you also added the idea of the space you were listening to it, the out of frame stuff and the back to front. The screen, thus, sort of
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extended itself to a much larger area of the auditorium, in which you are. There are certain cases where surround sound gives you absolutely… A lot of people think that it is realism but it creatively gives you many more possibilities. Realism is just one aspect. If you are watching sports, then realism is what it is all about. But if you are watching cinema, it can be a lot more. While covering something, you must cover it as real as possible. So, for a football match or a Formula 1 race or all such things, it’s added realism. For a music concert, it has added realism but you can stretch it forward. If you watch the Pink Floyd album remixed, the Roger Waters live concert… Q: In 1989? V: Roger Waters has done just one album on Atmos.22 He recreated one of his concerts into an Atmos BluRay and it is creating a different experience by playing with visuals and sounds in a very different way. It’s not just saying that you are part of this concert. It is taking you beyond. It is taking you into a film. It’s taking you into what is behind that music. It is cutting away from the concert and going to different spaces that are in the musician’s head. So, it is not just the depiction of the concert. You can do more if you are doing a musical concert. it depends on what you want to do. There is a Japanese label called Unamas.23 They have done a recent recording of violins and cellos playing a concerto. And instead of putting the music in front of you, they put you inside the music. Imagine sitting between these 4 performers and listening to them. They are on 4 sides of you and you are listening to the space and that’s a very different experience. Or, there’s a recording of a choir singing in a church and there is a soloist. What you hear is the soloist in the centre but you hear her voice in the entire church space. You hear the reflections coming back, how that sound is enriched by all those reflections, which you will never get in a stereo because the reflections are happening on top. That’s where you hear them and then you hear the chorus all around you. You feel like you are in the church. That’s the real experience but an unreal suggestion that this is not that realistic depiction of that singing. It is something else. Things are coming to you from a different space. You can create all this stuff if you want. You can do coverage, you can be a purist, you can suggest alternative possibilities. There is a lot of scope for doing stuff in different types of programs. Q: Would you prefer to have these different representations of reality? I mean real as real, with a bit of abstraction or unhinged from reality. V: Yeah. It depends on the artist’s intention. I am saying that the tools are available for us to use them in whatever way we want. People keep saying
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surround sound, immersive sound, brings more realism. That’s one component of it. You can use surround sound in a club today. There’s a club in London which is using Atmos as its main playback device. The metadata of every object that comes out is a part of the DJ’s console. So, the DJ is deciding which loop comes from where in that night club and suddenly, for the first time, you have sounds coming from the front, top, back and sides. They are travelling. Some of them are fixed. They are coming from different angles and people enjoy it. It is a very different night club experience. That’s also immersive sound. Q: Yeah. The term immersive sound is used and over-used, abused sometimes. But in immersion, theoretically, the audience is not able to think, to cognize. They are just bombarded with information surrounding them, and thus lose the ability to navigate mindfully. Do you think it is a problematic context for a cinema-goer? V: One is you can badly use any technology and the other is you can use a term badly as well, a marketing term. So, the problem is both. One is calling it immersive in that sense is a problem and the other is using it in that sense is also a problem. I mean I could give you bad examples of films mixed in Atmos. There are a few and I don’t think they help in people’s perception of what is happening. And the other problem is that whether it is 5.1, 7.1 or Atmos, people are just being bombarded with sounds all the time. In a love story, why is our average SPL at 90 and 95 in an auditorium? There’s no need. We don’t have soft sounds. We don’t have background music, it’s all foreground. Everything is foreground today, whether it is music or effects or dialogues. What are we afraid of? Whether it is filmmakers, sound editors, mixing engineers, everyone seems to be afraid of sound energy going down that little bit. But what they don’t understand is that unless you create silence, you are not going to create an impact of the next sound that comes in. You need to create a pause in order to make an effort, to create anything. You need to have pauses, you need to build something. Today, we say that these systems are of 60, 80, 90dB of dynamic range. How much dynamic range are we using? 3 or 5 dB? Everything is equally loud. Everything is at 90 dB SPL. It doesn’t go down to 85. So we are using from 85 to 90 dB SPL. That’s 5 dB of dynamic range. Our whisper is at 85 and our shouting is at 90. Then what’s the point of having such a powerful playback system, whether it is 5.1, 7.1 or Atmos. So, I would say that if you want to use any playback system, you don’t need to use all the 64 speakers, all the time. You might have that working for you. Also, you can have really low ambiences playing and you can create suspense. You can create any kind of emotion wonder, horror, anything.
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Q: Yeah. The sound designers who works with Coen Brothers, like, in Barton Fink24 and Craig Berkey in No Country for Old Men.25 He is very effective for Atmos. He is really great. While Walter Murch might be a little bit rough… V: He comes from a different generation. Q: I am always curious about the relationship between the concepts of Embodiment, Presence and Reality and sound, from a practitioner’s perspective. Reality is the most dubious concept in terms of sound. Sound all the time gives a sense of realism. Whenever it is recorded and reproduced, it represents reality. But at the same time, it eludes. V: If you take sound out of context, people don’t know what it is. When you record a sound effect of an action - even a most mundane thing like footsteps - if you record it on a surface where it is not clear what it is, what those footsteps are and if you don’t show a person walking and you use those footsteps, people don’t know what that sound is. It is the most obvious sound when you are seeing a person walking but the moment you eliminate the action on picture and place his back, people will take time to figure out what it is. Q: You mean to say that the realism is actually something that’s constructed, manufactured? V: Yeah, but it is also manufactured with the visuals and in the context of the visual. If you take the context of the visual out and record any Foley, most people won’t know what the sound is. You can record the most realistic Foley of doing something. You record the Foley of a newspaper fluttering in wind and as long as you have the image of the newspaper fluttering in wind, it will be beautifully real. Take the image of that thing away and you don’t know what is happening. Is it cloth? Is it metal? What is it? Q: Is it not more interesting, though challenging, for a practitioner to take away the visual aid and work with sound more autonomously because the visual aid of creating a context is making it easier and obvious? V: Yeah, so usually what happens is that… The function of the sound designer is to help the visuals, to bring more reality to the visuals, which is not necessary. In my case, if I see a newspaper fluttering, I don’t need to add the fluttering sound. People will imagine that sound in their head and whatever sound I put there, they will think it is the sound of the newspaper. If I synchronize any sound, if I synchronize pink noise to that, they will think it is the newspaper fluttering. Q: LG.
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V: I would like to work without the context of the visual but it’s much harder. Q: Sound artists do that often - they don’t use the same visual context. V: They have the freedom there because they can work in abstraction. They don’t need to create realism. They can work completely in abstraction and can isolate elements of that sound, purely as sound, and work with it. There they get closer to music. Q: Right. But, they also have the capacity to use soundscape. Soundscape compositions are closer to reality, the way reality is experienced everyday – a site-based nuanced reality, specific lived realities of particular locations. V: So, it depends on how real you want to be and how abstract you want to be. It’s the artist’s intention there. Q: Since you mentioned Mani Kaul and the possibility to have unreal mingled with real, do you think this is a very critical moment for an artist or a practitioner to balance out these two positions? V: See, in his soundtracks he is always pushing whatever sound effects he is using to not just be a sound effect. It is either marking a time or transition, a rhythm, moving into another event. Q: And that’s the artistry of the practitioner. V: Yeah. Q: Do you think that in cinema, the sound practitioner’s capabilities of artistic imagination or artistic capacities are hindered and that if he or she had been outside of the cinematic context, their creativity would have been further explored? V: I think there are challenges. When your scope is very well defined, you might think of that as a limitation but that also spurs your creativity. You know that you can’t do this, this, this. So you find solutions to do what you want. So I find what is really challenging in animation films is Foley. It can be a very musical Foley or a very realistic Foley. On one hand, there is suspension of disbelief. You know this is not a human character and you are creating all its movements and to make them realistic is a challenge. You yourself have to first believe that this thing is making all those sounds. Quite often if you see Randy Thom’s work 26 or Ben Burtt’s work27, you realise that they have collaborated in helping those images being visualized. They have collaborated with the animators through sound in giving a character to that persona in animation. That’s huge scope. On one hand, it’s a problem because you know what you are creating is not real and on the other, it is such a big challenge. And you are
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participating a lot more into making that thing more believable. So, it is both ways. You realize these are the boundaries of this exercise but then, you stretch yourself to do something far more creative. If Randy Thom was working as a sound artist, he would not have those restrictions to create the movement of that animation but I don’t know what… he would have had to set some limitations for himself for that artistic endeavour then.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:18:07 Name Abbreviations: Vikram Joglekar – V; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 Indian filmmakers Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani are often discussed in relation to the “Indian New Wave” or the avant-garde, alternative, and art-house cinema in India. Their works are informed by the Indian cultural taditions, such as classical music and theatre, and both were taught by luminaries like Ritwik Ghatak at FTII. 3 Khayal Gatha (Kumar Shahani 1989) 4 Siddeshwari (Mani Kaul 1990) 5 The Cloud Door (Mani Kaul 1994) 6 Speed (Jan de Bont 1994) dubbed in Hindi (1994). 7 Rangeela (Colourful, Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) 8 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra 1995) 9 Pardes (Subhash Ghai 1997) 10 Naukar Ki Kameez (The Servant's Shirt, Mani Kaul 1999) 11 Nazar (Mani Kaul 1991) 12 Idiot (Mani Kaul 1992) 13 The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski 1999) 14 Internationally acclaimed and highly influential Polish film author Krzysztof KieĞlowski’s few significant works: Dekalog (1989), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), Three Colors Trilogy (1993 – 1994), & Camera Buff (1979). 15 The Woman in Black (James Watkins 2012) 16 The English Patient (Anthony Minghella 1996) 17 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979) 18 War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy 1867) 19 Popular mainstream Indian film-maker of commercial cinema. 20 Star Wars (George Lucas 1977) 21 Mad Max (George Miller 1979) 22 The Wall (Roger Waters 2015) 23 See: https://unamas-label.net/ 24 Barton Fink (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen 1991) 25 No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen 2007) 26 Randy Thom is an American sound designer known for his work in films like The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu 2015)
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27 Ben Burtt is an American sound designer known for his work in films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg 1982), WALL-E (Andrew Stanton 2008) and Star Trek (J. J. Abrams 2009)
CHAPTER 18 BAYLON FONSECA1
Q: To begin with, the first thing I will be curious about is the way you came to sound. B: As in what made me come to sound? Well, I have always been curious about the world of sound since my very early childhood. My dad used to have a lot of amplifiers, which were valve based. He would keep getting these speakers that are not normally seen in India, like Wharfedale and the Goodman. He was a musician and many others in my family were into music - guitar, violin, piano - so, I think the fascination for sound started from there. Q: So, from a musical family you got inspiration to think through sound per se. B: Per se, yeah. But, curiously what I regret is that I should have been playing a musical instrument too. The reproduction of it, you know, when you hear music playing out of these speakers and how it was happening and what was the… The fascination about these musical instruments were that they were recorded and were playing out of a system. And you would look at the names of the engineers who engineered and so somehow the comment I would always make is that I’d rather engineer than play. I think that clarity also came at a very early stage in life, though of course not knowing where it would lead at a point in time where this stream of work wasn’t looked on as a job prospect. It was looked down upon, especially if it was to do with films. Catholics generally were shown in such bad light, you know, drunkards, philanderers, etc. So, keeping that in mind, I don’t think my father was too happy and I guess I unknowingly got into it. He has always been very clueless as to the nuances of what we call aesthetics and design. Yeah, so that’s been the beginnings of that thought. Q: So, particularly the parameters that came to your mind were, I guess, of the textures of reproduction: the musical instruments that you heard in the reality and they way they are reproduced and changed their textures… B: Yes. We obviously grew up at a point where you had a lot of Michael Jackson and that kind of pop music. But the music that interested and
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influenced me a lot was the music from Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins. To me music has always, since that early age, been what’s happening with the instrumentation, the guitars and the synths, bass guitar and from where’s the rhythm coming and where’s the lead and how do they put it together and who’s played what and then, in the assembly of the music, you know, the transitions from one music to another. And yeah, these were all the guys I kept discovering. I would have listened to a lot of Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Bon Jovi. The exposure to it has been there. With times, the ideas may have changed. In fact, as I grew older and when I started engineering, I would be in awe of how heavy metal really sounded so good. I have never been a heavy metal fan. I can’t kind of listen to a lot of it, but when you heard Pearl Jam or when you heard Scorpions and Whitesnake, when you heard them playing and when you realized the amount of fidelity in that chaos, if you may call it… because you are head-banging to it and you kind of… I couldn’t do a lot of head-banging, because I have never done drugs. So, if I did that they started assuming that I am on drugs. But what I mean is that somewhere in the subconscious I was very aware of how things were being balanced, how they were being engineered and it kind of kept drawing me more and more in to analyze and kind of dissect and understand more. Q: There is a historical development of sound recording, as you know. Optical recording, magnetic recording, digital recording and through growing up we all came across these transitions from one to another. Did you experience this transition yourself or through experiencing music or engineering sound? B: No, I didn’t have to… I always tell people that I ushered in the digital revolution. I never have been fortunate enough to work on the magnetic side of sound because at that point when digital was coming in, there were probably 4 people working on it. One of them was Ashok Shukla, who had Pro Tools 3.1 and I was working on post-production and I was using an Audio Vision. I remember the first filmmaker I had worked with had called me crazy. He said, “You are mad. How would it ever be possible for us to take a reel of film and digitize it onto a hard drive and play it back? That becomes video. That means it’s 25 frames.” So, you were not only ushering in a digital revolution that 8 tracks of editable sound, you were also working with video at that time, which was running off a hard drive, which was unknown. Almost no one understood the concept and so you spent a lot of time training and educating people on timecodes and frame rates and its basic differences. Till today there is that deep void, which has to be bridged to be able to make people understand. Timecode and frame rate - there is a remarkable difference between the two. Hence, looking
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back, I don’t regret because you worked on a technology that was going to revolutionize the future. You didn’t have to do the other format to be able to do this format. Also, similar to my experience in music, because of my lack of film background, not being from a film school or no education in that specific line, I was learning a lot of things on the job. So, on being asked how had I learnt it, I didn’t know what to say! I wouldn’t say I was a prodigy of any sort, because I was not. But, I just know that when I drove my first car, it was when I went for my driving test and I had never driven a car before. I drove that test, I did whatever the instructor wanted, I didn’t pay them a bribe and I got my license. So, there were certain things that instinctively came to me. I probably had an idea how it needed to be done. That’s how I took to editing of a digital platform and I have never looked back from there. Q: Did you have any reference, so to speak, because for people who worked in magnetic and then moved to digital, there was a sense of reference. B: I have never worked as an assistant or an intern to anyone. I was just thrown into the deep end of the sea. The first time, I remember, I was just setting up the Audio Vision and my boss Shyam Ramanna, God bless his soul, he walked into the room and I was like, “Shyam, so now what?” He sat down, we recorded some stuff, he edited some stuff and we did something. It was like: this is as easy as it is! There’s nothing more to it. After that, the approach to anything I did in life has been it was as easy as it could be. There was a manual, there was a machine. I asked him, “What happens, if I damage something?” He said, “Anything that’s damaged, can be repaired.” That was his second sentence to me. So, that was that. It was 15 minutes of interaction. He was the MD of the company, a hands-on guy who revolutionized the way computer graphics was being done at that point in India, in 1994. So, I never looked back after that. I guess it was just that push into the deep end of the ocean and now you had two choices, drown or swim. And I guess, swimming was the better option. Q: Right. So through swimming you explored the digital revolution… B: Completely, yeah. Q: What is your impression of digital realm of film sound? B: The concept of digital has grown from where it was. Being an 8-track playback recording system to today all down to, how much of hardware capabilities your systems have vis-à-vis the processing speed. I have sessions sometimes which are running 300-400 tracks per machine. The last film we did, we had 800 tracks running. Now when I say this, I also say that I am not very proud about that because I think a session needs to
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be simpler, it needs to be less complex, it needs to be clean and neat. It just needs to have what is important for the film. But, why were there so many tracks? It’s because the post-production process was a little chaos from the edit point of view, it was not locked, we were running out of time and had the release in our hands, we had to send drafts and redrafts of materials so that the mix never stopped. If you compare between 1994, where you had 8-tracks, and its limitations, and 2017, where you have that much amount of stuff, tracking available to you, you realize that you have really jumped so far in the last 20 years. Now, digital technology is a technology, right? 20 years ago we had a phone that didn’t allow us to have GPS. We didn’t have Twitter, we didn’t have Facebook, and we didn’t have email. Simple phone call, in and out, a message, in and out, nothing more than that and that was enough. Today, we have everything on our phone. It’s your computer in your hand. What has that done to make life better? So, it complicated life in many ways, right? It’s taken away the simplicity and added a lot of nuisance to the way of life. At a family dinner or in an outing with friends, you are constantly looking at your phone. The human interaction, the human connect and socializing has been reduced. I feel the same thing is happening with technology in our field too. It’s happening in other spheres of work. But has technology helped us make a better film? Has technology helped us make a better-sounding film? I think not. I think we complicate it with the fact that I can put in so much and all I get is mud out of it. There’s no clarity, no fidelity, there is no wow factor in it. Hence, I feel the simplicity of application is in itself the answer to this problem. Less is always more and it is not the other way around. Has it helped us? Yes, it has, a great deal. On magnetic if I was to… Since we have now moved to so much of location recording, especially in our Hindi films, I am able to record a lot on-location and it makes its way to the final product. This allows me to just change a line, a word or sometimes just a phonetic in the word because a particular pronunciation was missing and I can punch it in. I could not do this on magnetic. I could not have this flexibility. So, there have been the advantages. But… we have nuclear power and it can be used to destroy also and there’s a constant policing on how it is used. Similarly, as technology develops in films, we are always going to be flooded with newer applications, running of softwares, hardwares, etc. But, we have to remember that our filmmaking has to be good for a technology to be able to lend itself to the goodness of the product. Q: Right. Now coming to the sense of reality, do you think that the digital technology contributes to a sense of reality being explored, more than before?
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B: Similar stuff was discussed at the panel, which is good, because we are talking the same language and I think cinema is of two types, right? One is escapism and one is realism. Too much of escapism can get boring because we kind of get into another realm, which is not true and then when you suddenly see something real, you are excited because you are able to connect with it. The attempt in both the kinds of cinema is to create some sense of real. The moment something strays away from reality, our minds are programmed to understand that as not being real and we stop believing in it. Now, what is the kind of real we are talking about? Is it an environmental real? Is it an audible dialouge that is real? We are constantly trying to identify with that source that allows us to, at least, believe and not pretend that, “Yes, it felt right, brother. It’s exactly… oh yes, when I was young I knew this…” It comes from my experience with Raees2 because we are taking a film from early ‘70s to all the way to ’93 and we are trying to create a sense of realism from the film. The kind of people who would be walking those streets, the kind of hawkers that would be hawking their wares on that street and I am hoping at some point there will be one person in the audience that would say, “Yes, I remember…” So, when you are psychologically connecting the dots based on something that you remember in your subconscious, if that’s realism then I think… Q: Yeah, but does digital technology contribute in that emerging sense of realism in contemporary Indian cinema? B: It dares more than magnetic would. With magnetic you are restricted with what we call the loop spooling. So, when the loops were not creative enough, you would have that same loop repeating every 30 seconds. One minute gone and suddenly you hear that one annoying bird all the time. Secondly, the problem with magnetic was that you were restricted with the number of tracks you could playback. Of course, that was a different world because I always maintain during the magnetic era imagine how much tougher it was for them to do good sound and they did some outstanding stuff within those limitations. They didn’t even have automation on their consoles. Here, we have got the world. We have gotten a Pandora’s box open in front of us, everything at our beck and call and we are still not able to achieve probably 10% of what those films achieved. Their state of consciousness was so much more alive and tapped into the film, because they were paying attention. Some of the mixing engineers like Mangesh Desai would mix straight to optical. Margin of error was so limited. You just had to get it right. You knew every single move as the film was playing. You couldn’t make a mistake on that 10 minute reel, you know. With digital what’s happened is, you are now not limited to having only 8
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tracks. You can have as many as you want. But having as many is a dangerous call, right? Because more is not good. What’s real? I mean, if I am trying to create a sense of real as per our current situation here, then the sounds we hear are what make it up. But 10 minutes ago, this sound did not exist. Now, it might work in a scene if the scene requires this distraction since both of us are pretty distracted by it. But, if it was a serious scene and this distraction was there, the audience too would get distracted as opposed to the same scene running with the intent of the audience getting distracted by it because my dialogue would have, “Hey, please sit still.” So, you see, the stimulus also come from the screenplay. It definitely comes from the content that’s unfolding on the screen, to be able to create that sense of real, which contributes then to what we understand as, “Yes, I identify with that.” I hope that helps. Q: I think that digital technology does help… B: Yeah, sorry, I didn’t complete… I lost my thought somewhere. It does. It’s now allowing you much more freedom to cut between different kinds of sounds. See, one of the problems for the longest time would be that we would use the same loop of ambience. For example, I am in this location, scene no. 1 went out, scene, scene, scene, scene, come back here! Scene no. 22, same location, copy paste the same ambience again. We are not paying heed to the time of the day, we are not paying heed to the scene’s requirements or, understanding what the screenplay really is and how you want to actually elevate the sound design by silence or by intrusive sounds. Having multiple number of tracks available also then allows you to layer and spread out your sounds, on-screen, off-screen, whereever you want to place it. So, yes of course, when rightly used and a lot of thought are going into it, given whatever constraints that might be there like time constraint, release date, etc. You still are able to think now, right from the point of time when you started tracking, as to what kind of sound I want to put in and where. There’s a huge boon in it. Q: The question is of texture. The texture of magnetic recording and the texture of digital recording, there are basic differences. I mean, theoretically understood and practically felt differences of the texture. But do you think that the difference of magnetic recording from digital recording would be much warmer? Or do you think it also would be much more realistic or digital recording is much more realistic? B: I think, it’s been an ongoing argument for decades now. For 40 years, the argument is going on about magnetic being warmer because of more saturation. I think, the words warmth and punch, and so many other words that we sound guys have coined, all reflect upon the emotions that we feel.
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When a track is well-recorded and you like what you are hearing, you could as well pawn it off for being an analog recording and you would swear by the Gods in the heaven that it was and have a magnetic tape on your table and people would believe it is. It’s about how a sound makes you feel. I am not the right guy because I am not one of those crazy audiophiles who are going to dig so deep, you know, and go, “My amplifier, if I did this, it was gold-plated anode valve…” No, no. I think it is always down to what you are hearing and the best source of interpreting anything is your ears. If you hear something saturated, then it is saturated. If you hear something clipping digitally, you know it is clipping. You can hear it, you can sense it. So, I guess it’s all down to the technique of what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it and the fact remains that even if I like analogue better than digital, it’s not accessible anymore. So I have to now adapt to applying that knowledge here because even in the digital workspace, I am going to saturate, I’m going to clip, I’m going to overload and do all those things I shouldn’t be doing. Yes, headrooms are more, meaning I have more dynamic range from soft to loud to be able to achieve better results. Q: I would like to underscore the word real. Digital is more real or not real? B: Digital is just a platform. Was your Pulse phone or your analog Solenoid phone more real than the phone that you are currently using? Or is it just a medium of being able to do the same job you were doing with that component and now you have a newer component. That’s the technological revolution that’s happening to all of us. This is just a medium. Tomorrow, let’s say the medium goes and I can plug in straight to the cloud and record. What happens then? Would we say that this medium is more devil compared to the digital, hence we will forget about analogue? We grow from a generation to the next and very soon there will be a generation that doesn’t even remember about cassette tapes. As we grow, and if the planet survives, we will come to a point where digital… these hard drives, which once upon a time weighed 3-4 kilos, I remember, a 4GB hard drive, are now this small. So, what I feel very strongly is that, it is only a medium. It all comes down to how I record. Has this medium caused for the miking to change? No. I think the basics are exactly the same. While miking an actor, would I place the mic any differently? No. So, the sources of the content that we are recording have remained the same. The change in platform hasn’t changed the approach to technique and hence, the technique remains exactly the same. Q: But, does the technique stay exactly the same? In digital realm people work differently, no?
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B: How? Q: For example, if we come to post-production in surround sound… B: Oh, yes. Right now we are only talking about recordings, which are being done at the shoot. Q: Yes. Also sync sound. Sync sound has revolutionized film sound in a way. That is also an outcome of digital recording. Without digital recording you could not think of sync sound as it is now. B: Yes, the ability to record a multitrack, upto 8 tracks and today we can go beyond that by kind of daisy chaining recorders and have the flexibility of recording all the actors, who are speaking, on tape. Yes, it has changed the ability to then be able to come to the post-production stage and have so much control over every single mic. Now in my style of working, I record ISOs, I never do a two track production mix and that argument can carry on for as long as we live because there is that one world that says, “Hey, I am a mixer and I will give you a two track.” I am a mixer and I will give you my ISOs because I edit all of my films, I know exactly what my requirements are in post. So, yeah, the post-production workflows have gotten very, very specific and extremely complex. Sessions can run off them in a way that you have 100% control over every single parameter. I think the technique at recording levels is done and dusted. There’s no new wheel to invent over there. We are doing what our predecessors did. We have tried to better it, in terms of the technique of how we approach a recording and they will set precedence for kids who will come into the business after us and have examples to follow. Good thing is that they have examples to follow, where some of us were paving that path, because we have never walked down this street before, right? Today a lot of people go abroad and study sound. Back in ‘93-‘94, only the rich guys had the resource available to do that. Today, education, learning has become a very handy tool available to everyone. Q: Coming to sync sound, do you have any comment on sync sound practice? I mean the coming of sync sound and the revolution afterwards. B: See, sync came into vogue with Lagaan3 and Dil Chahta Hai4, thanks to Nakul.5 Fantastically recorded films, which revolutionized the way the industry would then move. But, I would like to draw attention to the fact that sync was already happening before that, on much smaller films with Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani. I don’t know all the other senior directors who were shooting in sync. There was a film that I did, which was shot in sync, called Bombay Boys6 , back in 1996. There was Dev Benegal, doing English August 7 , with Vikram Joglekar. So, there were many of our seniors who were already working in the format and the
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limitation at that point was that they were recording to a two track recorder or they were recording to a Nagra, with good sound. With the advent of the millennium, of course, everything changed. Now we got familiar with the fact that we could do 4-track recordings, we had 4-track recorders available either form Zaxcom or from Fostex and you had all these new mics that had come in. As it grew, of course, we grew with the times and it got even more intensive where you could, like I said, have an 8-track recorder. If you were doing 14-15 characters, you could piggyback another recorder, in sync, and run them on timecode. It changed the face of Hindi cinema. What it hasn’t done is, it deteriorated set discipline. With the ability to record sound, we also trained ourselves with ways of cleaning it up and arriving at a really good clean track, tonally sounding very good and we never lost the original textures. So, again we had to train ourselves overtime, experimenting at the cost of the producer to arrive at this basic denominator of a good-sounding track. Producers realized and caught on to the fact that we had so much of control over our cleaning, that it very commonly became a, “Okay, we will do it in post.” “Why you cribbing, why you…” So, from a point where it says sync sound, silence on set, now became a free for all with people’s phones ringing, actors’ phones ringing, DoPs’ phones ringing and there is no sense of any discipline. Now, the other drawback of sync is, sound is such a department that starts working when camera starts to roll. Of course during setup, actors are being miked, or boom shadows are being checked and so on. If it’s a wooden floor, carpets are being laid, those are the miniscule jobs that the sound department is undertaking prior to when silence is called for on set, which means at that point, all spots, all lighting, maybe grip to some extent, all production crew, all direction crew, hair, makeup, wardrobe, costume are supposed to maintain complete silence. But they have been working for so long, right? And now is the time when the shot’s rolling! So, they can chat among themselves and have a social moment. So, what’s happened is, a sound guy or a production mixer is shouting himself hoarse, asking you to maintain some form of discipline, even if not for us, as a courtesy to the actor, because the actor is performing at that point and the actor and the director positively don’t want to dub this film. So the battle you are up against is one that leads to a lot of depression because you are viewed as the grumpy, sulking, sad, boring, irritating, rude, arrogant sound guy, and none of the above are true because I have got that 30 seconds or that one minute to get it right. If it’s a single shot, I don’t have multiple shots to cut in and out of. This format of sync sound, thus, has lead to more downers than ups. It’s made working very difficult because, as a business we also have a tendency that “we will see in Post”, “we will see in DI”,
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“Okay, we will dub it later.” Later, nobody remembers, because later when you are like, “Oh, that has to be dubbed”, you are asked, “Dubbed, why?” Obviously this is problematic. “What! Why didn’t you tell earlier?”, “Yes, I told you.” I also condone it in a way because I know sometimes the filmmaker has a lot to achieve in a day and we have to try and help production make their day, right? But, at what cost? What if we adhere to a non-exhaustive, simple style of working, which is just staying disciplined. I am not ever jumping into anyone’s face when hair, makeup, wardrobe is happening, right? I am not going and fiddling, I am not jumping around the set when the lighting is happening. I am respectful of somebody else’s space. So, I think, I am talking on behalf of at least a hundred sound recordists who are facing these problems and you will uniquely find, maybe they might not be able to express themselves with so much of articulation and clarity. But, I am sure in some way you will find 10 points from each of them, one point per person, and they will all add up to the summation of what I am presenting to you. Q: Maybe there will be a sense that sound recordists need more cooperation from the crew members. That should emerge, right? As an outcome of sync sound being accepted in the mainstream sound production? B: That’s the deterioration that has happened. It should emerge. We should be conscious. It is as much saying that we pay a Swachh Bharat tax for not littering, defecating and so on and so forth. You still will find someone throwing something out of a car. I am kind of pretty tolerant and understanding when someone who is illiterate does it. But, someone driving a top of the line Sedan… What I am trying to signify here is, you have got an educated class of person who’s had his McDonald burger and pops it out of the window, so my expectation is similar on set. We definitely run our briefs during our pre-production meetings and have chats with the director, the executive producer and his line producer, with the 1st AD and crew and we request across all. At some point, we even send the first mail to the entire crew prior to the film shoot. That’s always been the norm. The director requests all of us to co-operate and we request all of them to co-operate, which is why I said, we co-operate with every other department – we are not jumping into others’ space when they are doing their jobs. Based on our experience, me and my crew are completely aware of others’ job and we expect that with their education, which is why they are on a film set, they might be mindful of what I am doing and that is why they’re talking in between a take is really a problem. Q: This is a sense of awareness. It’s an awareness which must be developed as a part of the management of filmmaking.
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B: We are dealing with not one filmmaker. See, the percentage of films happening earlier was very low. Probably 3 to 5 films were doing sync. Initially, with Dil Chahta Hai and Lagaan, Yash Raj Films, Dharma Productions, a few of them caught onto the bandwagon. Red Chillies caught onto the bandwagon. So, from doing a few films, we started doing 10-12. The arguments back then would be, “No but, how shall we do it?” I mean, how will I record? There is this traffic sound there. I am recording and someone’s playing a TV next door. So how do I do this? How do I go knock on his door and say, “Hey, shut up! Don’t play your TV!” No, that won’t work. So you also started to educate your crew on how you would approach a problem and production always would speak softly and sweetly, because that’s how you diffuse a bomb. Today, the percentage of films doing sync is immense. It’s not exponential but I think it has been a linear growth, where at least a 100 films must be shooting sync today, this is excluding television, ad films or web series and short films. Documentaries were anyway always doing sync. They were never dubbed. So I am leaving that out. So there’s been a huge growth, in the number of productions being made that utilise this format. Our film schools probably haven’t educated our film students as much into the discipline, ethics and dignity with which you conduct your job. No, I don’t blame them because with kids coming out of SRFTI or FTII, there are also kids coming out of L. V. Prasad, Chetna, K. R. Narayanan. Sound Ideas and Digital Academy and Delhi Film Institute and Bhupen Hazarika Film School and… Q: Whistling Woods. B: Whistling Woods and probably 100 other private film schools across the country today, right? So, when we started, as I told you, there was hardly anything happening. It was an ostracized job. Today it’s an accepted job. It’s a career option. There’s so much of influx of talent that’s coming into the business that doesn’t understand the discipline with which the job needs to be conducted, because, A: they need the job and B: they want to make you happy, a yes guy is always better than a no guy, even if it means doing a bad job. There has been a rapid deterioration in the expectations with which we are used to working, the format, style and discipline in which we were used to working. Whether it has done good or bad is almost a statistical. Since you are doing so many interviews, it’s almost like a job thrusted on your shoulders to figure how many films were really successful in the last 10 years, having done sync sound and what’s that yardstick with which you will be able to measure its success. The ability of being able to record in sync and reproduce in a noteworthy way, it’s a very difficult statistics to arrive at.
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Q: Yeah, but there are instances when sync sound does sound very evocative about the site being recorded. I remember a few sequences from Highway8 or a few other films like, Kaminey - Subash Sahoo recorded it.9 This sequence where this girl and boy are sitting on the stairs and the lively ambience from the neighbourhood. Those experiences are new to our ears. We are conditioned to dubbed sound. So, how does a place or particular environment comes to life though sync sound, that is to be understood. B: Sync sound, actually is not sync, you know. More than that is the director evoking a performance from an actor, which is being captured as similar to it’s being captured on camera and then reproduced. So, let’s take sound away from the equation. When that performance, acting-wise, gesturing-wise, look-wise are all perfect and now we take the sound and put it back, this sound, the things coming out of the actor’s mouth, add up to the emotion, add up to what was being expected out of the actor, that is when sync sound does it 100%. I cannot dub a film anymore. I hate the idea of being in a studio, locked away for weeks, dubbing because I know sync is… I loved to dub initially in my career, I did quite a few films that were dubbed. I still do, just that I don’t attend those sessions anymore. I remember one of the films I dubbed and my challenge on that film, which I set for myself, was to make it sound like it was location track and people did come back and ask me, “How did you manage to record this on location?” And that was an achievement in itself. This is a film called Shootout at Lokhandwala.10 It’s a gangster film and it’s hectic in its way, it is an ensemble film again, like all of my other films which are ensemble cast. I think that’s to prove that we can actually take a dubbed film and style it in a way that makes you feel like it’s coming from a location. Especially in emotional drama scenes, when an actor has reached a point where he or she is giving a 100% and all of it is pouring out, it’s impossible. An actor says, “Look, I can’t dub this again. This is it. I will never hit that note because…” See an actor also as a performer is touching his or her inner core, right? You can’t just get there just being in a happy mood. Of course, they have their own process to get there but when you are touching those points and the actor has to psych himself into that zone, to be able to get there and sometimes the breaking in a voice, the time, the crackle, it’s impossible to get there and that’s why I feel, I mean, it’s irreplaceable and the journey is fantastic when… I love sync, it’s not like I don’t. Every film is a challenge, when I get into it. Especially when there are so many actors in the frame and there are these tough locations to shoot at. It’s just that the crew tends to be… It’s like I already have 10 problems and the crew is my 11th, which could actually be well taken care
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of if they were a little more understanding. So I am not at any point saying that I don’t like sync, I don’t prefer it, I’d rather do sync, I’d rather be a production mixer than a sound designer. The challenge of being a recordist on location is so very immense. Q: We talked about the voice being recorded, the crisp voice being one of the fundamental narrative component, but there are other components like effects and ambience. Do you think of ambience as a fundamental component? B: 1000%. Of course you can’t do effects recordings when you are shooting sync because you have all the crew there. So, what happens is that all my holidays end up working, because I go back to locations and record stuff, listen to things that are unique to a place. You are creating sketch maps for ideas that are coming from a place. I would spend time sitting, observing. I think half of what makes it to a film, comes from observation. You are not searching for the right effect. No. I don’t think. That makes it feel like, you are really working. I mean, I carry memories of so many different places, even SRFTI. Each time I am back there, I hear something new. I have ideas and it makes it to a film because these ideas are in the environment and you realize that environment is never static. It’s constantly moving. If it was static, it would be so boring, right? So even things like doors, bells, footsteps up and down stairs, wooden floors that creak. I know our job is to cheat, my job is to heighten a sense of disbelief, to make you believe and I think it’s the wow factor. I always like to call it the wow factor. It’s like, “Wow, how did you do that?” Simple things. The guy’s walking on a wooden floor and 100% it’s going to creak. so, when I am shooting I am taking away the creak, because I don’t want it on my soundtrack and I am doing so many more things to take it away and then everyone’s gone and I am doing the same walk and I want the creak back. So, it’s sort of Photoshop and that’s what digital technology allows you, it allows you so many layers of different things playing, as they are needed, when they are needed. Everything is lending itself to something that you are hearing, that might make it to the final track at the end, which will be released in theatres on new media technologies that are being emerging every day. So, sometimes you are looking into the distance and you might never use that sound and it goes into a library and it makes its way somewhere else. But, observing subconsciously is the most important facet that you need to have. Q: Do you use stock sounds while using ambience or… B: A lot of it, yeah. I think if anyone wasn’t using it and said they weren’t, I don’t think it’s true. I think the best of the best guys across the world do.
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We might have a lot of recordings that come from the locations but to create an immersive experience, an extension of the screen, create that kind of movement, yeah, you have to dig into tons of libraries. I think our own collection of content that has been recorded, is a library in itself. So I think it would be a lie to say, no, I am using only recorded material. You are constantly cutting in and out of things to kind of create something new. Q: What about when you go to a new location, for example, outdoor or indoor, in a haveli or in a landscape, like a field or a village, distant remote village. Every location offers a multitude of sound, but do you find that amount of sound material from the stock related to that particular location? B: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You are basically asking “does it match?” See libraries have… From back in the day when there were only these many libraries, you know the 6000 series or the Hollywood Edges. Today what’s happening is people like us are also able to contribute to libraries. So, I might have a volume of recording of something specific and someone hears it and says, “Oh, can I use this?” We, the ones who are actually walking in the field and designing, have limited amount of time. But, unlike us they are tons of effects recordists, whose jobs are to record effects only. They don’t work on films or documentaries or on any other content. Every few months, there is a new library being released. I think it is as good as me hiring that person to go… So I had a discussion with one of these guys and I said, you know, I am looking for these kinds of sounds and he said, yeah, for this kind of cost, and with this kind of stuff, I can go out there and record an entire 5TB content for you. So, that’s nothing but delegation because what happens is, given our timeframes of postproductions, you are running against time all the time. So how do I go out there and do everything myself? I have an idea, if I explain the idea to the other person and give him the entire brief of what I want, I will get all those 100 sounds that I want back from him, sometimes more. Q: You also record location sound? B: Like I said, that’s a mandatory thing. In fact, like I said, holidays, but sometimes if you are lucky enough, lunch breaks, dinner breaks, depending on what hour we are shooting, record, clear out, security locks it down because nobody’s on set, because everyone’s gone to have… There’s only one security guy sitting around and then you can roll for an hour. You don’t have to sit around and monitor. Come back and hear it. So, you are having lunch at the same time, you are not making any noise on the set. See, it’s all down to what you want to do, how passionate you are about your art. The more inclined you are, the more crazy you are, the more mad you are. There were times when actually when I was shooting a
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scene, I would have mics facing on the outside of my set, live sets and I was recording ambiences. And I would remember very famously, Mr. Mulchand Dedhia would call me crazy. Mulchand Dedhia is one of the best gaffers India has. He is the guy who revolutionized the way lighting happens and he has worked with some of the who’s who DoPs from around the world. And I remember him saying, “Are you mad? What are you doing?” And I do agree at some level with him also because I still got crew moving around, right? But, I did that for an entire feature film and we came back with lots of stuff. Then I have matching ambience for the scene I am currently shooting. Q: Yes, absolutely. Timing-wise. B: Timing-wise. But sometimes it’s also very impractical, because I had to lockdown that entire corner and you do have crew who don’t understand. They are not as passionate as you. For them it’s just a film, you know, “Hey, what are you saying? Leave it, you have done 100 films.” So it’s dismissive, your passion gets taken for granted. But I think you have to ride that wave and then say, “Okay, so I want morning, afternoon, evening and night.” We just record and we come back with lots of stuff. But again I am repeating, it would be wrong to say that we don’t use stuff from stock. But the kind of stock you are talking of is, I mean, I never go to the 6000 series anymore because it’s redundant, it’s outdated. Maybe the percentage of stuff I will use from the 100 CDs is not more than even 5% that make it to a film. It’s one sound that you might like or… Yeah, in Raees it made a lot of sense, because in Raees I was looking for a lot of old phones. So, we may have recorded old phones on set but how do I get this phone to ring now? We searched through every single old library that was existing. I told people that, “If you ever use anything from Captain Audio, I will kill you all.” That’s like 1980s shit. But, this shit made it to the film because it helps me date the film back, you see. So, I feel it will be fairly lying and misleading to say that we don’t. You have to dig into libraries. You are padding. You are doing stuff. But, my whole team is very aware that I am looking for newer sounds. I am looking for, not realism, but more accurate content that makes me feel, “Yes, okay, this is nice.” You can feel a wind and the rustle of leaves, the rustle of grass. And when it’s wrong, you instinctively know it’s wrong. If it’s not working, it’s wrong. Just throw it out. Q: So to be more specific, what does ambience do to cinema? A: It does a lot. When you are talking of ambiences, you are talking of birds, you are talking of traffic, you are talking about crowds in a market. Now, you start to break it down. You start to talk about birds in empty
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countryside, you are talking about birds in the morning, you are talking about birds in the morning at 6 o'clock, birds in the morning at 8 o'clock, birds in the morning at 11 o'clock, birds in the afternoon at 12 o'clock, birds in the afternoon at 2 o'clock and the nature changes, every hour. You are talking of wind, the nature of wind and the kind of wind, you will use it where. A cold wind being used in the desert, no, that’s not right. You don’t know your winds that means. Blistering winds, where is it used? The wind when it’s raining outside and you cannot hear the wind whistle through the crack of this… So, I am looking for things that add value to my screenplay and it matches something that makes you go, “Wow!” But, you are not listening to the sound. That’s not the idea at all. I don’t want my sound to make you feel wow. I want to make you feel that, “Oh, I remember this when I was small, in our house it was like that…” The idea is to come as close as one person’s experience, not 10 because it’s impossible for me to cater to everyone. If one person identifies with that sound, I have succeeded. Everyone couldn’t have had the same experience, right? For me ambience starts to break down into so many different parameters and I am looking for specific thing in every single ambience. So, when it breaks down, we are talking about all kinds of birds, birds in different kinds of places. I would try not to use the wrong bird in the wrong place because it won’t fit in. Then it’s the different natures of traffic, then it’s the different natures of wind, then it’s the natures of crowds. Q: And room tones. B: If I want a room tone, that’s from location. That has to be from location. It has to be from the same place. If it’s a set then it’s a different story. Then we are going to rely on set tone because that’s going to match my dialogue and that will build the ambience around it. See, it’s a proven historical fact, put in as much stock (from sound banks) room tone as you want; I am going to mute it. Q: But if it’s recorded on location. B: Then I will use it. If I know it’s original, it’s real, it’s from a place where it’s actually from, I myself will put it in. But, historically speaking, and they try it (stock room tone) everytime and it doesn’t work. I gave it the fair chance. I hear it in my film and as my mix is progressing. I mute, unmute. Can I hear it? No. Not adding value. It’s out. I will send you snapshots of all my reels of Raees now. I am sitting right here, I will ask someone to send snapshots, you will see all of them are muted. Most probably one is on. But, if it’s from location, oh, billion percent it will make it to the film because I believe that’s what it is. My dialogue track is
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very solid and there’s no jump anywhere. My dialogues from one to the other are rock-solid but if I have replaced a dialogue somewhere and I have this dialogue room tone that would be the matching room tone that comes in. Again, it rotates through the day - morning, noon and night. Hence, I have a collection of all the possibles. Since the crew doesn’t allow us the chance to record, we have to figure it out as and when. To me this is the room tone right now, with that traffic outside. I will record it, that’s what it is. This is my centre track bed as we call it. So, my belief of dialogue is that, dialogue is always going to be dirty, unless you are in a very, very, very quiet place. That’s great! Otherwise, dialogue’s always going to be subject to some form of noise. So we should never feel that the noise has disappeared provided that the center track which contains the dialogue is conveyed to the audience very clearly. Film experience is not the music and effects. The audience is coming to watch your story, provided it’s not a silent film. Then we understand. Predominantly we make talkie films, right? Q: Yeah, but when you talk of breaking down of ambiences, many ambiences, layers of ambiences, do you think that surround sound opens up the scope? B: Yeah. 100%. You obviously won’t hear it in here and if you had a camera looking at me, this way, which means we are front of screen, that’s our surround, that sound would go to the surround and obviously hoping that we never take a shot from here, because then you are jumping the axis. I think, I love the 5.1 format. I have always been on the fence with any other formats, which are 7.1, Atmos. I have done films in Atmos now. Dolby was really excited that with the fact that I had finally taken that leap. But, I always maintained that in the 5.1 format, I would love to immerse you in the middle of things, as much as I can, given that we really have a big problem with Indian films that we have so much of background score and we use them to support scenes, rather than the scene supporting itself. When the screenplay, direction and acting are very good, experiences say that you don’t require score. I have had directors being convinced that, “Here we don’t need a score.” But because commercial films dictate that we need this foreground music, we need to pad it, we cannot leave it, “Oh, how can a Shahrukh film not have background score, right?” So, that’s unfortunate. Then any concept of sound design you are talking about and this immersive experience and this use of surrounds. Also surround is also not meant to be necessarily used where, this is a surround channel and you put one sound here and here. You have got positioning that can happen. You can move things around, you can have things moving at the back and it will not disturb you. The idea is never to
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disturb you because people say, see, 5.1 sounds great but the visual is on the screen and you need to always connect with the screen. But I say, “Yeah, great, you have to connect with the screen, but what happened when we did Gravity?”11 So, if a filmmaker is thinking so far ahead, this is what you can achieve with sound. Thus, I would love to go back to the script. I do this often with the students when I come to teach, let’s take 20 minutes of the film and look at the script - of my film or any other film – and let’s see how paper to screen, how did it transcend and what happened and analyze and understand. One of the things I wanted to do is to go back to Gravity and say pan voice into surround, take it to left surround and all the way back… Was it written? Or, was it an idea that originated from out of the content that was being shot? Was it a discussion between Fremantle, the sound designer, and Cuaron? They had these discussions, they ideated. When did the discussions start? So, the use of 5.1 by itself, is so immense to be able to take the audience right to the centre of it. Q: But there are differences between 5.1 and Atmos because Atmos might have speakers even on top. B: Right. Q: Does it make a difference? B: What would you put on top? Q: Maybe a bird passing by. B: Correct. So, you suffer the same problem as 5.1, where you have a bird going (mimics) and audience is probably going to look at the back, right? So one of the biggest no-no’s in sound mixing is do not have a door open at the back because invariably you will have someone, a cell phone ringing at the back. So don’t create a stimulus for someone to get distracted while an important scene is going on. Q: But, for example, if it’s a war sequence… B: Of course! Here’s the interesting part and that’s again where Gravity comes in, that you shot the film in space, which has no up and down and so movement is happening and you are not feeling it. And the camera is moving. One of the biggest no-no’s in mixing was never move dialogue off the screen because the tonal texture changes and did they defy logic and say, “Up yours, bro!” This is it, this is what you can achieve. It’s an outstanding achievement and excellence for film. I wouldn’t say it is an outstanding achievement and excellence for sound. It is an outstanding technical achievement of excellence in film. Because you took an idea and sound lived up to that idea and never jumped in tonal quality when you came on screen and you moved off screen and came back to the front. You
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are a sound guy. You can understand tonal jumps in dialogues will be distracting. So yes, when a film is shot, even in Atmos… See, we are struggling with, “what do I put in the top channel”. The top channel is your atmospheric sound, right? Like a plane going overhead, or if the camera is on the ground, a truck going over your head. Yeah, those are the classic sounds that go on the top. But, was Atmos only built for those sounds? No, it wasn’t. It was meant to allow you to objectify and give you so much serious control of placing a sound in a specific speaker, so that you feel like that’s the point source. For that, the film needs to tend towards lending itself, right? When the film doesn’t lend itself to that sound… Now you hear this? These parrots don’t seem to be coming from a specific point source. So, that’s what happens when I start doing my stuff on Atmos now. I give it a little larger width. It’s there but it’s not there, it’s spread across a little more. Q: Diffused. B: Yeah, it’s diffused a little more so it’s coming from a point source in a tree but we don’t know how much. So, it’s spread a little more. When I am coming back to 5.1, I have to keep it in mind that 200 theatres will play back in Atmos. And with Kaabil12, maybe we got 2,600. That’s what they are saying. So, 2,400 screens will playback in 5.1, for which, I have to also keep a tab on my end audience and not distract the majority. The 95% of my audience will hear it in 5.1. So, I have to go back and forth and back and forth. I think you will agree because you seem like the guy who has transcended to another level of sound and you are able to analyze and understand. I am sure you are an audience also, right? So, you know what I mean when you are watching this film and you are totally sucked in and a sound distracts you, a jump in tone distracts you, a wrong entry level of background music distracts you. There is that certain distraction that takes you, it has lost you. And for me hence, people find it though when I say emotional connect. My emotional connect is very, very strong and I try not to make a mistake. I must be making mistakes, I am sure, because there is no one to correct me. But, the way I slide in, come in and take over… A good film that has good sound, will never be noticeable. You will always feel, “Fuck, what was that film, dear friend?” And then in your discussion with your friends or on your drive back home, you will be like, “Yes, it had that moment that sound…” So I always say that no one should ever walk out saying, “Good sound.” It should be a good film. These are the things that influence my thoughts when I am working on edits or when I am working on sounds. When I put things in, why am I putting it there, what’s it doing, I constantly keep watching it from an audience’s point of view when I am watching a whole reel. I never watch it from the point of view
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of my sound. No, no, no! That’s the biggest mistake one can ever make, because, for me the battle is always with the music, right? So, “no, no, please increase my effects, decrese the music.” Music person will come and say, “no, no, please increase my music. Decrese the effects.” But, for me, it is the mix. I am happy to lose elements of sound and take away when music has taken over and vice-versa and we’re complementing each other so that we add up to the film experience at the end of the day. Q: So you are the first audience of your film? B: I am the first audience of my film and I am the last audience of my film by the time it leaves me. Then, it is unleashed to the universe because after that I can worry, be scared, hope, keep my fingers crossed. I run away from Bombay during the time of release for all my films. A lot of people don’t understand but it’s like a part of my soul has been taken away and put into the film and I can only hope that it sounds good and it’s appreciated and it inspires people. Yes, I am always open to critical comments when people don’t like something. I learn from my mistakes. But, it is meant to inspire people to understand what you can do with the soundtrack, you know, and how much we can actually push the envelope. I got asked this afternoon, by my action team that works on effects since we had to outsource some work and it was all rushing to the end; they said, “There is a very remarkable balance between dialogue, effects versus music and there are many places where music is taking the second fiddle and you have taken over with this and then there’s the other… Did you do this on your own or was music involved?” I was like, “No, it was a duet.” It was a back and forth while we were creatively designing. All my material was going to Ram Sampath and all his material was coming to me and there are some very poignant places, at very difficult points in the film, where the music has taken second fiddle to allow me to take center stage. Now, I am not evaluating what the audience feels or what a critic feels. I am evaluating, what we felt would work for the film and they came back saying, “Fuck, that is so good! How did you arrive?” That’s when visuals start talking to you. So, that’s the next level you transcend to. You have got all the vegetables and masalas ready and then you start to see your film on a screen and bang, an idea comes. An idea that you have not thought of before, it could be a last minute, “Oh fuck, I am going to change everything.” Yes, change everything. Because it is once in a lifetime. It is going to hit the screen and then it’s gone. Then you never have that second chance. So every channel, it’s not only surround, it’s not only digital technology. I think, these are tools that we have. It’s a medium we can play with. How do I keep my thought simple with all of these complex-natured tools that we have? How do I not get carried away by
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making it a khichdi (Hotchpotch)? You know, someone once said to me that you can have all the plug-ins in the world, but then what? I agree. I don’t need all of that. I need it where I need it. I don’t require it across the whole film. I require it for the specific things that I want to do and that plug-in might not be useful for the rest of my life. It might be an idea just used only on this one film because I am in search of the next best idea. Q: Yes, this minimalist approach, to keep as less as possible, in terms of technology, in terms of materials, is very apparent in your work. For example, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara13, it’s very clean. B: I think all my films are clean. I will tell you the films that aren’t clean. Films like Krrish 3 are not clean. I come with a certain amount of idea that won’t take away from my director or from my actor who have explicit control over the mix. But, I also need to be able to translate that idea on screen and films like those are very difficult because there’s so much happening, right? We need to tweak and tweak and then you come in and have a look. If after you have a look… This is our mix and background is going to go here and effects are going to go here. It’s a mess. Loudness is not good mixing. Loudness is lack of fidelity. Like what I said at the very beginning: I am recording and I am saturating everything. So where’s the fidelity? Then you asked me, we are talking about post-production, what happens there? I said, yeah, we got all the tools available, but with these tools if you are going to saturate everything and clip, it’s gone so loud, your ears are going to perceive only noise. Fidelity has gone for a toss. Hence, I say, ask yourself a question. When you are watching Transformers14, why is it so clear? Look at the fidelity in that chaos. Dark Knight Rises15 was a very loud film. Look at the fidelity of content in that. So we need to expose ourselves not to comparisons of how good that sounds. No, we need to expose ourselves to understanding why it sounds good. I think we get lost in this maze. We need to take a step back and then reanalyze. When I come to films like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara or Dil Dhadakne Do16 or Baar Baar Dekho17 or Raees, what happens is that I get a lot more control and say in my end-product. I am an equal partner and fully responsible for even that one mistake that has been made since the whole decision-making is on my shoulder, having understood the psychology of my directors and what they want. So, a mix of Raees would not be as the mix of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. They are two different mixes, because the commercial spaces are different. Thus, I have to also be aware of the commercial space requirement of my audience and try not be obnoxiously loud but have the energy still in that print. For Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara I got warned, “This is not a foreign film, yaar. This is an Indian film. So can you come a little bit more up?” We were almost gentle
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and subtle and I don’t regret it. See, out theatres playback softer. That’s another problem we face. I always mix at the standard level Dolby has set, 7 on the processor, whereas people mix at 6 and 6.5. I have refused. I have said, even if I suffer the faith of a theatre, I will not budge from the fact that I will mix at standard and then whatever happens, God will let it happen. So with Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, of course, we came a little bit up. But, the beauty with Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is how much the film is talking back to you. I am sure we all faced turmoil, right? So you want to feel that with the characters. More than Rock On!18, people remember ZNMD. It’s quite strange. It has become a cult feedback for me where sound is concerned. “How did you manage to, in that subtle yet up there, how did you manage?” It’s again, I think, it’s me, it’s talking back to me. It is doing something to me and it is making me feel good. It’s like a girl and a guy and I am doing exactly what she wants and I am getting back a reciprocation of it so. I know it is a little psycho, what I am saying, but I am just painting sound and for me sound as a medium is still music. I have never stopped thinking about timing in sound. So whatever I am looking at when I am cutting or even if I haven’t cut it and I am at the mix, I am always looking at things that are coming to a beat and it will never interrupt, I try not to break the scene with an obnoxious sound that will distract you. And in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara you get lucky because you are working with somebody like Zoya, who is so much in touch with characters. She is one of the most fantastic directors I have worked with. She is so good with people that you don’t know what she’s doing. I confessed to her during Dil Dhadakne Do. She asked, “What do you think? How is it going?” I said, “Zo, I have no clue. You are the one captain of a ship I follow blindly. I don’t think.” She said, “That’s a bad thing. At least, have an opinion.” I said, “No. Your film, when it comes to screen, becomes something else. So, what’s happening now seems a little weird but that’s your style and I can’t get it but when I see your film on screen and father, son, mother, daughter are in that room, that scene, that fight, that whole thing that is unfolding, and so many scenes across the film. People didn’t get that film, but that’s fine, they didn’t get her first film also. I think she is very Wes Anderson type in her structuring. I kept telling her, “It’s so Wes, you know, the way you are approaching human psychology and you are trying to interpret the politics in the family and no one's going to get it.” She said, “Fuck, you got a black tongue.” I said, “No, you know, you are talking about here. You have this audience here. So, how are you going to think?” I don’t know whether you like the film or not but her handling of actors is so, so accurate. Zindagi Na Milegi
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Dobara, again is glossy. It’s got Spain and it’s got this movement that get people all excited. I guess every film has its own progression. Q: If for example the visuals are removed, will you work differently with the sound? I can rephrase the question: Whether working in the cinematic context sound loses many of its potential? B: Would I be working to a script? Q: Yeah, maybe a script but no visuals, just sound. B: I don’t mind that. Q: You don’t mind that? B: No, because I ironically have done this film, where this character has to narrate this sequence of events and this character’s blind, so the visual is black. Unfortunately, in the script a lot of content was not written, so one had to construct the before and the after and add more value to what would be on that black and I think that doesn’t deter. I think that’s far more challenging. In fact, sometimes I feel, why not make a short film on black with only sound? Q: Yeah. B: Three minutes. You won’t be able to sustain the audience longer than that. I don’t think that’s challenging. That’s going to juice the mickey out of you because the challenge is so much more than when you are scoring something to visual. The other challenge also is, sometimes when a character is talking to another character. I have done this also in a film where we have come from a song and everyone is kind of drunk and finally the story is being told - what happened, that there was an accident, you know, we went for a drive where he was not supposed to go and there was an accident and in that accident this happened. So these two characters are on my screen, I started the story from the centre, all the way around, car drive, skids, accident in the front. So, what am I doing? Nothing, but a score, right? I always say this. People think that we are putting effects. 99% of us are putting effects, whereas some of us are scoring. That’s why I used the word score just now. I would love to score it to film because I need to take you on a journey and how else to do that but with sound? Q: Yes. B: It was an afterthought. It was not scripted ever. The story was compelling. I mean, of course, this old man is telling this girl, you know, this is what happened with this family, which is why they are always very drab. Khoobsurat19 is the film and Shashanka Ghosh is the director. It was not in the script at all. It was an idea that came to me and we tried it but
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it’s not an original idea. It was an idea that I remembered. it was inspired by something Shridhar did in Rangeela. 20 Shridhar’s been my mentor through my beginning years when I was working with DTS and it suddenly struck me out of the blue that I have got this chance to pay back. I love paying tributes to people, because no idea is an original idea. It has all come from somewhere else and that’s my tribute to him. It’s actually a tribute to storytelling because I didn’t have it. It came out of nowhere, and my director walked in and he was like, “What did you do?” From making it a sad, “Oh, you know, this fellow, he went with this father, he was not supposed to go, he did, the car crashed, the father and…” Such a boring story. And from a very boring story, we made it a very interesting story. Q: So, you created a kind of a parallel journey with sound, which goes well with the visuals. B: Exactly. The visual is just in one room, there’s no flashback, there’s no cutting to anywhere else. So, I think what you are looking for are abstracts that aren’t there and you make them another journey, another subplot, which the script could not allow. Q: Absolutely. But, sound inherently has a particular kind of diegesis, a particular kind of narrative. It triggers our memory more than the visual. B: Precisely what I have been telling you all along. You are constantly tapping into memories that were subconsciously planted through your journeys and experiences in life. They never came from nowhere. You just don’t remember it. I don’t remember where I was 20th January, 2016. I don’t remember. But, if I was in a place at a specific time at some point, some memory might trigger and I might remember because there was a stimulus, there was something that triggered my memory to remember. Like I said, cinema is escapism, whether real or not real, whether commercial or not commercial. Why is it when I am trying to watch The Birth of a Nation21, I can’t? I can’t because I am not ready to allow myself watch another film on slavery. I am not in that headspace. So, my mind says no. I would rather watch a film like Denial22, which deals with the holocaust. It’s a true story and… Even Birth of a Nation is a true story. I am talking about something that happened now, in last two days. But, I am not willing to watch that, but I will be okay with watching something about the holocaust or a court case between two writers because that’s a little easier and relatable. So our subconscious is triggering certain things that we aren’t aware of. Q: Yes, but when we escaped with the help of memory, that’s truer than the instant momentous reality. B: Of course. Because we are able to identify, right?
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Q: Yes. But departing from that particular perspective that sound triggers more memory than visual, perhaps in cinematic context the potential of sound is suppressed. B: I think we have not matched it out yet because we don’t know. We are still learning. The experiences are so many, the avenues are so little. We have tapped into a fraction of a percentage of our ability to do whatever it is we are trying to do. That is why I feel that, I say this very often, I have just scratched the surface. I am doing something that is very average. I am sure there is much more to it to achieve, I don’t know what it is. But I feel several times that I am so small in the scheme of things because what do I really know? I am sure there is potential to excel, I don’t know what it is. I don’t even have the right words to express myself. I just know that it comes from right inside me that we haven’t scratched the surface. We are being arrogant and pompous about nothing. We are talking about cinema, right? What about installation? Q: Yes, sound art. B: Yeah. What about sound art? What about those spatial experiences? What about those 64 channel playback set. Wow! I mean, no we are being arrogant about something that is very, very small thinking that we have probably scaled the Everest. No, it was just a little mirage and there’s a lot more to achieve and do. Q: Yes, of course. For example if we listen to sound works made by filmmakers, in the cinematic context. Mother and Son 23 or Father and Son24, Alexander Sokurov. Amazing sound done in stereo. B: Yes, and this is another thing that I tell people that we are again being pompous and arrogant about what we do and how about the guys who mixed in mono? Astounding mixes, in so much of limitation. I get drawn into this discussion about digital technology and what it has done for us. No, it has also ruined us. I am happy with the appreciation of some of the work. I get told very often that the detailing… But, I am not detailing. I am not adding. I am subtracting and that’s why you are hearing what I want you to hear. I want you to hear what I want you to hear because I could have distracted you with too many things. In our discussion this afternoon it emerged that we can hear 2-3 things at a given point of time. We can’t hear more… Q: Walter Murch said that it’s two and a half… B: Exactly! So, if Walter Murch said this way back in the late 70s, I have to stand up and listen to him. I don’t want to reinvent the bloody wheel. I would use that approach on something to make it better. Now, what am I making better? I am struggling. It’s because of the kind of films I am
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working on. I am struggling because our films also need to get, well, much better. And since you are doing this for a while, you are investigating, you have been… What films of our time can we be proud of? Gravity, Avatar, Transformers, Sully25, Deep Water Horizon.26 I mean, where are we doing this? What are we doing? Where are we fooling ourselves? Yeah, we want the 100 crores, 200 crores collections in the first 7 days and our egos are all great. So, I come from the same business but I despair in the same business too. It leaves me feeling, oh, what was the really best film you did. I think the one that had no music. The one that I fought with my director to put music. It was Abbas Khan’s Dekh Tamasha Dekh.27 No, I don’t think it needs music. And it emerged that the two strongest parts of the film were screenplay, supported by the sound design. I still feel his screenplay and his acting, his character and his direction were the lead of the film because he had the conviction to say, “This is good. I don’t need more.” The film didn’t do well, didn’t get publicity, got released, and tanked miserably. But, was it a good film? Yes, it was a political satire. It was very good. Q: I think I should stop here because I am taking too much of your time. B: Well, you got me talking… I am baring my soul as much as I can. Like, you are a psychologist and I am in for therapy. But, I think by saying what I am saying, I believe even strongly that I am a student of sound and I don’t know where the journey is going to take me and where it would end. It doesn’t excite me that I work on films, it doesn’t excite me. Yes, appreciation… I think this business makes us very depressed, you know. It’s a very depressing business where we are always looking for accolades and appreciation. Slowly I feel even worse that… But, what am a contributing? Yeah, kids love what I have done. It inspires them and that was always the ambition, to leave behind inspiration for people who didn’t probably come from the field of sound to believe that we can achieve because here’s this silly guy, who’s just an engineer, never went to a film school, never trained under someone. I mean the closest to having worked with someone is Nakul Kamte. You took the first step and walked ahead of him and not behind him because you were leading the way even though he pioneered. It was like, okay, you did this much, now we will do so much and we take it ahead and I think that’s how it should be and a man needs to inspire you, for you to inspire other people and that’s the ripple effect that one wants. Q: Yeah, great leaders are those who create more leaders. B: Exactly! And amazingly it is of so much pride that he has been part of this film called Lion28 and it has been at the Oscar’s. I think our journeys
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maybe different but we are all aspiring something or the other. For me my aspiration is that I love teaching. I mean, it’s my breakaway from the madness of films and I tell all the kids, I mean, if you want to be, you aren’t, I am. You know, you aren’t. You can’t. Because the ocean is so full of 10 million like you, where do you feature? If you want to be something, you have to work really, really hard. But, for how long? I can’t tell. Even I don’t know how long. I am tired of working this hard. But, am I working hard? No, actually, it’s like going out and playing football. It’s as tiring as that. Then, I got to come back and I need to rejuvenate and next morning I need to go out and play again. I just play as hard every day because I think there’s no other way. Would I perspire blood and sweat? Yeah, I would because that’s the fun of it. So does a neurosurgeon do it any different? Leave you with your skull open and walk away because he is tired? No, he pursues till the end, right? So, that’s the passion that you need to have for any field. It’s not specific to sound. It’s anything that you do in your life that needs commitment. Speaking to you renews those feelings that I have that being here last 4 days renews that feeling that, okay, I might not do this for the rest of my life but if I take up serving chai to someone, I will make sure he’s the happiest man in the world. You know, he should enjoy my presence. We don’t know why he is there, what’s happening to him and what’s happening to me, that’s all immaterial. I think our purpose needs to be served for what we are here for. I think philosophy, not the preachy kind, but the connection with what we do - there has to have some soul. If the soul’s missing, I think, we are missing a good part of our lives. Hence, when I am doing a film, I feel a part of my soul is going because I cannot not give. I have to be able to treat it like it’s my baby and it’s going to stay. I am going to be dead and gone at some point. Man! Even 50 years later, it’s still going to be there. People still remember the first film ever made. It’s not gone. It has not disappeared. Hence, I don’t mind talking. I love sharing if someone really… You are going to write a book and it’s going to inspire someone at some point, right? It needs to make people believe that, no, it doesn’t come easy. The toughest part of what we do is that it gets tougher and tougher with every film because the length of the rope keeps getting cut shorter and shorter. Our producers believe that we can pull it off. With the best of what we do we have to not crib or cry. We have to have a smile one our faces and say, “Hey, we back you 100%.” That’s really a tough journey to go. It’s very lonely. There’s no one you can explain this problem to because your wife, your kid, your parents really don’t understand what the sacrifice is. It is not a great journey at all. Sometimes, I feel it’s a worthless journey where you are losing so much more than gaining
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because you are passionate. Sometimes, I feel passion is a pain. Fuck all this shit. I have seen so much of success. Maybe not to the extent of what Shahrukh Khan has, but, this is my journey, this is my life, my little box. I was a nobody. I came out of nowhere and I got this far. I had no godfather but along the way the doors kept opening and people kept inviting me in and trusted me and in my abilities and I felt the need to pay them back. How else but by my work and make them feel really thrilled about the fact that this one irritating guy, he always wants more time to work and he wants more space to work. He wants, he wants and he wants. But fuck, he bloody gives his life. So, I really hope it inspires people to believe that.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:43:43 Name Abbreviations: Baylon Fonseca – B; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 Raees (Rahul Dholakia 2017) 3 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 4 Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Wants, Farhan Akhtar, 2001) 5 Nakul Kamte, sound mixer and location sound specialist, also part of this book. 6 Bombay Boys (Kaizad Gustad 1998) 7 English, August (Dev Benegal 1994) 8 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 9 Kaminey (The Scoundrels, Vishal Bhardwaj 2009) 10 Shootout at Lokhandwala (Apoorva Lakhia 2007) 11 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) 12 Kaabil (Sanjay Gupta 2017) 13 Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Life Doesn't Come Again, Zoya Akhtar 2011) 14 Transformers (Michael Bay 2007) 15 The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan 2012) 16 Dil Dhadakne Do (Zoya Akhtar 2015) 17 Baar Baar Dekho (Nitya Mehra 2016) 18 Rock On!! (Abhishek Kapoor 2008) 19 Khoobsurat (Shashanka Ghosh 2014) 20 Rangeela (Colourful, Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) 21 The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker 2016) 22 Denial (Mick Jackson 2016) 23 Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov 1997) 24 Father and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov 2003) 25 Sully: Miracle on the Hudson (Clint Eastwood 2016) 26 Deepwater Horizon (Peter Berg 2016) 27 Dekh Tamasha Dekh (Feroz Abbas Khan 2014) 28 Lion (Garth Davis 2016)
CHAPTER 19 SUBASH SAHOO1
Q: I would primarily like to ask you about your work with sound recording. It had started with magnetic media, right? S: Yeah. Q: First in location recording, and then in mixing? S: Yeah. Q: And now you are working in the digital platform - digital recording and digital mixing. What are the particular or specific differences that you experience and how do you see that difference reflected in your work? S: Then and now, if you look at the profession, then definitely at that particular point of time you had limited tracks, limited resources and what was happening in mono sound was to create a particular geography. You have to choose the correct effects and ambience to the dialogue. You can actually multi-layer the thing. Q: Hm. S: But whatever we used to select for the ambience - if you chose one or two ambience that should be correctly placed - it should sound correct. Right now, if you look at it, we have like 5.1, 7.1, Atmos - you have like so many channels. Now, you can distribute each ambience and each sound effect into different speakers and different channels. All the dialogues will be on a different speaker, and effects will come in a different one. There’s no jarring or no overlap. But in mono, you should actually keep everything on one track. Even dialogue is there because dialogue is the centre and you are writing the story through that element only. Without distracting that, you should choose your effects, ambience, this and that. At that particular point of time also, if you look at it, sound designing doesn’t have much of a scope, to be honest. I doubt whether sound design work in India was there then because everybody had a loop - magnetic loop or an optical loop. Say, birds. What they would do with birds was - suppose one person has like 30 varieties of birds. He knows that like loop no. 1, loop no.2, loop no.3, “Okay! So this is a forest and there is a peacock there. So, use
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your 25th loop for this section.” Basically, with limited resources, it wasn’t actually expanded at that particular time. So what you had to do was you would ask them to use a specific loop according to the locale. Then you could transfer and then it went to the editing table. Literally we didn’t have to do anything. We transferred, and the job of sound editing was done by the editor. They used to match and then add a silent leader to it and make a whole reel. Then they used to send. Finally, for the mixing engineer it was lots of power and the conclusion of the final product was much more for the mixing engineer than the sound engineer. At that time, after dubbing, the sound engineer would choose the effects and all. Then, the mixing engineer used to finally control it at the mixing. Because of which, if you look at the National Award from four years back, sound is actually the only category which had three National Awards - sync sound, sound design and sound mixing. The rest have only one. Before, there was one National Award and that was meant for the mixing engineer, not for the sound designer. The power or whatever was given, it was decided then that the mixing engineer should get the national award. Now, if sound designer was also added to that, then it’s okay. If not, then the mixing engineer used to get it. What happened at that time was that a lot of work used to operate within relationships. It was more into a kind of family oriented thing. Suppose you are the producer, and I worked as a sound designer. At that time, not only sound, different production houses had their own sound recordists, their own cameramen. If you were working with Raj Kapoor2, then the cameraman and the sound recordist would be fixed. This is basically family tradition. There was analog sync sound at that time too. It’s not that it wasn’t completely there. They had Nagra and all. I started off with a Nagra. It happened back then as well. People used to try and do sync sound in all the art-house films that were made then, like Shyam Benegal and sometimes Govind Nihalani.3 They tried to keep the sync sound motif in their film. Because of the realistic approach of their cinema, after dubbing, it used to seem that the visuals are going in one direction and the dubbed track is on another. They were not getting that performance and for that reason they had to keep the location track in the final mix. I remember I was taking Shyam Benegal’s interview some time back for a Mangesh Desai film.4 He was saying that he had done sync sound for most of his films in the 70’s. They had shot somewhere in Punjab in a rice field. While Mangesh Desai was mixing the film, he suddenly found some hissing sound and wondered what that was. It was the wind that was blowing over the rice fields. So, he sent somebody to get this sound recorded and said, “It’s very interesting and we could incorporate this sound very nicely.”
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Q: Hm. S: So, somebody went, got it recorded, came back and it was incorporated. What I am saying is, it also depends on the vision of the director. So at that time even, this used to happen. But earlier, in the magnetic era, what happened was that there were less art-house filmmakers and those who were there, they couldn’t enter the commercial market. Very limited people would watch those films, especially in the festival circuit. But the common mass or audience wouldn’t generally go. Thus, whether it was sync sound or not, wasn’t so crucial also. No one realized what sync sound was. What happened in those times was that all the commercial films were more into dialogue and music. Only the loud sounds were effects oriented. There was nothing specific like ambience. If you notice closely, you’ll find that they are there if there is wind or birds by some chance. Generally there is a room tone. That way, if you sit anywhere, there is a room tone. But they were not present in films. They used to mainly play between loud sound, dialogue and music and when loud effects came, they were placed accordingly. But some good sound design films, which are more effects and dialogue oriented and not ambience oriented, have happened in India. If you look at Sholay5, it is one of the best sound design films of India, sound oriented film. But these kinds of films were less in number. Mostly they would accentuate music and dialogue. But as a sound person what I feel was happening in the optical medium was that our dynamic range was very less. It has the dynamic range of 78 KHz. It was theoretically 80-82, but practically 60 to something, whatever would go up to 6 or 7. Since the range was missing, the brightness was also not there. But it was correct for those times. But when the digital medium arrived, people used to record as per the frequency of the source. Then we replaced. Slowly, before Dolby, the Ultra Stereo came. But still Sholay was 70mm and 7.1. Magnetic medium was there during that time. Because of the magnetic and the optical medium, the dynamic range also was very less, though we are getting the perspective. I thought that particular format 7.1 wasn’t used much because the 70mm print was rarely used. Of that, 7.1 wasn’t actually successful at that time. Q: Hm. S: Since the digital medium came after that, initially when it started through the tape medium the dynamic range increased, like DAT and all. After that, everything literally turned digital in the Indian context. When I started working in digital medium, the total number of Porter DAT machines in India were 2, HHB Porter DAT DDR 1000. At that time everyone from the commercial circuit in the Indian industry used analog. From 1995, I started using Porter DAT DDR 1000 and specifically
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Sarfarosh6 happened from ’94 to ’98 or ’99 - 5 years. Because of Porter DDR 1000, I was there in the location to record the pilot and also because of two-track, I started to take all the ambience and effects from the location. I couldn’t use the ones with the dialogues because of the noisy camera, but I recorded on location maximum number of effects, whatever it could be. If you watch Sarfarosh, I recorded most of the ambience and effects also at the location. For instance, when Aamir Khan is going on the car, about 20 to 25 jeeps arriving together etc. - all the effects from Rajasthan, like, the call of the camel - everything I recorded on location. That’s because I decided earlier that it would help me in post-production. So I got all the effects and that were incorporated in the design. Q: In Sarfarosh? S: Yes. Have you seen that? Q: Yes, I have. S: The maximum number of times we used the location tracks in that film. Though we underlined that through dramatization, we used a lot of sound from the location. It’s the year ’95 or ‘96 that I am talking about. So, I started from that time and slowly, as I said, in ’97 I worked with Shyam Benegal. I did sync sound also. But because it was an art-house cinema, nobody knows. I came to digital again. Nobody knew then what sync sound was. People knew that the pilot track, which is getting recorded, is type of a sync sound. But thankfully, Lagaan7 happened in 2001 - it got released. The credit for this will go to Aamir Khan, thanks to him, suddenly because of his commercialization. He said, “let’s do this differently” and I remember how much he used to take care of things for Lagaan. They shot for about 8 to 10 months and they took extra precautions to shoot sync sound, and they started promoting it the way they promote a film these days - the promotion starts while it is in post. It was promoted as a sync sound film. When Aamir Khan was promoting that as a sync sound film, people thought, “Oh what a sync sound this is!” So this came to people’s attention through all these dramatizations, and not only people - all the commercial producers and directors rushed to see the film at that time. For example, when you are journeying with a fleet of ships tied together on the sea none of them will jump. But when one jumps, then each one will follow suit. This is basically the tradition that has been followed in the Indian scenario. Very few people in India take the initiative of doing something new for the first time. Everyone waits for someone else to do it. So, whoever does it, you first look at the film. If one person has used it for one subject, other people will follow the same trend to make it work. Everyone will do the same. The sync sound scenario was
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also very similar. Thanks to Aamir Khan, when Lagaan became commercially successful, Dil Chaahta Hai came.8 Nakul Kamte is famous because of this. But this doesn’t mean that Lagaan was the first film to do sync sound. We have done many sync sound films before that. He himself did sync sound for Bhopal Express. I also did sync sound for some of the films before. But they didn’t get noticed or, commercialized. So the climax started at this point in the Indian scenario – it was pre-Lagaan and postLagaan, where sync sound era in Indian cinema came after Lagaan. When it started, at that point initially we used to record on DAT. DAT also had limited number of tracks - only two tracks - one is boom and another is cordless. We used to mix them and give. Then slowly again we used to get two recorders and join them to get four tracks. Then PD6 came from Fostex and it gave us like six tracks or eight tracks. Slowly, all these new things came and as I said, Ultra sound came in ’89 - from Hum Apke Hain Kaun9, Dolby Stereo. Though that’s analog medium again but it came in optical and it was four tracks. But, at least the frequency response and dynamic range increased a little bit and finally we got distribution of effects and dialogues and everything. So, slowly we could accommodate our own effects due to that, leave the dialogue and do this. Post that, Ultra Sound went and Dolby came - Dolby stereo, then Dolby digital. When digital platform arrived, whatever we recorded… Pro Tools came and before that, around ’93 to ’95, we used to work on Soundscape. So, it has been a long journey but everything has its own beauty. What I mean is that what was there at that time it captured the beauty of that surrounding and situation the best. When you think about the heroines of the old times, they used to look fabulous in saris or in kurta pyajamas. But now that beauty is transported to jeans and t-shirt. Nowadays, life is fast. If you look at those times and if you cut a shot immediately they’ll say that you have removed the emotion of the actress. In old times, if you see, fast cutting didn’t exist in the films. Now, if you see, there’s no breathing space. If you do everything very fast in your love life, you’ll go through a break up soon. It’s very similar with films. Now it’s more a fast life. People earlier were actually cool. All the decisions were taken with peace of mind. There was no mental pressure from the outer source because one was not connected to the world. There was a beauty. Earlier, it would take you two days to know what was happening at Andheri. Now it’s totally different and suddenly you are so distracted. There was one TV channel in olden times. Now there’s a thousand. When you are watching television you are surfing, you are not focusing onto one. If you look at it, your mind is affected a lot by this crowd. When I am talking to you, I am simultaneously thinking about a hundred other personal things. After
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speaking to you I have to immediately start doing another work. There’s no breathing space for me. When the magnetic medium was being used, you would do dubbing or mixing. It used to take one to two minutes to go back and come when you would do rewind after mixing. You would get a break for those two minutes. Q: LG. S: You would also get time to think about what you have done and if there’s any other possibility of doing it. Or, maybe, you needed some silence to yourself and then restart. Now it’s so fast that there’s no breathing space. I think everything in the world is changing to keep up with the time. For example, if you look at the music, previously it used to be so soothing. Now, one piece of music will come and run for four days and then it’s gone out of market. It’s become very momentary. We are actually diverting from various spaces and not concentrating on any. These are the situations basically. Q: I will ask you about the use of ambience in your work. In Kaminey10, for example, in the sequence where Priyanka Chopra and Shaheed Kapoor are talking in the staircase and we hear an immense amount of ambiences coming from the park, even from further distances. S: Kaminey was made in 2009. Omkara is 2006.11 Q: I don’t think that many films from 2009 could provide such large width and depth of ambience. S: Very true. That credit should go to Vishal Bhardwaj again. Q: Okay. S: If you look at it, it is actually before Omkara and after Omkara for me. I must have done 20 films or 25 films before Omkara. But I got recognized after Omkara. Q: Hm. S: Not Kaminey, if you look at Omkara also, ambience and sound, there’s much more depth. The ambient sounds and effects in Omkara are much more powerful than Kaminey because it is the story of very interior U.P, Meerut. Q: Yes. S: Because of that, you’ll get much more depth, much more perspective, and much more effects than Kaminey. Also Vishal’s subject is as such, it needed so many layers, and I think Vishal being a director is complete if you look at the technicality of it. He is big for Maqbool12 and all, forget about that. If you look at Omkara’s Vishal, not only as a director but you
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see for a complete film. You also need each department to fulfill their part to make a beautiful film. Someone says, “Oh! What a subject the film has. Or what a direction!” But they don’t say what a film. So, when that expression: “what a film!” comes, then everybody’s contribution will be adding to the subject of the film. Suppose, I design my film, I design all the things. But at the end of the day, the director is the captain of the ship. There are 22 mediums or crafts to make a film, like camera, direction, sound editing, casting and so on. There are around 22 heads. I am associated with the medium, so I know this. What I am saying is, to sketch the film if you somehow put the color yellow or orange more, it will overshadow or overpower. You must balance everything. So, for the first time in the Indian scenario, if you look at it, someone went into that depth and darkness of cinematography - both Omkara and Kaminey. Not only sound, no one dared to touch that zone visually before that. Q: Was the decision to keep the depth, amount or the level of ambience by Vishal Bhardwaj or yours? S: Basically, we try to give our views. Suppose I being a director, I say we should keep at this level. Now the director might say, “No I don’t want this. I need this.” So end of the day you lose, because the director wants to play in a musical way. What I am saying is, at the end of the day definitely you do your duty. Compared to other films, you try so that according to the international standards you can increase the level of ambience and keep it natural. But Vishal Bhardwaj also won’t be able to do anything if he doesn’t have anything in it. Then he is playing musically. He saw that the ambience and effects are equally powerful and also they enhance the particular situation without the music and effects. Being a creative director he then decided, “No, my ambience and effects is working in this. Let’s take out the music. Or, maybe, background music should be kept at a background level, not at the foreground level.” In India, most of the people keep background music at the foreground level. But in Omkara and Kaminey, he wanted to explore the state of mind and we went into the foreground level. Otherwise, most of the time we balance equally. Even if you look at the visual, nobody will agree for this dark a look like Kaminey. He said, “I am least bothered about – the arc (street) lamp of Bihar is so dark that you can hardly see anything. What is your conviction?” He said this to the cameraman. “If you feel that the subject demands that, do it.” Then Tassaduq Hussain, who studied in L.A, under-lit the film accordingly. The film looks that great. So, in Omkara also, if you look at it, there are 8 to 10 pieces of music that I recorded at the location, which are used. No one uses it this way in the Indian scenario - the rustic-ness, the local band, the local music. Even in Kaminey, it’s only two or three
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pieces. He said that since it is a playback type, you record it. “I don’t want to record it at the studio. You record.” So, we all went to Goa and there I hired all my extra equipment. We went to a field and I positioned all the bands differently at their place and they performed live over there for about 5 to 7 minutes. I took 2 recorders - that was almost like 16 tracks. I correctly placed each individual in those 16 tracks, so that there’s no feedback and there’s no cross-pick up. Then I recorded that. At the end of the day only a portion of it was used - about thirty seconds or a minute was ultimately used. Q: This trend has become quite popular now. For example, we have seen a street singer singing in a particular sequence for quite a long duration in Highway.13 In Gangs of Wasseypur14, most of the music is recorded on location. S: This is because of the new generation of directors and also thanks to the corporate houses, who sign with the new generation directors and agree that they don’t want the typical romantic love story as shown commonly in most commercial films. If you take a new generation director like Anurag Kashyap or Vikramaditya Motwane, the way they think is also because of the globalization that happened all over the world and the easy access to world cinema that came along with it. Also they are going to Hollywood and people from there had come. So, we understand our language and their language as well. These new generation directors - they try to have a very international way of doing it. Q: Hm. S: Not only in sound, I am talking about all the different traits. Because of that only in sound and everything else and even mixes if you look at it… Just consider Sneha Khanwalkar who does music for Anurag Kashyap. Just see, the village music gels so well with the film. It has given more layers, more rustic-ness to the film. Q: Yes. Now my question is: how do you define ambience in your practice? What do you think it does to cinema? Why did you use that amount of depth and perspective of ambience in Kaminey or Omkara? S: For me, along with the depth, the geography of a place also matters. Suppose we are sitting inside a room. But we do not know whether it’s near the sea or a market place or an office or somewhere else. So, whichever way I treat it, that will give you the geography of this particular place and that’ll also place how far the ambiences are. Suppose, I give you a Doppler effect of a distance. Maybe you’ll see if I give 120 speed Doppler effect whichever way the highway is going. Maybe I’ll give the sound of an auto moving slowly or something happening in the outside -
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maybe the area has a lot of traffic jams. These are basically the things that I define in ambience, which identify the geography of a particular place. If you lose that, you are gone - you can’t establish the geography. Q: We don’t have any information of the geography in most of the films from 70s showing mountains or urban spaces. Yet, those films were popular. S: I think there is a difference between then and now. People used to go to the cinema for their leisure time, for entertainment. Nobody was aware that it is an artistic medium as well. It is not necessary that the food that you’re eating will become bad because I am doing something. You might enjoy that. But if I treat the same theme a little better - like in Eastern India I will use mustard - it might add to the layer without losing the taste. But the thing is that though at that particular time everybody enjoys it, only if you can add an additional layer that will beautify the film and also can define your geography without losing the commercial element. This doesn’t mean that Kai Po Che is not a hit. Have you seen it? I have seen it. It’s done by Baylon Fonseca. If you see his sound design in Zindagi Naa Milegi Dobara15, and Kai Po Che16, thanks to his directors, you see that ambience has taken a front role. Q: Yeah. S: See Kai Po Che. I would really love to work with that kind of a director who’d give that opportunity to do justice to the cinema. Not just like that. I don’t mean to say that Kai Po Che is a failure for a film, not even that Kaminey is a failed film. I mean if those films were done musically it wouldn’t have been much different. People and the director - both should understand. I am giving you an example - I won’t tell you the name. It’s a very beautiful film set in the underworld, maybe in 1960 or 70 and a very successful film, superb film. I worked on the design of the sound that for almost two to two and a half months. When I went for the mix, the director didn’t allow me to sit in the mix. He was such an old traditional guy, he didn’t say anything. I went and I sat with them for the first reel, and I told him, “Let’s mix this way. Let’s increase the ambience now.”’ He said, “Sahoo these ambiences and effects will give you awards. What will it give to the viewers?” Q: LG. S: “Viewers need dialogue and music for the entertainment.” Then I didn’t go to the mix. They mixed finally and I saw later that whatever I did for almost two and a half months, it all was almost kind of out. I could have done the same thing in just ten days. I realized that I had lost my two months, which I could have saved.
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Q: Hm, I totally understand. S: So, basically the temperament of the director also matters. Very rarely directors understand and recognize the completeness of cinema. For them, if you suddenly increase the music, you will get the dynamism. If your story does not have any dynamism, what can the music do to make it that way? They keep requesting to increase the volume more. Now, with the digital medium, it is very hard to hear. I mean, it’s very painful to the ear. They don’t understand this. The soothing-ness is already gone. Q: But it is also true that the presence of certain established sound designers in the crew probably forces the director to think otherwise. Take Rockstar17 as an example and then, Highway as another. Rockstar has little ambience and in Highway we have an amazing set of site-specific ambiences. A: They are two totally different films. Q: Still, there are many outdoor sequences in Rockstar, which need to have some sort of ambient sound layers. S: Again, this also depends on the director. Q: Yeah. S: In Rockstar they have Rahman’s music and maybe the director was overwhelmed by Rahman’s music style. And the film’s name is Rockstar! Q: LG. S: He decided to keep it a musical film, to be honest. But Highway was no doubt a different film altogether. He is a very sensible filmmaker. If you consider each of his films, each of them adds a different layer to his career. So he found that the visual enhancement, what the characters are enacting, it’s not necessary to underline that by enhancing the music. It is not necessary to dramatize that. The actors are already giving whatever drama is required. They have done their job. You need not overdo the music to over-dramatize that more. So, they try differently to enhance it, make it more ambience-oriented. They thought that there is so much visual dramatization by the actors, maybe it’s not necessary to over-underline it. Q: But, consider his other films also. Before Rockstar, we had Jab We Met 18 , or before that Socha Na Tha. 19 In Socha Na tha, there is little location sound. S: What I think is that the understanding of cinema needs to be acceptable by the audience. Think about the time he made Socha Na Tha. At that time, not everything was already in use. So, he was a layman to that particular format. When I show you something and demonstrate, then you’ll understand the working principle clearly. But initially it’s difficult
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for you because you are new and the people surrounding you are also not very confident. So, I think, he was using the already established surrounding filmmaking. After Jab We Met and Socha Na Tha, the film scenario has also changed. People tried different ways and so he also tried the different way. Some time back, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is an Oriya director. He is very old and he is a celluloid guy. He said, “Sir I made a digital film. It’s so good.” He was so backward till now. I used to keep telling him 6 or 7 years back to do digital, but he wasn’t doing. He used to say, “No, film is film.” I said, “Sir you have to move on with the new generation.” Q: You mean that the ambience gives this sense of geography or provides information about the geography. Do you think that this is due to the coming of digital technology? Why is this sense of geography more visible or audible in recent times? Why is it in demand that you have to give a sense of geography in films? S: No doubt about the fact that it’s not only due to digital. Q: Then? S: So many different aspects are there. You can say that digital is one of the aspects because mono and the magnetic medium don’t have that dynamic range. Mainly if you see the low tones - I’m talking about the room tone, which can’t be heard in magnetic - now you can hear that and you can make it high. Previously when I would sit here, all the sounds would come from the front. With 5.1, 7.1, it’s coming from the left, from the right, left surround, right surround. It’s the new technology. Not only digital, new technology. I mean to say that 5.1 was there earlier as well. Even Sholay had 7.1. But magnetic doesn’t have that kind of dynamic range. This new digital medium and the new technology of 5.1, 7.1 and now Atmos - definitely the credit will go to these things. Alongside, in India, the vision of the director and also the sound designer is influenced by the new generation technology, world cinema as a whole and acceptance from the viewers. These days you can’t make a fool out of anyone. People have started viewing different kind of cinema after the multiplexes had come. It is not that they only watch musicals. If it’s meaningful cinema, there are a lot of viewers. When you put ambience in a film and people from the village are watching the film, they won’t feel any difference. If your content is correct, nothing else matters. End of the day my only opinion is that if your skeleton is strong, then the more you beautifully adorn it, it will become more appealing and ornaments will beautify it. If you can beautify what is present normally and take the appeal from 70% to 100%, then why not? One should try.
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Q: Now, I would like to know about your perception of the channels. How do you place sounds in different channels? If we take monaural as a particular reference, then we come to stereo and you have possibility to expand a little bit of off-screen space maybe. Then, that off-screen space is further expanded into 5.1, 7.1, Atmos, Auro 3-D and so on. How do you place your sound in this context? What sort of layering and sound design elements do you bring in within this particular framework? S: See, that depends totally on what the scene is. When you design any ambience or effects or whatever, sometimes you design according to the scene, how to create your atmosphere. Maybe, at times, though the atmosphere is there, you have to dramatize that atmosphere according to the scene, or maybe state of mind. So, it totally depends on that particular scene’s requirement. Theoretically, I think, how anyone can justify 5.1, 7.1 or Atmos, totally depends on what the sequence is. Q: What do you mean by dramatization? S: When I say dramatization, I am talking about the effects. For instance, let it be Sarfarosh. If you recall the interval, it’s again a symbolization. Naseeruddin Shah is very disturbed by the surrounding and a small goat runs around and in the process his glass breaks. He picks up the goat and tears off its ear, and immediately it’s the interval. So, this basically implies that whoever does anything wrong in his surrounding, will not be spared of his wrath. What I thought of in that particular sequence - it also kills the innocence. You are so self-centered that you don’t think of the other side. That way, there you only thought of focusing on that. Q: Okay. S: There’s a dialogue in the film where it is said that when you kill someone you will find out his religion before doing so, even innocents get killed this way. What I did was whether it was a kid, whether it was an innocent creature, I thought I’d want to bring out the inner pain of a particular instance. So, I slowed down that painful cry of that goat. I extended that cry to make it sound more painful at that time, in that space. Q: Okay. Nice work. S: I don’t know how much that will reach people. For instance, the naxalite movement happened initially. I showed that real front and then slowly I diffused that. I used reverb in that and I went into a different zone altogether and everything was empty. Initially, there’s a naxalite war someone is dying. Finally you see the signs. You see the death when all the bodies are there. Finally you can see the dryness through, maybe, when a piece of paper is flying around with a dry sound. Basically this transition from there to here, it can be a hard transition. So you make it slightly
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surreal and diffused and then you enter into that other zone, which will affect mentally. You have to get into it in that way. How you go about that design? Like, in another film I am talking about, I am not thinking about the ambience or the effects. Let it be. One guy is like a goon and the city is under his terror. If anyone speaks against him, that person will be dead. Now, there is a guy who actually raises his voice against all this. He is lecturing the crowds about not to do any wrong thing. So, the goon comes and picks him up from there, then strips his wife naked and kills him in front of his wife. After that, he wipes his hand in the clothes of the wife while thousands of people are standing and watching this cruelty. Then he leaves with his men. Initially, for the agony I decided that let it be - he is crying and slowly the murmur and everything vanishes. We enhanced his cry with a reverb and there should be a slow background music and he is not there though, he is going. You can say the whole ambience of that particular area enhanced by that particular cry geographically. I actually mixed it into complete 5.1 everywhere in the surround, not only in one place. Q: Okay. Did you pan it in surround? S: Yes. Not only one surround, but totally. Basically it can move to everywhere. Actually whatever it is doing… Again the innocent one is saved in Sarfarosh. All these factors have to be considered while you are designing. Q: Do you think that having many channels give you the creativity to put sounds in a particular position as the numbers of channels are expanding all the while? Or when it comes down to the use of ambience, do you prefer to keep it fixed in the center? S: More number of channels definitely gives you a much more scope to do, if you look at the ambience. Let’s take the example of Slumdog Millionaire.20 When choppers come down, you see it beautifies the wind, which comes from the belt. You see the travel of wind from here. Q: Yeah. S: If I am restricted by the channels, I can’t create that. If you can see how it is going, when you can see the rounds of the winds, you won’t get that particular thing. Q: Would you not get distracted when you’d have to turn your head away from the screen? If you put ambience in the rear channels, sometimes it can create a sort of disorientation. S: What you are saying is totally hundred percent correct. But you have to understand that you have to do this with equal intelligence. Or else
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sometimes it might disorient - no doubt about it. Where did the mobile phones come from? But still, sometimes in the dramatized way or intelligent way, you have to use the ambience correctly. Otherwise, it will distract. I totally agree. But in most of the places nowadays, if it’s a multilayered thing - suppose once it will come and go - you don’t notice. What I am saying is if you notice where that particular thing comes from, when it comes, you realize it. Then you’ve to enhance your thing, “Oh! Superb!” Q: Do you spend time at the location by yourself when you go there, or you prefer to wait for the director, depending on your relationship with the director? S: I actually understand what you are trying to say. Basically nowadays, what I said, by doing the sync sound of the film, all the sounds have newness. Initially, when dubbing used to happen, you had BBC. BBC has 5 or 10 CDS. Say, you are making a film - use the sound on CD number 10, track number 15. Everyone would use that same sound. But now, we are going to the location, recording the location dialogue and also parallelly we record the ambience and effects. Suppose, the choosing of the vehicles - when vehicle comes, you’ll think whether this is correct for you. Even if it isn’t correct, if you are seeing another car visually, you allow. Else, you take up music. So, basically, how much did it skid, where did it fall, you get the exact naturalness of that particular car. By this, you are actually differentiating between this film and your other films. I have done 75 films all together. If I keep on using the same thing in all the films, it will be monotonous. Then you won’t keep the ambience. Again it will be music like it happened for older films. It will be dialogue and musical films. Because of the newness, new geography, new location, you are there recording the ambience and effects on the location - all that adds a new layer to the film, which will make it different from the other film. Whatever dramatization you have to do in that, you have to add different layers keeping this existing track. Q: But you also do dubbing, right? S: Yeah. Q: Why do you do dubbing if everything can be collected from the location? S: No. Sometimes they use dubbing even in Hollywood for 5%, 10% or whatever. There are two or three reasons for this. The first thing is time consistence. Suppose you have an evening shot. The light is falling and there is no alternate. Suppose, it’s good visually but it’s not good for you. But there’s no time so that they can actually go for another take, there’s no alternative. If you can go for a wider space, the performance is good.
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Otherwise, if there’s no time since we do more in limited time… So, apart from the visual, we get very less time for sound. There are very rare filmmakers like Bhansali who shoot for eight months literally. What happens in this case is the effects and ambience are totally up to you and how you are taking it. I am talking about Omkara. I would go to the location before anybody did. I went there and recorded for half an hour or an hour. Suppose from 7o’clock to 1o’ clock, whatever they’ve shot, I’d make my notes and when it was lunch break, I would keep telling the first AD that these are the effects that I’ve not yet taken, I have to take it in lunchtime. What I’d do is when everyone would go for lunch at 1 or 1:30, I used to go to the side to make a note of what effects I needed. Let’s take the example of the scene in Omkara where Konkona Sen performs. Vivek Oberoi and everybody were coming by driving the car. So, at the interval I would take the thing to the other side and record. If there was a one-hour lunch break, I would take 15 minutes break for the lunch. The rest of the 45 minutes I’d go and record my ambience and whatever effects that I had to take. If anything were left, again I would tell the first AD, “Tomorrow morning I need this first before the shooting starts. I should complete this before the shoot starts. Even if dialogue remains, ambience and effects shouldn’t remain left out.” If you look at Omkara, 80% of the ambience and effects were recorded on location. Even the dying sequence of Kareena Kapoor, the swing, everything was from location. Even that sequence of Kareena Kapoor and Konkona Sen making, the “Halwai Kheer”, the cow dung scene, all the cars that you see moving in the film - I took the same portion, same place, same vehicles to get the correct jobs correct these things, and inside-outside I recorded everything. After everyone left, I told everyone, including Vishal and others, that you have to wait for two minutes since I have to record all these things. Q: Also in the marriage sequence, right? S: Yeah, everything. If you look at Omkara, when Kareena Kapoor’s “Haldi” is happening and the villagers are singing - that song I recorded on the location; when Vivek Oberoi is getting that musically, and everyone is coming to the village, it’s continuous. Everything - including when everyone is going for the marriage, Ajay Devgan’s gun, the sound of the swing, everything. How much was kept finally is a different thing. I must have recorded almost twelve pieces of music in that sequence, out of which we used 6 or 7 pieces of location music. Q: That particular sequence in the train tracks, where he is going for the kill and it’s raining outside, is remarkable.
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S: Yes, that is there. Because of the rain on their body also, I could retain 60% of the location track. I’ve dubbed 30% or 40% of that particular sequence, but the rest 70% is location sync sound. Q: Did you dub the voice? S: Yes. But I used the 70% of the location sound of that whole sequence. Q: Do you prefer to use mostly the location sound? S: Yeah. Even if I am doing a dubbed film now, I clean the whole track though it is not sync sound. I told the director that though I have dubbed 100%, still I am going to use 50% location sound. I get somebody, I clean the tracks and just replace the dubbing track by the original track. Q: How much do you clean? Does it depend on the director, the story or do you have your own preference? S: My preference. The director never interferes for that particular thing as long as it sounds good to them. Basically, we never try to make the sound very plastic. It should be as natural as possible. In the initial days of my career, I tried to clean it a little more than normal. Suddenly, after a film or two, I realized that you are cleaning and again putting the ambient sound. Why should you do that? Q: Absolutely. S: So, as long as keeping the originality - I mean, without losing the original voice, the quality - there’s sometimes low wind you can cut down to like 50 hertz, so that on 100 hertz it is not affecting your voice. That’s all. We tried to minimize as much as possible. But we used to EQ a bit to raise the brightness of the thing. Mostly I try to record as much as possible on the location. We know that in Indian film we have four to five songs. When I do, I keep my notes - suppose there are two days of song recording where I am not required. I go and record the local ambience, geography and everything, in those two days, so that I can recreate it later. Not only Vishal Bhardwaj, you also see Sudhir Mishra. Have you seen this film called Khoya Khoya Chand?21 Q: No. S: Just see that film when possible. Not only Vishal’s. Then there is a film called Manorama Six Feet Under.22 Q: Did you do the sound for that film? S: Yeah. Then again I recorded. Just see the perspective, how a silent place can be enhanced. The beauty of sync sound, what we did there, is a beautiful example. Initially, at a small 5.1 place we did everything. Whatever you see in Manorama Six Feet Under, more than 80% is
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recorded on location. The first Hero Honda he bought - all the things I recorded on the location to get the natural tone of it. Everything I recorded - the vehicle, the other car. I didn’t use any other sound. After doing everything, I showed it to the director. He suggested some corrections according to what he didn’t want. After doing all that, we went to the mixer. When we heard it in the mix, suddenly he found and said, “My goodness! I am hearing something different! Now it is different.” Then he called me and said, “Sahoo sahib, I will not tell you. You hear the first line and tell me the meaning of it”. He played it. The first line says, “There is no-one in Margad registaan”. Margad registaan means a dead desert. Then he said, “Since the line says that it’s a dead forest why are these human voices over there?” Then we re-designed the whole sequence for ten days and finally we mixed the film. Just also see Khoya Khoya Chand. He is one of the good directors and he also has a good sound design perspective. I am doing the next film of Navdeep Singh - NH 10. It’s a very nicely designed film. It’s a Haryana based thriller. A: Navdeep Singh is a very good new director - he does sync sound for all of his films and he uses the sounds even if it is a bit noisy. He directed Manorama Six Feet Under. Q: Oh yes. S: I am doing his second film - NH 10.23 Q: So, the final question is – S: If you look at Mumbai Summer 24 , it is very ambience based film. There’s a film, which is coming now - Kya Delhi Kya Lahore. 25 You should see this film. It’s ambience-oriented and has only one location. The film is about one check post remaining in the time of partition. The war between India and Pakistan happens and one soldier each from India and Pakistan remain alive. So, the two surviving rivals will live on the one check post. It is a two-hour-long film and it happens within one geographical location. Just see how you can sustain one location for two hours. That is the film you should see for ambience. Q: LG. Who is the director? S: Director is Vijay Raj, the actor. Q: Okay. S: That is the film that you should see for the ambience when it gets released. It will help you in Indian perspective. It’s kind of a very rare film, you see. Mumbai Summer is also a good film for good location sound use.
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Q: What does this locational information, in your opinion, give to the audience? Does it transmit something to the audience apart from the geographical awareness? Do you call it authenticity or a sense of reality? What do you think? S: Whether it is a commercial cinema or parallel cinema, I definitely think we go for authenticity and reality. Now it’s the multiplex cinema. Good or bad, whatever it is, cinema at times can be 100% false. The things that are getting portrayed at one or the other places, though you are putting some other character who doesn’t mean what they say - you are leaving that as the play of particular characters, effects and ambience, which will be specific to the location you are shooting at. So, I think all kinds of cinema should have location sound because it doesn’t actually have to hit or flop to establish the reality. No technical support makes your film hit or flop. These are the extra ornaments, which aestheticize the film and it makes it complete. Q: Yeah. S: It is not a complete film without these additional technicalities. Q: Of course! How do you think this transition is from a very holistic point of view? From mono to stereo to multi-channel 7.1 or whatever how do you look at this transition from a very long historical point of view? How do you see it from a long distance shot? Which way is it going? S: I think it is going in the very correct way. But at some places we misuse. I’ll give you examples of Ramayana, Mahabharata. At those times, if someone had to get anything, he would pray to the god - probably Shiva - for years. “Oh lord! Give me a boon.” Then Shiva would agree and then the Rakshas will come to kill him first. So what I think is people try to misuse digital medium. By misuse I mean that people think that digital medium is nothing but the loudness. Suddenly, it is like: louder your film sounds, the more hit it is. Our sound people and may be the director should understand the medium correctly and they should utilize it in the correct way. I am saying that anything in excess is bad. For instance, when you eat little it’s very tasty. When you eat more, your stomach will be upset and you’ll feel sick. This is also like that. Some days back, it happened to me. I wouldn’t tell you the name. Two months back, one of my films got released. It is a very soothing film, and it is kind of a very softly humorous, a very light-hearted kind of film. It is not a loud kind of a film. But then the trailer came, which is a very thriller oriented trailer. Thriller is so much dramatized visually, that the music is also over dramatized. Now it is almost like Dolby is no more, dying. The optical
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medium is long dead. We are more into digital – UFO, Scrabble, these kinds. Dolby had a control. When they used to come for mastering, they used to see that the thing shouldn’t be more than 85db. Or maybe you could go up to maximum 90db. Now there is no limitation. You can play it anywhere. Even the speakers blast at times, it doesn’t make any difference. What some sound engineers do for these thriller kinds of films in the playback chain in the theater is they try to take precaution. They think that if they keep together the speakers, which are playing the sounds, they will be blasting. For this reason, they used to keep in 5.5. When you are using 5.5 and then I am mixing my film in 7, totally the level, the balance and everything is going for a toss. Even the dynamic range goes for a toss. To make it loud, what some people do is in 5.5, they mix at 9 instead of 7. Q: LG. S: So, what happened with me in this film was suddenly I recorded and then the trailer came out before that. The trailer is so bloody loud! And it’s a thriller with all squeaky sounds. After that the screening was a huge show. All big people of the industry had come to see it. When I saw, I found out how my sound was hearing different. My director was looking at me and wondering what happened to the print! What happened was that the mixer made loud the screaming sounds that were there 4.5 instead of 7, and he didn’t increase it from 4.5. So, the total of what I got was almost like half of what I had. Q: How was it sounding like? Did people like it? S: No, I ran to the projector and told him that bloody you have to make it 6. It was a mess. The director was looking at me! What could I do? I had a major fight with the sound engineer who was there before me. Post that, I had a talk with the production house. It went over to big people talk. Then nothing doing, I told the production house that you have to give me in writing that I am not responsible if any problem happens to this film because of sound. If you are keeping this trailer before us, you have to make it minimum 6db down. Else, I am not going to allow. If you are allowing this kind of trailer, you have to give it to me in writing on paper. Finally, they called this guy, and they called me. I called this guy and he said, “You know Mr. Sahoo, this film doesn’t work if my sound wouldn’t be at this particular level.” Do you think sound makes or breaks a film? Which era you are looking for? “No, you don’t understand. Loudness means thriller, thriller means loudness.” I said thriller means loudness doesn’t mean that you’ll blow the entire roof off the house. We have some sealing point. “No.” So I said, “Do one thing. You come, I’ll come and we won’t talk. We will call ten other people who are normal and then watch
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the film. Then if they say this is loud or soft, we’ll make it loud. If it’s correct, we’ll pass it. “No, if I tell the producer, if they go ahead with their cutting down of sound, otherwise it can’t happen.” He was speaking with such an attitude. “I will tell the producer not to put this trailer there, he wouldn’t put it there.” I said, “Okay, do whatever you want. But I won’t allow this.” Finally, I literally reduced it up to 7db and I overall increased my sound 3db more because of that trailer. Post that 7db less and 3db more - with that balance of 10db - I got into equal level. Q: But it is also true that digital technology allows you to have tremendous amount of lower levels of sound. For example, more rumbles and room tones. Why don’t people use that? S: Here also, there is a problem - the playback thing here. Every theater is not at all aligned. They don’t want to spend money on theaters. They want to only increase the money of the ticket price. My goodness! Sometimes the left is very high and right is not working. What do you do in that condition? The reason is they keep 7 to 5.5 not to save the speaker - it’s because in multiplex system there is only one projectionist and there are seven or five theaters. The layers between the other theater and this is so less that if you increase the volume, it will cross between the other things. You can hear the sound of this particular film there and for that, you keep the volume low. Q: Okay. A26: I went to see Pritam’s film Shuddh Desi Romance27 at PVR. When there is music, everything is okay. Sparks were coming from center speakers when it was only ambience and dialogues. Because of the music, you are not able to hear the spark. I called Pritam. Then I said that I can’t hear the film and so I am going out. I took the money back and left the theater. Most of the theaters are like that. Sometimes left surround is not working, sometimes right surround is not working. The main problem is this. Somebody mixes it in such a big level and if you mix it in a correct level also, it won’t be played back correctly. Like I felt Ram Leela28 was very loud. S: It is. A: Hitendra Ghosh did the mixing. After that, someone else mixed. S: No, they increased. They increase it by 5db when they take the output. A: Ram Leela itself is a very loud film. Everybody talks very loudly. On top of it if you increase it! Q: Are there examples of people using lesser volume or silences? S: We used to create silence also in the film.
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A: There are so many silences in Omkara. I mean, in Omkara silence is actually enhanced. There are many passages like that. Still, that film is appreciated by people. It’s not like you need to be very loud. Q: One film could be a very good example, but it wasn’t done that way. In Barfi29 there are very less amount of dialogues. But it’s so full of music. A: It’s a musical film and they used Western music also for that because it was a Chaplin kind of comedy. You need to do that for enhancing that slapstick kind of comedy. Even Kahaani30 has a lot of ambience. S: You should go for Kahani. It’s an ambience-oriented film. Q: Yes, I have seen that film in theater. A: They have used it very beautifully – sound done by Allwyn and Sanjay. Q: Thanks!
Notes 1
Duration: 1:16:52 Name abbreviations: Subash Sahoo – S, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Jayadevan Chakkadath - A 2 Raj Kapoor was an Indian actor and producer, and regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of Hindi-language mainstream Indian cinema, popularly known as Bollywood. 3 Govind Nihalani and Shyam Benegal are well known for their socially relevant films and both upheld the parallel cinema movement in India. A conversation with Benegal is part of this book as an entry point into the subject. 4 Mangesh Desai is a legendary sound recordist and veteran mixing engineer in Indian film industry. 5 Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) 6 Sarfarosh (John Matthew Matthan 1999) 7 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 8 Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Wants, Farhan Akhtar, 2001) 9 Hum Aapke Hain Koun (Who am I to you?, Sooraj Barjatya 1994) 10 Kaminey (The Scoundrels, Vishal Bhardwaj 2009) 11 Omkara (Vishal Bhardwaj 2006) 12 Maqbool (Vishal Bhardwaj 2003) 13 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 14 Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap 2012) 15 Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Life Doesn't Come Again, Zoya Akhtar 2011) 16 Kai Po Che! (Abhishek Kapoor 2013) 17 Rockstar (Imtiaz Ali, 2011) 18 Jab We Met (Imtiaz Ali 2007) 19 Socha Na Tha (Imtiaz Ali 2005) 20 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle 2008)
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Khoya Khoya Chand (Lost Moon, Sudhir Mishra 2007) Manorama Six Feet Under (Navdeep Singh 2007) 23 NH10 (Navdeep Singh 2015) 24 Bombay Summer (Joseph Matthew 2009) 25 Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (Vijay Raaz 2014) 26 In some of the interview sessions my former classmate at SRFTI, Jayadevan Chakkadath, who is also an accomplished location sound recordist in Indian film industry (Mumbai and Kerala), accompanied me and intervened sometimes with his comments. Chakkadath is also part of this book along with another classmate. 27 Shuddh Desi Romance (Maneesh Sharma 2013) 28 Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela (A Dance of Bullets, Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2013) 29 Barfi! (Anurag Basu 2012) 30 Kahaani (Sujoy Ghosh 2012) 22
CHAPTER 20 MANAS CHOUDHURY AND BOBBY JOHN1
Q: I would primarily like to ask you about your experience with sync sound because both of you worked with sync sound, I suppose. Bobby, you’ve also worked with the editing part of the sound tracks, right? M: (overlap) Yes. Q: I can probably ask you about the intricacies of sync sound. Why did you choose sync sound to be your particular format or method of work? You could instead dub the voices. You could have recreated most of the sound effects in the studio. Why did you prefer to work with sync sound? M: Sync sound is more realistic. If you see a visual, you can see a person and every other thing in the visual. You cannot recreate the whole emotion if you dub it. At the same time, there are some artists who can recreate the emotions very interestingly. Sometimes it’s better than what is supposed to be on the screen. But it’s so realistic that the same emotion and the same feeling cannot be exactly recreated - that is why it’s very challenging also. It’s very challenging especially in India because the Indian condition is so noisy for sync sound. Other countries and other places are not that noisy. Q: But then, there were films from 50’s - late 50’s or early 60s to 90’s most part of late 90’s - most of these films were dubbed. M: Yeah, because the first talkie film was Alam Ara2, which was direct sound and synchronized with camera because at that time, the Mitchell camera was there, which helped to make sync sound. Later on, people wanted to go out of studios. They wanted to use not so bulky cameras like the Mitchell. So, they wanted to use very handy cameras and Arri (Arriflex) came into the picture. That was noisy. Then it was very difficult to capture both sound and picture together because the camera itself was so noisy. Slowly, that time, the sync sound became obsolete after the 1940’s probably - 1935 - 1939. But I remember some films like - I did lot of work with Mr. Shyam Benegal, Q: Hm. M: He’s been doing sync sound in every film from his early films.
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Q: Yes. Maybe also Adoor Gopalakrishnan. M: A lot of people - because they are the people who see cinema where sound is an integral part of the whole. So why will the sound be different. It’s an integral part. If you talk, if you see his eyes, if you see the visual why not sound, in whatever form, even if it’s bad? That is the beauty of the whole feel. Q: Yes, but do you think that this particular sensibility in people - not only in the audience but also the sound people - came after digital technology emerged? I assume that digital technology enables people to work better with sync sound. M: Indian cinema is based more on the Star system. So, some artists prefer dubbing, they’re used to the dubbing, and they know they can perform much better in dubbing than on the location. They wanted to make their voice audible in a much better way than what had happened in the shooting. So they wanted to come to the studio and do it in a proper way. That is why – because of the Indian Star system and basically some filmmakers - they wanted it in a bigger way. They wanted the cinema in a larger format, larger perspective, and larger audience. The audience wanted to listen to the sound, which is much larger than realistic. But some sensible people wanted to see cinema as an integration of everything. Sound is an integral part of the cinema. Sound cannot be better than what it is supposed to be in a cinema! Nothing can be better - neither visual nor the sound can be better than the cinema. If the cinema is great, everything is great - the visual is great and the sound is great. That’s what some people - the sensible people - believe is the integrity of the sound. That is why the sync sound is more believable than anything else. Q: Okay. Believable. But do you think that you can work with sync sound because you have digital technology in your hand? Will it not be difficult with Nagra - say two channels or single channel tape recording machines? Can you do sync sound with them? M: Yeah. Slowly the technology is growing up to Dolby Atmos right now. Everything is going up day by day. Q: Hm. M: In the initial days I’ve worked with the Nagra. I’ve been working with sync sound. I did a film called Samar3, which was the first time that I did sync sound in Nagra. At that time, Shyam Benegal used to do every film in Nagra. So, for the first time I introduced digital to Shyam Benegal. I said, “Sir, there is a DAT which is digital. Why not let’s try with the DAT?” But because Shyam Benegal was an oldie, he said, “We’ll do it in Nagra, right?” I said, “Okay. I’ll do it in Nagra and simultaneously I’ll do it in
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DAT.” But later on, when he listened to the DAT, most of the dialogues I used were from the DAT and slowly, the digital technology came into Shyam Benegal’s film Samar in a DAT format. I introduced DAT for the first time in Samar. That was digital. Digital is much crisper and cleaner. But Nagra was also there - Nagra tone and everything was there. For Nagras, we were using a single microphone and so everything was mixed. That was much more challenging. You have to be very sure on the location that this is going to be final and this is what the audience is going to listen. You have to be very sure at the same moment. You have to decide then and there. Right now, the more technology coming, people are becoming more casual and more careless. I know that I’ll be able to clean it in the post. But it was much more challenging during those days. You had to see the location and see what exactly were the noise factors, which were there - what were the things that’d be taken care of and what the artists were going to do there. You had to see whether your boom was facing correctly – whether it was down or not. Right now, you have multiple tracks - you can do it. You know that some mistakes might happen; day-by-day you become more casual. You know you can do it in the post. Q: Hm. Yeah. M: A lot of gadgets are there, you can do it. You can simulate the tone. You can do many things. Q: But still we hear more…? M: At the same temperament, if you can have the technology here, then nobody can beat you, especially in the Indian condition. I have worked all over India. I’ve done sync sound in Calcutta, Delhi, Chennai, at many countrysides - I’ve done sync sound in many parts of India. So, I know. I’ve also done sync sound in Australia, Malaysia and other places. So, I know what the difference is in the Indian context and their contexts. It’s definitely challenging over here. Calcutta is really worse. Still you have to do it. When you do it, you have to find the ways of how to do it. Q: Another thing that I’m very curious about is your own use of ambience. M: See, it’s always based on the cinema first in Indian films. Your cinema demands a certain kind of ambience. You go to the location, you think about the sort of ambiences that you need for this film. You know the script, you know everything. Then you decide what sort of ambiences you’d need from this location. That’s how you… I did a film called Paanch, Anurag Kashyp’s film. 4 That was probably during or before I started shooting for Lagaan. 5 The subject was of rough texture. That’s why we discussed, like Anurag said that we would be shooting in the Bombay traffic and all that - all the noisy locations. Initially I was worried
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as to how to do it, because I’ve always been shooting in controlled locations. Shyam Benegal goes to a very calm city and chooses his subject accordingly. For the first time Anurag Kashyap said that he’ll be shooting in Bombay. It was very tough to decide how to do it. Then the subject was such that the texture of ambiences was going for that subject. So, that is how the Indian cinema is related to sync sound itself. Even if it’s a noisy location, you don’t really need a studio if that texture is there. Then you do the dubbing. If you want to have a studio feeling in the whole film, you don’t need the texture. Then you go and do dubbing and put whatever you want to. You see Paanch - you can never create that feel even in the dialogues. I was doing a scene where there is a deep well and two people are talking on the two corners of the well and that sound was reflected through the water and it was coming up again captured by the mic. Q: Hm. M: So that tone, even if I try to create, I’ll never be able to create in my life. That is the beauty of that feeling. Even if you dub it, you want to create it, you do whatever processing - you won’t be able to get that feel. Q: When you go to a location for sync recording, even though the story does not tell you to listen to the wide spectrum of different sounds in that location, maybe you can listen to the location in that particular layer. And probably you can record some ambiences out of the story. Isn’t that possible? Do you sometimes not go beyond the story or the script to record more information from the location? M: Yeah, sometimes you capture some interesting sounds you find because that’s partly like documenting certain things on location. Sometimes, some interesting sound is there and later, during the post, you might think that it can be used creatively. Q: Hm. M: So it can be that normally you do it - some interesting sounds, which you’ll never get anywhere else. You’ll normally do that. That is the normal phenomenon - when you listen to something, which comes to your mind and stays there, you do record it even if it’s not required for that film. Q: Did you ever do dubbing for your film? M: Yeah, some parts. Mostly it happens with a performance. Sometimes the director wants to change a little bit of the performance. Then you dub. The post work comes to Bobby. I have tried it in Bombay. I have tried in almost twenty-five sync sound films along with Bobby. I started before Lagaan. I did a film called Samar. After that, Hari Bhari 6 and then Paanch and Bollywood Calling, and 3 Deewarein7 after that. There was no
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sync sound and no post facility in the Indian context at that time. How I did it - day and night sound one sound, time codes - that was really tough. At that time, there was no facility for doing post for a sync sound film in Bombay. Later on, everything started there through the process of transitioning from Nagra to DAT, introducing of DAT and from post at that time how to do it. At that time, Real Image was coming. I spoke to them about how to do post - there was no post software. Avid was there. They said you could do the post in sound with Avid. There was something by Avid before the Pro Tools, Avid. Soundscape was also there. I spoke to the Hyderabad guys, I spoke to the Chennai guys. I went to Bollywood Calling and to Real Image in Chennai. It was a tough time. I spoke to all the Real Image people, everywhere I asked how to do it. Then during Lagaan, Nakul came with a postproduction software for the first time. I tried. But practically because of different realities like Lagaan, they didn’t want the other productions to do all those things; so I couldn’t do it. Q: Hm. M: Almost fifteen nights, we were practically sitting together to use the original sounds from the Avid. I was talking to him like, “this timecode to this timecode.” All the cuts were like that. There was no software. Q: Did you work with sync sound in 3 Deewarein? M: For 3 Deewarein, I did the post because at that time I was accessing Nakul’s software. Q: Hm. M: I did that, 3 Deewarein. It was almost 2002. Postproduction software was there during 2000. But it was really tough for early films. Then slowly, the postproduction came into all the studios. Since then, Bobby’s one thing - probably it’s a unique thing that he is doing - is the dialogue cleaning. Nobody really yet understands what dialogue cleaning is. Q: LG. M: Most of the people I’ve seen in the twenty-five films I have done… I know that people use boom sometimes and sometimes cordless. But I have been working with Bobby. That is a unique thing. It is a mystery nobody knows yet - I’m using both cordless and boom, which is a beauty. Slowly as the technology develops, nobody yet knows how to do it. That is a very specialized job, which I’ve been doing with him. Even if I’ll try to do that, I’ll not be able to. You have to constantly listen to the dialogue tone and match it from one shot to another. You’ll not be able to do it unless you get into that character. That’s why I don’t leave him. Q: LG.
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M: I don’t leave him for other reasons too. My thing is that when I record it and when I want to see it in the theater, all my characters’ tones need to be correct. Q: Homogenize? M: It’s very edgy otherwise. I’ll record it and give it. There’s no big deal. I have been doing couple of films with Rohan Sippy. In the first film he couldn’t understand. By the second film, he understood that what Manas is doing with Bobby could not happen anywhere else. I did Dum Maro Dum.8 The dialogue cleaning he did but the rest of the things I had to because they had a tie-up with other studios. I did Nautanki Saala.9 It was full of dialogues. I had shot everything in Bombay. That too, during monsoons. Not a single word has been dubbed and that is been done - a little bit of design for Atmos. You just go to the theater and listen to every dialogue. When Atmos came, everybody thought there are a lot of speakers, a lot of liberty and so we’ll put sound everywhere. But that is not the case for Atmos. In Atmos, you can hear even a sensitive sound from a source. Atmos is not that setup where you’ll have a lot of speakers and you’ll put everything in the surround. I saw this film Gravity.10 Look at Gravity, look at the surround sound design, look at the music. Such a small sound also should be heard from the source. That is the beauty. It is not possible in the Indian context. You’ve to go by the trend. Q: But this trend is changing. M: Trend is changing. Sensible films are coming up. Some sensible filmmakers are coming. That is how it’s changing. Even then, it’s taking longer than it’s supposed to be. Q: Yeah. M: When technology is coming at the same time – when the invention of medicine comes, the diseases come first or before the medicines? Q: LG. M: Similarly, when the technology is coming, so much nuisance of sound is also coming much faster than the technology. However, few sensible people are also there and they are trying to make better ways of understanding… B: The budget nowadays is very less, right? We can make film within fewer budgets, but you can’t take a risk there M: What happens because of the stars system is that when they will try to understand first, the things will change faster. Q: Yeah. For example, Aamir Khan in Lagaan…
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M: Aamir Khan. The whole sync sound revolution came largely because of him. Before that, Shyam Benegal has been trying since Ankur’s time.11 Nobody was bothered. “Oh it’s an art film!” But when Lagaan came, things became easier to accept. It was very tough even for the artists to accept. When Amitabh Bachchan… B: Cameramen were not co-operating at that time. They were limiting their freedom. Q: Hm. M: So there are many things, many factors are there to it. There were some political aspects to it also, which is better not to discuss. It was the financial part - the political aspect. Slowly, people became aware. The artists are like, “Okay! We don’t have to go for the dubbing! That’s fine. That’s cool!” that is also there. But the one uniqueness that I found, which is yet a mystery to understand actually - that’s the uniqueness in the post. Q: Hm. I would like to ask you regarding how you treat voices recorded on boom and voices recorded on lapel? Lapel gives a very close kind of tone for the voice. B: Yes. Q: But boom includes the spatial information of that location. B: Yes. Q: How do you make a balance between them? How do you select? Which one do you select? B: I select both because only with the two mics can you balance the tone with a long shot, close up and mid shot. Otherwise, if you’ve to have only one mic, it’s very difficult to match the tone from one shot to another. So I prefer both the mics to be mixed. The cordless gives you the body of your sound and the boom mic gives you the ambience, surrounding. If you combine them together in a proper proportion, you’ll get a better sound. Q: If you only use boom, and it already includes the ambience, do you need to add ambience to it later on during the design? B: Yeah, because in boom you have only a mono track. Since you’re playing on a 5.1 or Atmos you’ll need the ambience to be laid over the speakers in the surrounds. M: But sometimes, with boom you concentrate on the voice more. So, you need to layer many more things of that location to give a better feel of that location. Q: Okay. But that’s only keeping in mind the 5.1, 7.1 or Atmos?
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M: No. Even in case of a mono film also, you can give a better feel of the location. You get an atmosphere if you give a boom that is only concentrating most of the times on the voice, but you can give a better feel of that atmosphere by adding of layers. B: In a location your concentration is on capturing the sound, the dialogues as best as possible. M: But according to the characters – B: So you don’t concentrate on your ambiences while recording. Q: Okay. B: And you cannot get to judge the balance on your headphone. How it should sound, how much ambience you need, how much dialogue you need – all that you can decide only while mixing. Q: Yeah. So by that time, the ambience should be recorded, maybe separately in a camera. B: Yeah. Because there are a lot of outside noises, and the “action”, “cuts” and the crew is shouting. You won’t be able to record the ambience at that time. Q: Hm. What about the bodily effects? For the effects, do you prefer to use Foley or do you prefer to keep the original effects? For example, the clip we’re seeing… B: We use both. If you want an international soundtrack, you have to remove the dialogues and give the ambience and effects separately. This is mixed with the dialogue and so you won’t be able to remove that. Q: Okay. B: Thus, we have to use Foley too. Q: To layer over the original recordings, right? B: We layer it. M: Rather, it’s more difficult for a sync sound film to create Foley because you have to create in the Foley in a similar kind of tone to the ones you get on the location. That is really tough for the Foley people. Q: Yes, of course. M: Some people ask why is it taking so much of time if you’re not doing dubbing? You rather take more time for a sync sound film than a dubbing film. It is something called belief. If you believe in it, do it. If you don’t, then don’t do it. Q: Have you ever worked with dubbed voices? B: Yeah.
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Q: Did you also work it up? B: Yeah. Q: What is the difference between dubbed voice and sync recording of voice? B: With dubbed voice, you’ll never feel it is natural. It’ll never match with the lips. Q: But it has clarity, right? B: There’s nothing like that. Sync sound also has a lot of clarity. Sometimes I feel that the sync sound clarity is much better than the dubbed track. Q: In that sense, the definition of clarity may include more information from the space itself. M: Some people say that with sync sound you don’t get clarity. First of all, they should understand where they have heard it because maximum of the Indian theaters are not standardized. So you cannot have clarity there. And you get the mid tone louder in specially dubbed voice. You don’t get a feeling in that, but you need the information. That is not cinema. You’ll get to listen to Salman Khan - all the dialogues have to be clear in the theater. Those kinds of audience are different - punchline and everything and they wanted to compare, like, the Chandan cinema theatre. Chandan theatre’s calibration is not correct. Some people say, “I can’t hear anything at Chandan cinema.” Chandan theatre is not the correct place to judge a film. You have to go to a proper standardized theater and then tell you can’t hear anything. Q: Hm. But it can be challenging to record on the location because in some of the closed spaces - maybe inside a room - you have tremendous amount of reflections from different walls that makes it probably very, what to say… difficult. M: Yeah. That is there. But there are different microphones in the technology that are coming up. With those you can cut out many reflections, the acoustic cancellation of reflections. B: You can use carpets on the floor. You can cut down a lot of reflections while shooting. Q: Yeah. M: Those microphones were not there while shooting in the initial days. So, people used some acoustic on the locations. Right now, the technology has come up and you get some microphones, which give you the cancellation of reflections. You’ll get a correct tone.
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Q: You work with sync sound - both of you. I ask you to look back at the kind of films that Indian cinema has produced. Just listen to Dharmatma12, for example. The whole film is dubbed, and when we go to the outdoor, we listen to the voices, which are recorded inside a studio with applied reverb. It’s very unrealistic sounding. But those films have been quite popular. So, how do you select? M: See you also have to understand that it’s because Indian cinema is going on since many years. So, they have done it in different situations. At that time of Dharmatma, the subject was so powerful that you didn’t see whether it’s dubbed or not. Q: But the subject is more powerful in films like Shanghai.13 M: Yeah. Q: Or in films like Once upon a time in Mumbai, its subject is even more powerful. So? M: Why did they choose sync sound? Why have they not done dubbing? That’s because that sensibility comes in along with the filmmaker. They believe in that kind of setup. Shanghai’s subject is of more realistic kind. Probably that is why the director wanted to make everything so realistically in terms of the visual and sound. B: I did sound editing of Shanghai, actually. His point of view is different from the other directors. M: Because that’s the sensibility. B: He wants everything noisy, as it is real. Q: Okay. B: Most of the directors don’t want that kind of treatment. They want dialogues to be clear, and they want music. Q: Okay. B: You hardly hear any music in Shanghai. Q: But films like, let’s say, Highway14 are full of ambiences, full of rich layers of sound - at least in the first part. That is a very commercial film done by a very commercially minded director. The subject may not be that powerful, in the sense that you don’t need a realistic treatment. But that film contains sync sound and also contains ambience. Such huge amount of ambience! B: That also depends on the subject of the film. M: He has done a lot of films. He must be looking forward to this kind of subject to treat it differently. Right now everybody - what I am seeing
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since the last decade - is trying experimenting with different things like new ideas, new technology, and new ways of thinking. You see the changes in terms of Indian cinema in the last ten years. The revolution drastically changed Indian cinema from here to there. Look at ten years back and look at here - even the audience’s sensibility has changed. People liked the film called Vicky Donor15 - it was a hit. This kind of subject is being well accepted by the audience. If you told this subject to any producer ten or twenty years back, he would not have accepted the idea. He’d say, “What is this?!” In the last ten years, these kinds of ideas have been emerging. People are trying to experiment with many things. Q: Do you think these ideas and the sensibility of the directors are only changing the sound of the film? Or the sound people - sound technicians are also changing? M: Sound technicians are also a part of that. Even if the director has a subject or an idea, you as a sound person take it to a different note through sound, which even the director probably have not thought about. He’s trying to experiment. So he might accept it. Basically, it’s a collaboration of many people together to make a cinema, which have the vibes together and you make a better cinema. That is how cinema is made if you look back at the history. Q: If we separate out the contribution of the sound people - what are those contributions apart from sync sound? M: Everything in terms of sync sound - the design, the creative aspect. Q: For example, if we concentrate on ambience, do you think that the use of ambience has been changing in the last ten years? M: Yeah. I can say the earlier films were more dominated by the music only. Slowly people are coming up with effects and ambiences rather than music. Some films don’t have music. B: At that time, there was a limitation with technology. With music, you can play a film and play the music in sync with that. At that time, we didn’t have any technology of putting the layer of ambience in sync with the film. We have a loop that’ll be running constantly and you punch in at the mixing. At this place you need the bed, switch on the bed and you switch it off whenever that scene gets over. That’s what we had. M: Because of the limitations, you don’t have many things. B: You cannot take a car and run on the studio. We added some car passing. That’s all. With music you can experiment whatever you want in the theater, you can perform in front of the film. That advantage was there for music.
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Q: When we come from mono to stereo and then to surround, do you think that the amount of channels that are added one after another, also influence the use of effects in films? B: Yeah, they also influence. The main advantage is “Undo”. LG. In digital you can “undo”. With analogue you cannot do. Q: Yes, you cannot. M: But great films were there earlier. B: You said you heard all the reverberations in the studio. At that time, there were limitations of multi tracks. If you were dubbing the dialogues at that time, you probably have four or five tracks for the dialogues. Two or three people were sitting together and doing the dubbing because we had a limitation. We have plenty of tracks now. We can record each character separately. M: Earlier films also had limitations, but they have done great jobs. Look at Ajantrik16 or look at Adoor’s films. They have done having limitations also. I mean you can’t beat it. That was a different time. B: Yesterday, Bose (babu) was saying, “Nowadays I am not able to match my own standards!” M: LG. Yes. Because I have seen that he was the master of fingers. I was mixing one of Shyam Benegal’s films. There was no advanced technology at that time. We used to do recording only on Nagra, and music and effects and everything were on rock and roll. Even the little finger was working a little bit. Q: LG. M: I thought I could’t work like this. And that used to be like one reel. Now you can punch-in any point of time in the mixing. At that time of one-reel-one-go was that you have to do the mixing ten minutes constantly. Some correction you have to do in the next run - you correct this part, you forget the other part. That way, mixing is always very subjective. But that sensibility was working during those times of Mangesh Desai and Hitendra Ghosh. Q: I would like to ask another very specific question to both of you. Do you keep the audience in your mind when you record in sync or think of a design and you edit the tracks? Do you keep in mind how the audience will engage with your work or how the audience will be interpreting it? B: I have never thought about that. Q: You never thought of. But –
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M: No, you think about that. That is why when you design, you do certain scenes and forget it and come in the next couple of days and see how it is sounding and how it is giving a feel to you, as an audience. In terms of design, you do that a couple of times. I do one reel and I go away. I come back again. “Let’s see Reel One.” Then you just put this - how is it sounding? That is how it’s an ongoing process. Even if you go to bed, you think, “Should I put that? I think that might work much better.” I changed a fan sound that I was doing in three different places. At one place I put that fan, I said, “It’s working…no.” Next day I came and put it in another place. “This is working much better in this way.” That is how you think also. If it’s working a couple of times, even if I go and come back and listen to it, then it might work at least for five other people. That is how the whole thing works. Q: (To Bobby) What about you? What do you think? B: For me, the director thinks most about how the audience is reacting. Q: But sound-wise? B: I have to make the director happy sound-wise. I have to see whether the director is convinced or not about the sound input which I am putting. M: Because it’s a director’s vision. B: That is the director’s point of view whether it’s working. It’s his/her choice. M: Most of the times we do certain things and the director comes and listens to it and goes, “It’s ok. Some changes here and there”. That is how it happens. If the director doesn’t say anything, then it’s working. Sometimes you show also to a couple of other people, “Just look at this scene. How’s it working?” you get the feedback and rework on that also. Most of the times, horror films are more challenging because they have to be really scary. Is it really giving that fear? Q: If you give good things to the audience, they’ll accept it. M: Yeah. B: Hm. M: But it takes time because – B: For example, we were doing one film. There is a silent chopper like that one in Abottabad where they killed Bin Laden. They used a silent chopper. So, we don’t know what is a silent chopper. We never had silent chopper on a set. So we created – M: It’s very subjective.
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B: We created a silent chopper somehow. Then the director said, “I don’t want any sound of the helicopter.” It was a comedy scene. Silent chopper means there is no sound. Q: Hm. B: That was his point of view. CHORUS LG M: But even if there is silence, you try to convince. B: There is no sound of the silent chopper. Q: In mono you had only one track, right? B: Yes. Q: And you had only one source from where the sound would come. There you put all the sounds. B: Yeah. Q: A little bit of ambience - primarily voice - music and effects. But when stereo came, you had a little bit of space where you could just make a kind of directional choice. B & M: Yes. Q: So, voice was also kept in the center and effects were spread a little bit. But when the surround came, you had a much, much bigger space. How did you adapt to that extra space that you got in your hand? How did you manage to shift your localization of sound? How did you plan it accordingly? B: For me, everything comes from the front when you do a mono film. So, you always give preference to the dialogue first. Then only the other things come. Here we can think differently - dialogue is separate, music is separate, and ambience is separate. So, we can create a feel of sitting inside the same location. Earlier we couldn’t. Suppose, we are sitting inside a car. All the sounds are coming from all the directions inside the car. Earlier you didn’t have that privilege. Q: What then was the experience in your opinion? B: It was great. Q: No, I mean, in mono sound - if I am not sitting inside that location, then what was the experience of mono sound? It is coming from one source only. B: Yeah. Q: What was the experience like in your opinion?
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B: LG. I never worked much on a mono film. Q: Okay. M: When the mono is there at your front, the concentration is always for the information. B: But was it an inferior one? I mean, was it an inferior one watching a film in mono? M: No, it’s subjective. See, whatever information is there, that has to hold you. But here you have lot of space, even though that is not holding. Some other things are holding you at least. You get a better feel. When the mono is there, that information has to be very interesting to hold you there. If it’s not interesting, it will not hold you. You’ll be not interested. You’ll lose that concentration and look here and there. That information has to be very interesting to hold you there to listen. B: Still, if the film is a boring one, even with the sound - even in 5.1 or even with Atmos - it cannot – M: That is there. So, that doesn’t hold you. The content always has to be great. If the cinema is great, everything works together. Even if it’s a mono, even if it’s a stereo, it’s a 5.1, or it’s Atmos. If the subject is great everything works together. Only thing is that you have a better space to work, accentuate sounds a little more in a bigger way, larger way. Q: How do you perceive that mono sound and stereo sound and then surround sound differently? There are definitely differences in the way you perceive it. How was it in your opinion? In stereo, you have a little bigger space than mono - how did you perceive it? M: If I look back to the stereo or mono right now, it is more challenging to make a mono interesting. We have done a film - he was also there - called Firaaq.17 Q: Firaaq, yeah. B & M: Nandita Das. M: That film was a great experience for me. After the Godhra incident, the whole city was calm. You had to create that atmosphere - that calmness in the city. It was very tough. If you look back and listen to the whole film, it is almost like a mono. But it is more challenging to create calmness in 5.1. Even if you had the space, for me, it was almost like a mono. Q: Okay. M: Sound was there. But then, you had to very creatively use certain sounds which would give that feel of that space, that calmness which was almost like a source from mono.
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Q: Yeah. M: That is rather subtle. Subtlety of sound, created in a mono, you have to be very intelligent to create that mono interesting. It’s a subtlety of sound. Q: Do you also think like that - in terms of mono and stereo? B: Yeah, when we work on a film. Right now we concentrate on the highest technology. Whatever the options we lay that one first. Then we go down back. Q: Even in mono, stereo or surround, voice is always in the center. Isn’t it? B: Voice is always in the center. Q: The other tracks are somehow sent in different channels. Right? B: But the voice is the narrating part. I mean it’s the information. It’s the one, which is actually attached to the audience and the screen - the main connection between them. Q: Yeah, you put other tracks such as effects on the two sides of the screen and then you put ambience on the two sides of the screen. In surround sound, you put the ambience further away from the screen. As a mixing specialist or as an editor, what do you think happens following these strategies? B: We are not exactly putting further away. We are rather adding more layers to it. Q: Okay. B: When you have a mono film, you have a fixed dynamic range. You have to work in that one. When 5.1 mix comes, you have more dynamic range and more channels. So, you can have a very loud sound to a soft sound. Q: Yeah. Absolutely. B: That advantage is much better than mono film. A: He was the guy who actually started one of the earlier films of Bollywood sync sound. He has gone through how the technology is changing from the start and how the sync sound was perceived - the use of sync sound. B: Mono had become obsolete by the time I came to the industry. Q: Obsolete? B: Dolby stereo already taken over the industry at that time. Q: How did you come to work with editing - voice editing or dialogue editing?
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B: Earlier, my passion was music recording. There I started using a workstation. Then I did a CD of Indian sound effects with Resul (Pookutty). I mastered the CD and we started working together from there. We started doing films and we have worked together for four or five years. Then I continued in that same profession as a sound editor. A: Still, editing voice is totally different from what any sound person is doing. You’re concentrating only on voices. B: Yeah. Q: I think you did sync sounds in the early days of Indian cinema. Do you think it’s different from today’s practice? B: Yeah. Very different. Q: All of them are sync sounds, but what is it? – B: At that time, you had only one or two track in a DAT. Q: Hm. B: So, if four people are talking, you’ll have four mics. Everything was combined and recorded on one track. You couldn’t distinguish these two mics. So, when you speak, his mic is also catching and another’s mic is also catching. That’s bad sound, actually. You cannot eliminate that sound because they are mixed into one track. Now we have multi-track - all the tracks are separate. We can eliminate those sounds. So you get it much cleaner without the reverb. Q: If you talk about reverb, then that reverb is original. That reverb is already carrying a lot of information from that particular place - maybe it’s a room. B: But that may not be the actual reverb. Q: Okay. B: It’s an added reverb. This mic is also having reverberation. This mic is capturing the noise, that mic is also capturing the same. So, your noise level and reverb level have also gone up. That affects the actual clarity of the sound. In earlier times the clarity was much less than the current scenario. Q: I think all of these settings will be changing slowly in future and more speakers will be coming... B: Yeah, they’ll be changing. Q: Maybe on top of the head. How do you then think of your work? How will you adapt to that change again? B: You’ll have to try at that time.
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M: That has already started, right? There are plug-ins, like, you can simulate half the feel of a different space over here, in the plug-in. You don’t have to have speakers over there. Like in those virtual sounds, you can have it. B: Have you heard of virtual Barber Shop? In the stereo mic, you feel that the haircutting is happening all over your head. Q: You can also have it in binaural. B: Yeah, binaural is there. But it is very difficult to establish in a theater because people are sitting everywhere. Q: Yeah. Absolutely. M: It’s not that difficult. You just have to very meticulously and proportionately do how much information you have about this space. B: That will sound differently to different people. M: No, you have to proportionately distribute this information in the other parts also. That is very tough. But you can create it proportionately to different parts. From here also you’ll have an almost similar feel and from there also you’ll have an almost similar feel because that information is already there. That is very tough. If you see Gravity, it’s Atmos mix. If you go to a theater where the 5.1 mixing calibration is good, you’ll get an Atmos feel in a 5.1 theater also. That is the virtual sound. Because the mix and everything, placement is so nicely done. You can create it in the Indian context also. But the Indian requirements are different. Not necessarily that they can do it, but it’s not the case that you can’t do it. Q: Can you come to something specific that is different in the Indian context? M: In Indian cinema, you can create those kinds of feel or moods. Even that is a very interesting mix and an interesting balance you can create. But they don’t need those kinds of subtle mix, those kinds of subtlety in Indian cinema. Indian requirements are different. So, people are not doing that kind of mix. Indian mix is mostly Indian music, which is completely different. That is why the whole thing’s different. Q: But we can think of another thing also. Indian cinema, in recent films at least, there are a lot of extra bass added. In earlier times it was much sharper – M: You’re talking about in terms of the dialogues or what? Q: Altogether there’s lot of bass that’s added.
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B: This bass started coming when we used electronic or digital devices. In earlier times, maximum bass was produced by the analog devices. There was no instrument below that. Now you get 40 hertz sound. Q: Is it because of the electronic music systems? B: Yes. In earlier times, we had mono. Mono has a limitation in carrying the frequencies. So, we cannot go below that and we cannot go after that. So it sounds mostly sharper. Q: But people started to use room tone. For example in Dil Chahta Hai18, we hear room tone for the first time. Room tone has a lower frequency range. If you do sync sound recording in any indoor sequence, room tone will be included. I mean, room tone as the electrical hum and general kind of what is called white noise. M: Room tone makes your dialogue lively. Q: Lively, yes. But room tone is – M: Otherwise, the whole dialogue will be dry. If you hear it, it’ll be dry. If you add a little bit of room tone, it would make it livelier. That’s why we have to have a correct choice of the room tone. It’s not like any room tone you can put anywhere. You have to have a correct choice of room tone. Not necessarily, you record the scene here and you have to put the room tone of here, not necessarily. You have to think and create the correct kind of room tone depending on the scene. That will make the scene coming to life. It’ll be interesting at least to listen to those dialogues. Q: What does this added room tone mean? M: I have done a couple of dubbed films also, as the films required it. What I do after doing the dubbing is, I come here - to the studio - and add a little bit of a room tone to make it more lively. A couple of dubbed films I’ll name to you. You can’t feel that it’s a dubbed film. Since my sensibility is in sync sound always, I want to make a dubbed film also sound like sync sound and I dub it accordingly too. While dubbing, it’s not always that my microphone has to be here in a close performance. I record with a boom and I do the dubbing also in a similar pattern – like straight dubbing. Dubbing has a feel of the character moving and I also give a feel to that when the scene is happening – Q: Perspective? M: Yes, perspective during dubbing. During dubbing also I try to create a feel of sync sound. Q: What about you keeping the perspective during editing? Do you prefer to keep perspective or -?
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B: Yeah, I create that too in the sound editing stages. A: We can create a perspective with the combination of the cordless and the boom mic. M: Perspective is not that you drop the level down. [CHORUS LG] You just create that feel of perspective. It is actually very tough to create that perspective from a distance. It’s not the level. With the same level also, you’ll have to get that tone in your perspective. That is more challenging. Q: Do we need to create that perspective or it’s already there in the sync recording? M: It’s there in the sync recording. Sometimes you want to do more in terms of the large screen. If you want more perspective, you can create it with that large screen using both the microphones and combinations of their reverb to make it more realistic. Q: So, the perspective is created to make the audience – M: Will make it believable much more by getting into the space. Q: So, that means you think of an audience! M: Yes. Definitely. Probably technically he is not being able to tell it, but every time you definitely think about the audience. B: I am also an audience. I think in my way and I show it to the director. Q: Okay. B: I mean, audience perspective means such sound, through the storytelling. That we can’t decide. Nobody knows which film will become a hit. A: You also think about the audience - your audience is the director. Q: Yeah. CHORUS LG A: For a sound designer, it’s the larger audience. He thinks he’s responsible in a way for his work. Q: If you go through the reviews, at least concentrating on IMDB reviews of recent films, lot of reviewers are also talking about sound. They’re commenting on how they feel about sound, being attentive to the sound experience in the films separately. M: Things are coming up right now because no one was talking about sound earlier. That’s changing as you get to hear it now. B: Earlier, sound was only music.
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Q: Yes. Sound earlier was thought of as music only, as a soundtrack. As people are giving attention separately to sound I think the field is opening up. M: Yeah, it’s definitely changing. People - even the audiences - are talking about the sound. Then if you make it better, if you make it interesting, the audience slowly will change. It’ll not take much time. But as I said, it’s the Star system - it will move faster when the stars think about it. Q: Yes, of course. M: It will take a long time otherwise. I have been working here since the last twenty years. I have been seeing how the changes have been happening. Q: Do the new stars accept sync sound as a process? M: I luckily started working with Mr. Shyam Benegal. He himself is a pioneer of sound. He always wants - even right now I’m working with Mr. Benegal - he would say, “I only want to listen to the boom track, just give that to me.” Q: Okay. M: When he watches in the monitor and listens to it, he says, “Give me only boom track. I don’t want to listen to anything else. Later on you do whatever, but I want to listen to only boom track.” LG. Q: LG. M: That’s because his thought process is different. B: But now he knows that he gets the boom. M: He knows that he hears everything after the mixing. But during shooting, he wants to hear only the boom track. A: Bhansali (Sanjay Leela) once made only one person stand. “Nobody else stands. I don’t want to concentrate on anybody. I need this one portion - Supriya’s dialogue.” But nowadays you have a choice in the recorder. He can get that particular out through the ISB. Q: Hm. A: That kind of thing. People are also now aware that you can do these things. Q: Hm. M: Even the oldies accept the new. They know that it’s something better that they are trying to do. It is not a major issue. B: But it’s good that directors are now taking care of that.
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M: Right, definitely. Luckily I have been working with people like Shyam Benegal, Nagesh Kukunoor and Anurag Kashyap. I worked with Ram Gopal Verma. He believes in the sync sound, but he is quite impatient. “Why is it taking so much of time?” That is his thought. Q: Kukunoor is always working with sync sound, right? M: Yeah. He came to India and wanted to do a sync sound film. He never knew that in India people were doing sync sound. Luckily, I was shooting Hari Bhari with Shyam Benegal in Ramoji (Film City). Kukunoor came to visit Shyam Benegal. He said, “You’re doing sync sound with an Indian technician?” Shyam Benegal said, “I am working since 1973. All my technicians are Indian.” Then he spoke to me. He never knew that technicians are doing sync sound in India. Then I started working with Bollywood Calling 19 , and after that Teen Deewarein, even though limitation in the post work was happening at that time. I was travelling to Hyderabad, Chennai. There was nothing here in Bombay. Slowly things were changing. Q: Do you think that there is any difference between the sync sound works you did earlier and the work you are doing now? M: In terms of my maturity - definitely different. Q: In which way? M: See, at that time you were only concentrating on getting a correct sound. Right now, I’m looking at the prospective of the film - what is a better thing, which will be better for the cinema together, like which will be working. That is a much larger way. Little bit different, but in a larger way. Q: (To Bobby) And what about you? Has your work also changed? B: Yeah, working style always changes according to the technology and the more options that you get. M: More technical developments are constantly happening. We experiment this way and that way. That is always an innovative way of handling things. B: You can try out a lot of things now. Q: Okay, lots of thanks to both of you.
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Notes 1
Duration: 01:08:15 Name Abbreviations: Manas Choudhury – M; Bobby John – B; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay– Q; Jayadevan Chakkadath – A; Other Abbreviations: Laughter LG 2 Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani 1931) 3 Samar (Shyam Benegal 1999) 4 Paanch (Five, Anurag Kashyap 2003) 5 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 6 Hari-Bhari (Fertility, Shyam Benegal 2000) 7 3 Deewarein (3 Walls, Nagesh Kukunoor 2003) 8 Dum Maaro Dum (Rohan Sippy 2011) 9 Nautanki Saala! (Rohan Sippy 2013) 10 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) 11 Ankur (The Seedling, Shyam Benegal 1974) 12 Dharmatma (Feroz Khan 1975) 13 Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee 2012) 14 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 15 Vicky Donor (Shoojit Sircar 2012) 16 Ajantrik (Ritwik Ghatak 1958) 17 Firaaq (Separation, Nandita Das 2008) 18 Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Wants, Farhan Akhtar, 2001) 19 Bollywood Calling (Nagesh Kukunoor 2001)
CHAPTER 21 VINOD SUBRAMANIAN1
Q: I would like to ask you about your ideas of location sound. How do you see location sound? I think you have a different idea. What about others working with location sound? V: So, your primary question is about location sound in terms of my approach to it? Primarily there is a difference of approach only because the other side exists. And to me it is not really conducive for cinema as an integral element of cinema the way it’s done. It’s got to do more with the fact that the sound of the spoken word, the dialogue in a performance, etc. should be treated as an integral part of the performance and the mis-enscene. Now the best way to do that is what you should be utilizing as a location sound recordist or a production sound recordist. The tools that are available to us today are quite diverse. But if you break it down, it is basically the microphone and where it is placed vis-a-vis the actor or the performer. When you put a microphone on a boom and record dialogue with it compared to using a lavalier microphone that is fixed at one place on the actors’ body, the difference is quite obvious. The air around the microphone and the movement makes the track recorded with a microphone on a boom more real than a microphone that is fixed at one place. It doesn’t matter if the actor is fifteen feet or thirty feet or even a hundred feet away from the camera. It still sounds like as if a person is sitting on your shoulder and speaking to you in your ear. Of course, at times I am made to record it that way and try to make it sound like it has got air around it. Perspective - a term that people want to use and don’t quite achieve - it is not so easily achievable with a wireless microphone. The general excuse is that we are living in a noisy country, there is no control over locations, we do need to have that much body and otherwise it gets lost in the middle of everything else. Background music in Bollywood cinema is so overwhelmingly loud that dialogue gets buried in it and you can’t hear the lines. But then my question is why do you let that happen? As a sound designer or as a sound person in postproduction, why do you allow that to happen? There is always this backseat that one needs to take in postproduction when you have some big guy directing it. The
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producers, well, they all want the music to go higher and higher in level and yet the dialogues should be heard. So they push the dialogue up as well. Hence the whole scenario lends itself to an unreal, over the top kind of feeling. Now that is something I don’t like. Personally I just find that problematic and irritating. If I go and sit in a film theater or cinema and watch a film, which has been done this way, it gives me a headache by the end of the day. Rather if there was some kind of a balance that could be achieved in terms of its aesthetics, content, a kind of a layering approach where you use different layers prudently and not use every layer all the time, but some layers at some times should take precedence over other layers. So, at times it’s the dialogues that take precedence over the music. There are times when the music takes precedence over the dialogue if need be or the sound effects or special effects in audio. If you see a film like Jurassic Park2, you’ll find that it is very well done because everybody, including Steven Spielberg, has that finesse in the approach. They are not interested in making a big muddle out of the whole thing. They are interested in layering the sounds. The first time when you see these people hear the sound of a Brontosaurs and you see that little puddle there with ripples in it, that very low frequency thump and you hear the music. If you isolate only the music, you will find that the background music in that particular scene or those set of shots has very low LF content because that space has been left by the music composer for the sound effects. There is only that much space in the frequency spectrum. If you want to put it that way, there is only that much space in the soundscape of a film. If everybody is going to vie for all the space at all the time, then all you are going to get is mayhem. And I don’t want mayhem. I don’t think people want mayhem. If they are applying their minds to it when they see a film, they will see mayhem in Bollywood cinema most of the time. Even today, I am sure a lot of people will say that we have gone a long far way and things have improved and all that. I would say things have improved but then, the level of improvement is so minimal compared to what we should be looking at in terms of achievement, that it’s really not a big thing. We have not achieved a big milestone yet. We have not improved our understanding of sound. We have not really graduated. So, essentially, even when it comes to location sound which as people say is a recent phenomenon - location sound has started gaining precedence over dubbed films in India only over the last couple of decades or fifteen years or whatever. Various people who did one project at a time and at particular points of time, usually there are references to them. These projects actually started the whole process of thinking about recording sound on location. Quite honestly, they might have done that, but the rest of the Bollywood
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community did not necessarily take a cue from it and genuinely look at taking things in that direction. If that would have been the case, then we would have been at a very different level today, in fifteen or twenty years. That is not the case. I am rationally looking at it as a causal level. I am not making any judgments here. But the thing is that if somebody said that Lagaan 3 was a film in which location sound was done properly and probably for the first time in India, there have been other location sound films. Bandit Queen4 was a location sound film done pretty well for its time. The way that film is, it lends itself very well. But has the rest of Bollywood learnt from that and taken a cue, and thought they should carefully think about it and look at sound in that way? We should understand sound at a deeper level and then utilize it in a better way than we have been doing and then open itself to new ways of functioning, new ways of filmmaking. I honestly didn’t ever see a situation like that happen. Based on my analysis of the way the situation is today, I can say that that’s not the way it has happened. Then what’s the point of just giving it some lip service and talking about it just from the outside? I say this and I am very sure that my peers and friends in the industry are also going to say the same thing when they talk about it. When you are hired to do the location sound for a project, everybody says yes it is important. But when you actually go down and get to the locations and start shooting, the image takes so much precedence over sound. Eventually it’s back to square one. The sound department is struggling to survive the onslaught of the image during the shoot. I am sure not a single sound mixer worth his salt in India is going to deny or say something against this statement. They are going to support this statement. Then what are we doing about it? I don’t know. What can I do about it? I keep fighting. People keep fighting in their own way. I keep fighting in my own way. Everyone has levels and ways and styles of fighting. I have my way and my style of fighting. But what am I fighting for? For heaven’s sake, you have hired me to do location sound for the film or for the project and you are not giving me space to breathe. Why? Because of whatever, you know. Your planning has gone for a toss. You bit off more than you could chew - you are trying to do a seventy days shoot in forty-five days. Therefore there is a big hurry to finish scenes. Then some actor gives you trouble in terms of dates or some shit like that. Put it all together, and it basically is a big excuse. All we have to do is, we are asked to comply and coexist. We are asked to comply first. So I go on the location and say, “What the hell is this? Why is the genny right here?” “We can’t park it outside because we don’t have permission for this road”. I say “Why didn’t you get permission for this road?” “We cannot get permission for this road”. “Then why did you select this
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location?” “We did not have any choice. We wanted this kind of a thing.” I don’t even have an opportunity to talk to the director at that point because his priority is to set up the shot and take it. It’s absurd for me to go and say that this is not the location that we should be shooting this scene in. But if I try to say that even at the location scout or the recce as they call it in the UK, they are the funniest. In location scouts, you are supposed to go and checkout a location for its conduciveness. Is it good for sound and it is good for everything and whatever? But most of the time, location scouts happen like they are a given. “So we are going to shoot this scene between Budhaditya and Vinod Subramanian in this cafe out here”. So, the whole team - ten to twelve people in four different cars - come to this café, see it and then most of the discussion happens in terms of lighting and whatever. Then they might turn to me and say, “So, what do you think Vinod? Is it Okay?” Suppose I’ll say, “I’ll need to get these two roads blocked,” immediately the production manager will say, “That’s not going to be possible. It is impossible to block these roads.” I tell you, nothing is impossible. But they ensure that they don’t want to do their bit. They are lazy or at times they are just simply stupid. At times they are over-smart. Anyway they don’t care two bits about sound. There is somebody in that team who doesn’t. Quite often it happens this way. The director will be interested. DoP might also be conducive. You will find an art director is not. So, you will find a hollow floor on a set. Or you will find that the production manager is not and you will find a generator right next to the location, you know, stuff like that. So, what I am saying is that it has only been a struggle ever since I have started doing location sound in India. There has never been a simple easy day in my life as a sound mixer. It is not that I miss it, but I am just making a statement that I did not have any. Why wouldn’t anybody like to have a simple easy day at work? One thing I am really glad and happy about is that my equipment, the way I have set it up, the quality of my equipment and the fact that I take care of it very carefully and very well. Touch wood, I have never had any major issues or niggling issues. Most people have niggling issues with their equipment. I am very happy to say that I can sleep well because the next day when I get up and go to work with my gear, my gear is going to work. I know that. An extreme amount of effort is gone into making sure that it happens. I personally cut and solder each cable. I have built my own cord. In fact, many times it so happens in my case that the preparation for a shoot sometimes is longer than a month. For my last feature film, I prepared for a month and a half because I had some new equipment that I had purchased and I had to integrate that. But almost the rest or more than fifty percent of the time was involved in rearranging the setup to make it more
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efficient. That way more can be achieved with less physical effort. I am really glad to say that it worked well for all the fifty days of the film that I just did. So that part I am very happy with. But it is the same old thing when I go out to location. Sound is fighting for a space. For what after all? It is not like I am going to record the sound and sell it on eBay or put it up on a wall in my house. It is for the project that I am doing. After the film is done, people come and say that the sound was brilliant. I have had a situation with a film that I did in 2007. I had some major fights with the director on the location. It was a ridiculously weird way of shooting. There was no clarity on what was being shot. It was just unnecessarily long takes and totally extempore kind of a thing. I did my thing. This guy took three years to edit the film. Later, when I meet him, he says, “I don’t know how you did it. But the sound was just brilliant.” So, how do I do it? I did not do anything extraordinary for this project. I just did what I do. But if you don’t realize what I am doing when I am doing it, and it only comes as a… you know. It’s like what they say with the great painters. Van Gogh got his due only after he died. In my case, I get my due after I finish the film and the film is done and over with. They finish post and then somebody calls me and says the sound is really great. But while the project is happening, can you please allow that to permeate and give me a little more space to work? You say that sound is an integral part of filmmaking and cinema. So please give it that space, not because Vinod wants it. Q: Don’t you think that there is an emerging emphasis on sound recently? For example, after formats like Atmos came out, they have multiple channels and digital technology offers multiple channels of recording too. Don’t you think that this kind of emphasis gives sound designers, sound mixers and location sound recordists a bit of upliftment or more importance? V: See, Budhaditya, I look at it this way. For years we have had Dolby 5.1. That itself is two surround channels and three channels in the front, behind the screen and a subwoofer as well that takes care of really low frequency rumbles and stuff. What have we achieved with this in Indian cinema? Have we achieved anything really brilliant with this? I have failed to see it. Maybe I am too cynical. But I would like to think that I am being realistic and not cynical. I am being very real, very rational and not cynical. Let alone technically, I don’t think we have been able to utilise 5.1 sensibly and aesthetically in our cinema. Now what are we going to do with 64channels that is what Atmos is - sixty or eighty … Ten times more flexibility in sound. What are we going to achieve with it? See, the point is it’s not a thing in itself. To me, it’s not. Sound is not a thing in itself. If that was the case, please find Mr. Yo-Yo Ma, or somebody and take him
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to a studio and record a good album. Use the best microphones, the best techniques and create one of the best sounding albums of the great cellist. That would make me happy. But sound is not a thing in itself in cinema. It can’t serve its own purpose if the entire film itself - the story, the way it’s made, the way it’s shot and the way it’s designed, the imagery - doesn’t lend itself to a certain soundscape. I can’t come up with a soundscape in the dark. It is something else and the film is going somewhere else. People think sound is going to transform the film. That is a phrase I have heard quite often in Bombay. “Man, now that sound is going to transform the film.” “What the hell! Why didn’t you start transforming the film when you were shooting it? What were you doing then? You were hatching eggs? Were you hatching eggs when you wrote the screenplay? How can sound suddenly transform the film? It’s like you are trying to build a concrete road over a marshland. It’s very nice, but it’s going to sink in two years. So, whatever you have done in two months of your shoot, it’s going to make the whole thing sink. It’s not just the sound that’s going to go down. Your image, your camera, your steadycam and whatever cam and your lighting and all that shit and the art direction, your costume, your locations – Switzerland or whatever - everything is going to go down the ditch. That’s the problem. I feel it’s great, you know, advancement in technology is great. Dolby, Atmos, Auro 3-D, multi-channel surround, wave form synthesis based systems where you can actually let a sound travel across three hundred and sixty degrees in one axis as of now, smoothly without any jumps, without letting anything to imagination, physically you can hear the sound travel like you would when you are sitting in an open space and you hear a car pass by. There is a continuum in that. Dolby, Atmos and technology of this kind are trying to achieve that and they do achieve it a lot more than just five speakers. But what are we going to do with it? It should not become a spanner in the hands of a monkey. What is it going to do? The monkey is going to come and conk you on the head with it. The monkey does not know what a spanner does. That’s the problem. The solution to this problem doesn’t lie in the hands of the sound recordist or the sound guy. It lies in the hands of the filmmakers. Now, it doesn’t take rocket science to come to this conclusion. It doesn’t take much to understand what this technology can do. I mean, a filmmaker doesn’t need to be technically proficient to know the nitty-gritties of Dolby, Atoms or whatever, but does a filmmaker know how to utilize it? That’s the question. Q: But more and more films are shot on location, mostly on typical Indian locations. For example, Highway5 or The Lunchbox6. Indian locations are
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exposed more and more and people are not going to distant Switzerland to shoot. V: It’s probably easier to shoot in India than in New York or somewhere else. I am not saying it’s easer or tougher - it’s as difficult to shoot a film in New York or London as it is in Bombay or Delhi or whatever. Yes, there is an additional layer that is difficult to control. That is of the noise of the people honking and the traffic etc. People in London or NY don’t honk as much as they do here. So, sometimes my peers and friends in the sound community ask me, “How the hell do you manage it?” Well, exactly the way it needs to be managed. The reason why I wanted this interview to be held outside here and not in the air-conditioned space inside this café is that this is the world I am living in. I don’t live in that rarified atmosphere in there. Unfortunately, I have to deal with all these morons honking when they don’t need to. But if I were to shoot a scene, which has got three pages of dialogue here, my first question is, do we have to shoot it here? Does this three-page dialogue scene need to happen here? I want to look at it rationally. So, I ask the writer, the filmmaker, and the director, “Do we need to shoot this scene here? Can you justify why we need to shoot this scene here?” If he can and if its justifiable and we do need to shoot the scene here, then my next question is, “Can we have some control over the traffic?” It’s a production call. Most of the times the answer is a “No”. Sometimes the answer is yes and when it is, we have some control. But the next thing they want to do is that they want to introduce their own vehicles to create traffic. Then comes the coordination exercise between what’s happening at the background and the foreground. If dialogue is happening and we have a shot, which shows the background with traffic, how we are going to deal with that? It takes an effort to be able to do it and get good results. If I am told that nothing can happen and this is the way it is, just shoot. Well I have my ways and means to do it. There are compromises and limits, but my focus would be how intelligible is my dialogue. If on a particular word in a particular shot, there is a honk that makes that word unintelligible, I will want another take. Usually I don’t ask for takes. As it is with the camera department and with actors and other issues with coordination of the direction department, they anyway end up with five or six takes. So, I mentally edit the stuff and see. This is what I do at that moment, I edit the sound in my head and check out if I would be able to get the dialogue over a couple of takes or three takes and if there is consistency, if I feel that then I am okay. One other thing about the way films are shot - the design, the visual language. More and more films are shot with coverage. They call it coverage. Coverage basically means that you are shooting it in such a way that you are getting as much material as
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you can to take and treat them as building blocks in your edit room. Cut it together to physically create the scene. I would say this the most pathetic way of shooting anything except multi camera television probably. If you take the old television serial called the Bold and Beautiful7, you can pull out three episodes from any season and from that pull out three scenes and watch them, you’ll find that they all look pretty much the same. It’s not that they aren’t achieving something but that is the nature of the best. The way they shoot it - it looks fucking consistent. It is not a great thing to achieve. It is just fucking consistency. They shoot with big cameras and they shoot that typical intro to the scene with a master and they start cutting across shoulders and they shoot this stuff over and over again. Now if you going to apply this to a film shoot, you start with a master and start cutting to other shots and then you are going to run the whole scene in every shot, even in a close up, then what I would infer is that you have absolutely no confidence in your visual sense or your ability to previsualize the scene. You are covering your ass as well as covering the scene. Then the question comes up about multiple cameras. Fortunately so far I really have not needed to deal with a multiple camera shoot except for one, which was being shot by a famous Indian cameraman. So, I went and spoke to him and said “Sir, if you are going to shoot a wide shot and a close together, then it’s totally detrimental to me.” So he says “We have to save time, you know.” I said, “You are not saving time by shooting a wide and close together. If you shoot the wide and then you shoot two close ups together, you are saving time. There is fucking logic in that. I can stamp my feet on the ground and say yes there is logic in what I am saying. And there is absolutely no logic in what you are saying.” The point is who cares? You are not even thinking about sound when you are deciding to shoot multi-camera. Just recently I had a meeting with a guy who wanted to make his first film and the executive producer says, “Well, yes of course we are going to be shooting with more than one camera because it’s a children’s film and we don’t want to miss anything that the child does.” So, I said “I am sorry but your director probably is just barely capable of handling what one camera is doing and you are going to bring in a Canon 5D, 7D or something in the hands of another guy. The results of that camera are not going to be necessarily conducive to your film and even if they are, how are you going to decide? Who is going to check on that? You are unnecessarily going to constrict yourself by dividing your attention across two sources and you are going to waste time. Is your DoP going to light up for both cameras? NO. So you are going to take a fraction of the larger shot with this camera. How do you think that they are going to match? You are going to spend hours in post trying to match the two.
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You are going to use one Alexa or RED camera and a 5D. You are going to match it. All the people who say they can do it, yes, it can be done. Who is saying that it can’t be done? But look at the effort involved in getting it done! If you are talking low budget, what amount of money and time are you spending on post? Then comes the whole thing. When you are low budget, you can exploit.” You will get a guy who is going to do coloring for you for a block sum of money. If the color correction on that film should ideally have taken ten days, then you are going to make him work on it for twenty-two days. Obviously. Because that’s the time it takes. But you are not going to pay him for twenty-two days and you can get away with it. People do get away with it, and they feel very happy. They feel very proud of themselves. But they are not doing anything right. And what is the end result? With all the twenty-two days of color correction and stuff, it still shows up like a sour thumb. It’s not like you can shoot anything any way and just match it. Then if that’s the case then please go and work for MTV. Don’t try to make a film. I would tell you that all this technology era that we are well into - even this NAB there were 3 or 4 new cameras have been introduced. There is a CION camera from these guys, there is a new Blackmagic camera and RED has obviously come up with something or the other. There are cameras, which are available for a few lakhs of rupees, the way the 5D was first made available. There are other cameras that look bigger and more like movie cameras and less like the still cameras that are available now. People are going to buy them and somebody is going to rent them out. Things are going to become more approachable. But what you fail to realize is that as we get into the digital domain, we get into more uncertainty in terms of compatibility. There is so much confusion in terms of formats. People don’t know. Everybody is groping in the dark and they catch a little ray of light here and there and get out of the tunnel. It is almost like survival. It’s like when the holocaust happens and if you have just barely enough to survive. You have dug yourself deep into the ground and you have survived. You will want to find ways to survive and put some water and some food into your mouth when you come out somehow or the other. It’s like that. That’s not film making. What is this? So be it Atmos, some new technology, 4K or whatever, the content eventually has to be worthy of it. That is the problem. I don’t know if my friends here would say that I am wrong. That’s okay. I don’t think the content is worthy of it. I can go to the extent of saying that Hollywood content is not worthy of it the way things are going these days. Even the Hollywood content is not worthy of using these tools. They are not able to use these tools as much as they should.
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Q: To give examples of the Indian films using location sound or sync sound, let’s take Shanghai 8 , or Highway and so many other films that came out around that time. Let’s also take Lunchbox. By using sync sound they came out with very fantastic layers of ambient sound. It’s audible. So it’s evident that sync sound has opened up scope for playing around with layers and… V: If it’s being done, good. I am absolutely exhilarated to hear that it’s being done. If it’s being done well then why not? But then, I still think the main intention is the content. If that doesn’t drive the process, then no matter what you apply during the process, it’s not going to lift the content up and take it further higher. The nature of filmmaking lies in the content first. Show me a good story, a well-written story and a story that is going to be shot the right way. Please don’t try to tell me you want to do this film in thirty days when after reading the script it’s fucking evident that this film need 45 days of shoot. Then you are going to cram it all in the name of low budget. But they end up spending a lot of money on things, which do not matter eventually and wasting time. So many things happen. It is not just in the final result, it’s the way and the route that is taken to achieve it. That is also a contention. Most of the time this is an issue that I find with our filmmaking. It’s an issue with their filmmaking as well. I am in touch with some of the top sound-guys around the world and it’s not a cakewalk for them too. It’s not like we are the ones screwed with everything, like with loudness in cinema halls and loudness of the mix and they are having a good time. Absolutely not. We are dealing with overtly loud mixes in India. When I spoke to Randy Thom and he said, “Don’t think that the grass is greener out here. We have been dealing with the same darn thing.” The mixes in Hollywood are also getting louder and louder. The producers are making it go louder. The directors want to make it louder and the sound departments are complying with that. There are no norms. A very interesting movement is taking place in Europe. It’s called P Loud. You should check it out. Basically what they have done is, the EBU said “We can’t have this gross negligence in terms of sound levels across television channels. The moment a program is finished or there is a break, the commercials come up and they sound three times louder than the program. We can’t have this.” So, they have put the technology and rules and regulations in place across Europe to ensure that sound levels in any television channel remain consistent and under control. It’s like if I set the volume of my television at say 52/72 on a 100 to listen to something and suddenly in the middle of the program there is commercial break, I have to go down to 30 and then come back to 52/72. What the hell! They didn’t want it and they have managed to do that. To make that happen in
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cinema is a tall order. We have had so many discussions with the Dolby people here in India. They say, “We have prescribed certain loudness levels, but we can’t go up to the throat of the director and producer who want it to be louder than that.” We sometimes refuse to master certain mixes when it is really too loud. That is why we have a separate loudness level for trailers where loudness is given a little space on the higher side. But on the final mixes, we don’t. But then, how can we control at what level it’s going to be played in the theater? With digital cinema, remotely they can control in which cinema hall, for which show, which film is to be played. It’s possible now through the Internet. That technology is in place already. They have done all this to avoid piracy. Since the content now is also digital, that makes it easier for them. When they can control the content delivery, they can also control certain technical aspects of the content when it is delivered. These things could be put in place. Who knows what is in store? To answer your first question, I am genuinely happy if there is movement, if there is new space being discovered. I will still say that if the form and content of the film is not inspiring, then it’s not giving space to innovations in sound or better aesthetic content. Nothing is going to happen. You cannot give me a bad script and expect me to transform it with sound. That is a tall order and it is absurd that people think that way. People do think that way because first they start thinking that they have got a great script. The problem is there. They lose their objectivity very quickly. Once the script comes out and they start shooting it, the methodology, the style of work and the workplace defines the quality of the content in a big way. Eventually, if you have compromised your content with these big constraints then what are you going to do at the end of it? Then it comes to the sound department in post. Since we are the last leg of it, we are always constrained in terms of time. Now that's one thing in Hollywood, at least for some films like those of the Coen brothers, they keep due time for sound. And in big projects, sound is given a lot of time. They spent so much time in getting the sound for Gravity. 9 They went through all kinds of innovations. They used contact microphones. They went and recorded stuff from here and there and created a soundscape, which is worthy of mentioning. Simon Hayes, for example, worked on Les Miserables.10 He was given so much space to do his stuff that got him that Oscars. It was well earned. He went through great troubles to get that sound. Even though there are criticisms in terms of the quality of the sound and all that, obviously LAP microphone worth 300 or 400 dollars is not going to sound as good as condenser microphone worth a few thousand dollars. It's not just the cost but the size of the diaphragm and other technical differences, which make a big difference in
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the quality of the sound as well. That's all okay, but what he was able to achieve was because he had the full support of the director and the producer. If these two gentlemen support you, then the rest of the team has to support you even if they do not want to or they feel inconvenienced or whatever. Many times it just so happens that you have a really good situation for sound. It’s a nice quiet space, maybe in the middle of the night and that's why it's quiet. Everything is fine, but since camera department puts gels on lights and all the gels flutter since there is a breeze. Now, they could have got silent gels - the ones that don't make noise when they move. But when they ask for it, the production comes in and says that they do not have the budget for it. I say. “For heaven's sake! You're spending a decent amount of money in trying to do location sound for the film, if it's just about money.” I've got an absolutely conducive situation here and my sound is getting screwed because of the light gel. What do we do? We live with it. We struggle with it. I have spent a huge amount of time on the location trying to tape down that gel, have two people hold a cutter at the back and in the front trying to block the air that is moving that gel. Then the Chief AD starts getting irritated because time is going there and they have got to make the day as well. Now, why do they have to make the day? It’s because they have 60 days of shoot that they have compressed into a 45 days’ shoot. Eventually it all goes round and round and comes down to one thing. If you have a good content to shoot, a good script, a good story that itself is going to be inspiring to people first - a genuinely good story and not something that you think is good but is actually a piece of shit. It happens like that as well. A lot of people say this is great but it isn't. If you have a decent good story to tell, then how are you going to shoot it? Your definition of the workspace is so important. Even a good script can get demolished by a bad shoot - a shoot that is constrained for time, and whatever. Everybody says you can't have 100 days’ shoot because this is just a two-crore film. But who's asking for 100 days shoot? At least put in effort into the scheduling and create a sensible schedule. Please don't do it just because it has to be done. Due effort has to be put into that. If you have less money, you'll have to put triple the effort. Even though less money is going to translate into less time, you still have to make sure that in less money the opportunity to make a decent shoot has been created. Is that in my control? Nope. Is that in the control of the director? Yes. Is that in the control of the producer? Yes. Is that in the control of the DoP? Yes. Now this triumvirate, the three heads - the Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwar of filmmaking - they are the ones who define the workspace. Q: Not the sound guy?
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V: No. Q: Why? V: It's not because I wanted to be like that. But that is the way of the world. That is the way it is. Cinema has always been treated as a visual medium first. Q: But there are new formats that have been introduced. Multichannel sound is much more powerful in regards to the 2D visual. Why would the sound guys not get the due respect? V: If I had the answer to that question in the form of some kind of a little pill, I'd quietly go to all the directors and producers and DoPs and drop it into their cups of tea or coffee. But I don't. The fact is that sound is the most misunderstood and the least understood entity in filmmaking, even today, with all that which we think is happening which weren’t happening earlier. Like, we are doing location sync sound in India. That is great, everything is great. But where is the due respect for that? Where is the due value? That opens up a completely different chapter which is not technical or aesthetic, but political. It's absolutely and purely political. This is a completely different chapter. Why is it political? The politics of the workspace defines hierarchy - the hierarchy obviously being that what would sound do if there wasn't a visual? So, the visual comes in first. But the fact that you're treating the visual and sound separately is actually your shortcoming. You as a director or as a DoP are unable to understand that. Even if you want to understand, you're not giving it the space to look at it that way. That’s probably because you have been looking at it this way for so long that change seems impossible. Forget about people who have been at it, even people coming out of the film schools don't realize it. If you're asking a 55-year-old DoP who has been around for too long to change, he can’t and that's fine. But when you're asking a 22-year-old or a 24-year-old coming out of film school, they don't know it and they won't accept it. They are thinking of cinema as a visual medium from day one. Then what would you do? There is something seriously wrong with what is being taught at film schools. Who's teaching them? Q: If you think in terms of the history of Indian Cinema, one sound guy got the Oscar award but no cameraperson has even been considered for the award. So, the emphasis should be here now. V: No. No. Hang on. In the history of Indian Cinema one person got the Oscar - Bhanu Athaiya had already got an Oscar for costume. She's a great costume designer. My first feature film that I was talking about - Bhanu Athaiya was the costume designer on that film. I was too young to realize what I could have done. I was struggling just doing my thing alone at the
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time, because of which I couldn't interact with her at that level at which I would have wanted to. Yet I remember a few instances where she really helped me with her costume to be able to hide the mic properly and sensibly. None of her costume materials gave me an issue. Let's have another coffee or something. Q: Maybe another cold coffee. V: So, you know, what happens then is my problem in the hierarchy of the so-called senses, but forget about the senses. The hierarchy of the way the business is in the world over. It’s not only here - sound is not given the first thought. It is the… Okay. So you are saying that the guy from India went and won an Oscar. So? So what? Q: So… V: So what should that do? What should that have done? Q: It's the awareness – emergence of awareness in sound. V: Then please ask that guy who won the Oscar to come and create the awareness. Somebody needs to do the job, right? Q: By default it's coming… V: My dear friend, when the Shakyamuni was born, a few people got aware, but not the entire world. People were still killing and coveting each other. So, what are you thinking? Just because one Resul Pookutty won an Oscar from India doesn't make the entire filmmaking community in the country sit up and think "Oh fuck! We were not thinking about sound, and now we're going to think about sound and we are going to think about it deep. And really, really, really…” No! That's an event that took place and that's it. Right now it is a political struggle as well because the sound union came up with an ultimatum saying "Enough of this bullshit from the producers. We're going on strike on 18th of December if our demands are not met.” What were the demands? Proper sensible wages for sound people working in the industry - television and film. Money has to be paid on time. One-sided contracts are not to be made. I've been seeing a new clause that comes up in contracts nowadays, including one of mine. That producer refused to remove that clause from my contract. Then the union wrote a letter to the producers saying, "It does not matter if you keep this in a contract and whether Vinod has signed it or not. But if a point of time comes when there is a contention, please be aware of the fact that this clause is not legal. It's illegal." You cannot have a clause in a contract, which says that, "This contract cannot be contested by any union or guild." They’re basically saying that we will not listen to any union or guild and they're getting me to sign this. I'm an honorary and a life member of the
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sound union in India. I did not have to pay a fee to get the card. The union came and gave me this card in honor of my services to that union when I was not even a member. And I'm sitting here with a contract, which I want to sign because I've already invested time and effort into the project. I've also invested a huge chunk of money in getting some equipment for this project and for other things as well, you know. So, I was appalled. I said, “No, this can't happen.” Then a friend of mine, one of my juniors who worked with me, sent his contract saying, "Sir, Mr. Vinod, please read this and let me know if I need to be worried about anything. I just can't understand what all this bullshit means." I saw the exact same clause in his contract. Word to word the same! I said, “What the hell is happening here? All these people - the producers or the producer’s assistants or their legal counsel or whatever - have gone around exchanging notes and they're coming out with a clause like this!” It's incredible. It's happening in a country like this where there are so many films being made. There is a union, which is under a federation, and the producers are also a part of that federation. Every year, there is a rate card, which is never being followed. So, last December we said that either we follow the rate card or we'd be going on a strike. They asked us for time and have taken three months. The deadline, 31st of March, is gone. Now they would meet on the 21st of this month - a final meeting. If this meeting doesn't go through properly and sensibly for the sound community, then the entire federation will go on strike. This is on paper. The federation has said so. You can imagine what that means. The entire Film Federation is going on strike. It will come to a standstill in Bombay. That's the level at which we have to fight for our rights. I have to fight for my rights. I work on the projects and yet I don't get paid. What kind of a business is this? I would rather go and join a bank or something, you know! At least I know if I go into my job for 25 days a month, even at an elementary level, I will get my pay cheque at the end of the month. This industry of ours is worse than the unorganized labor industry in our country, which involves people working in the Dhabas, the assistant to a laundry guy, to a dhobi, some less than 17-yearold kids working in kitchens, those poor kids who come and shine our shoes for 10 bucks. I'm no different from them. What’s the use of my education, experience and everything? Nothing! Nothing stands in front of a producer who is belittling you by not paying you your dues. Just tell me, should I be going to be thinking about this? Or should I be thinking about sound and its aesthetics? I'm living a less than human life as a sound guy. Let's put it across to any sound guy in this country and let them say, "No, we are living a wonderful life!" Let just one person say it, and I go on record here, I will stop working as a sound person in this world, not just
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this industry. I will leave this profession! I go on record. The problem is that there is a general bad attitude that you can get away with anything. There is also a big chunk of the sound community who allowed them to get away with anything for years and decades. There are people who are still getting away with it because if I quote union rates for a job, there are people who quote less than union rates and the producer’s assistant is looking at the numbers only. He's not looking at hiring Vinod Subramanian, with this kind of experience and this kind of quality of work. All he wants is a guy who can fit the bill. Cost to Company. I've got X amount of money and have a guy who's willing to do it. That's it. Case closed. The guy goes and he doesn't even do an average job. He is way below average. By the time they realize that, they are already in post, and they're already dubbing the stuff because their job is to finish the film. What's the point in thinking about it at that point of time? "Oh! The guy I hired to do location sound for my film didn't do a good job." I did the sound design for a film that won the National award this year. One of them - one film won a national award, but that's not so important. I guess it was the only film in that language and so it obviously won the award. But when the film came to me, the quality of sound work from the location was so bad that I was just… The guy who did it is not necessarily a guy who just came out of the woodworks. He's been around a bit. I called them and asked "What the hell! Why is it so bad?" All they gave were some stupid excuses. It was an amazingly callous job. Somebody was totally callous in his attitude. Coupled with that, there was nobody on location including the Director - to check whether he was able to get good sound or not. Now, the director says, "Well, I trusted him." Yes, but you know what? One can write in Aesop's fable about you then! You get what I mean? Don't mess around with things like the monkey who pulls the wedge out of the piece of wood and gets killed because it gets stuck in between. Don’t mess around with things that don't concern you. It’s that kind of thing. I can write an Aesop's fable based on this director's statement that I thought he was doing a great job or I thought he was getting his sound. It was so bad that if there were two people like you and me standing and talking 5 feet apart - say, I was on one side of the car and you were on the other - there is one boom which doesn't even move between you and me. When it so far, what we normally do is we put it in the middle and pan to the left and right from one place because it is faster. If you physically try to move the boom 4 feet or 5 feet apart you will miss some words or trail onto some words. So please keep the boom in one place and turn the microphone towards the person who's talking. It's quicker, and at least you'll have a microphone on axis and you'll get
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something even though the microphone might be 3 feet away. Nothing! The mic was just on one side. The other side was just left. Whatever lapel microphones he had used were all overloaded. So I had a terrible experience, but I took it up. When people go and see the film, except for somebody who has got a keen ear, nobody is going to say "Oh! No, no, no. This is great. No, I did not feel any problem with sound" or they would say "Yeah, there was some problem, but it is okay." It was difficult because a lot of actors were not really actors, they were just people. Like, if I just catch this guy on the street and say, “I want to take a shot with you. Say this to that guy and then walk away.” Am I going to find that guy later? Otherwise you have to dub the whole film. There is no money for that. There is no time for that as well because everybody wants to send their films to Cannes. Everybody wants to send their films to Sundance. That’s the focus nowadays. From the outset of a meeting, the very first phone call itself, I'm sure you'll hear all my friends also say the same thing, they’ll say, "The thing is, by next month itself we have to send it to Cannes. So we need to ensure that we manage this." “What were you doing all this while?” I ask. I don't know. Ultimately, what are we talking about? We're talking about filmmaking with so many constraints and then we are talking about sound people who are hired at menial levels of wages. Take the case of boom operators. In India, the boom operators are paid at the level of spot boys. I have nothing against spot boys. But if a spot boy gets 1000 or 1200 Rupees a day, the boom operators are paid similar amount of money. The boom operators in the West are paid equivalent to the first AC. In India, the first AC could be getting Rs. 8000 a day, whereas the boom operator would be getting Rs. 2500 a day! The most important person on the set as far as sound is concerned is the boom operator. If we cannot get that mic in the right place at the right time, then no matter what I do forget about me, even the great sound guys like Simon Hayes or Jeff Hetchler or whoever else - nobody can record anything if the boom is not in the right place. That's how important it is. If the chief AC, the focus puller, doesn't pull the focus right, even big DoPs like Vittorio Storaro cannot do anything. But what we do in India is that we spend money on the focus pullers and camera crew, but we won't give a boom operator his due. So we're dealing with a lot of shit of this kind. It's not that we've got a cushioned life and so we can think about the aesthetics of sound. Q: From politics, I would like to come to a particular area I'm very much interested in: ambience. V: What about ambience? Q: Ambience as a layer. What do you think ambience does to cinema?
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V: That depends on the kind of film one is looking at. Look at the history of cinema and the way sound is being used by various masters. If you look at how Tarkovsky used sound and his atmospheres, you’ll find that he did different things in different films. Him and Artemyev created atmospheres in a film like Stalker.11 They were electronically generating atmospheres with music playing the role of ambience at times. So there was a juxtaposition of these kinds of elements to create a meaningful and sensitive soundscape. But if you look at his film Andrei Rublev 12 , it required the quietness of the atmosphere. When the Tartars came to invade, it required that flurry of activity associated with people on horses, brandishing swords and cutting people down, arrows being sent out of bows and spears being thrown and mayhem - he does that wherein that needs to be done. And all this was happening at that time in mono. There was no 5.1 surround, no Dolby. It was optical track, mono. Now, with all the technology that we have today, when we see these big Hollywood films I sometimes sit back and think that less is more actually. We have forgotten that adage “less is more”. Create meaning with less rather than inundate the audience with more. If we can do that with a few elements that are significant and poignant, then why throw 50 sound items at the audience? People have been doing it for ages. People have done great work. Look at Ben Burtt, and Walter Murch in Apocalypse Now.13 Walter Murch is an amazing example of a guy who transcends what he calls himself – a sound editor. In India, we have this concept of sound designers now. I've been a sound designer on a few projects. What do I do when it comes to sound design? I do what I can do first. Because if the visual imagery does not lend itself to abstract thought, if it's all real, then I have to go real. I can't go unreal, I can’t go surreal. I can’t let my imagination run a riot. But there are things that I have tried to do. Like in the film Baga Beach, the film that I was talking about regarding bad sound from location, I tried to do certain things in post.14 Baga Beach is a space that I haven't been to. That was an advantage of a certain sort because I could imagine what it would be like. I wanted to go there and record sound, but by the time we got down to starting the post, Goa was hit by the monsoons. So there was no way they could have recorded anything that was connected to the imagery of the time of year that it was shot in. It was shot in the non-monsoon parts of the year and had some music from the local Goan musicians, which again was not very well recorded. It was quite badly recorded, in fact. I had to fight with the director to keep that music only in the film, and no other composed music, unless it could be composed by the same person. Unfortunately, that person - an old man fell gravely ill and was at the hospital. So, that couldn't happen. Thus all I
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had were a few badly recorded tracks, which are used in the film. The other thing that I tried to create was the atmosphere at Baga Beach at night. Goa is replete with these rave parties and stuff happening here and there. So I imagined that if there is a rave or trance party happening within a kilometer which is going to reach my ears in the low frequency LF thump. It is assisted by the wind. The wind sometimes blows the sound my way and sometimes away and so the sound wafts in and out. I utilized that element quite extensively in the film. I haven't seen the final print. So I don't know how well it translates into the cinema. But as I said, this is an element that I want to use in certain scenes. The film is about child molestation and the abuse of children in Goa by certain foreigners and the locals don't get to know about it. Foreigners go and live in their houses there, and the children are sexually exploited and molested. There is a scene in which the father, the mother and the uncle are sitting with this boy in the kitchen of their house and trying to interrogate him in a nice way - trying to get him to say that a guest who is living with them has molested him. There, I fought with the director again. I said, “I'm going to use the sound of a trance or a rave party happening half a kilometer away and it should be heard. It should be felt. The audience should feel that. They shouldn't grope for it. It should be there but not prominently. It should come and go.” Q: The ambience? V: Yes, exactly. It's a part of that atmosphere. I want to make it that, even if it isn't. But I'm quite sure these rave parties can be heard kilometers away, and the wind carries it towards you and sometimes away. So the sound comes in and goes out at times, but you will hear it. I tried to use that as a kind of a contrapuntal element where there is something of really grave importance happening here and you can hear these fuckers somewhere partying. Almost like a juxtaposition of two completely…one blatantly Dionysian activity happening there. Not that I have anything against Dionysian activities, but representational. In the sense, that to me, represents the sum total of the culture there which allows even children to be exploited sexually. They are sexually free and they are doing what they want, but it is a big problem if they start including children in it. Here I have seen the boy being molested as an audience of the film. I've seen it. The boy is sitting there and is being questioned. He does not say anything, which is the way it is most of the times. Children who are sexually violated do not come up to their parents and tell them that this guy did this to me. So, I used it like that, as an element. I was just trying to give you an example. It is very simple, but I believe that it would have been effective. Of course, only the audience can tell. But whether the audience felt it or
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not, it is my sensibility that I’m looking at. Whether I'm able to express my sensibility in an honest way… Q: What if that particular atmosphere would not have been there? What would have happened to the interpretation of the film if that particular ambience layer would not be there? V: You mean, in general? Q: Hm. V: Then it becomes television. Furniture, not art. Whether it is realistic or whether it is representational and iconic or juxtapositional or contrapuntal or whatever, if the element is not used at all then… We don't live in a vacuum. Do we? There is sound around you all the time. You hear sound even in the world's quietest place. You are in a city and you will hear that. Even if you find yourself on the top of Mount Everest, you sit there and you will hear sound. You will hear the wind blowing. Something is missing if you take that out. Yes, at the same time, there is silent cinema. But silent cinema had its own ways of dealing with the fact that sound did not exist in physical ways, yes. In some way or the other to figure a method to deal with the absence till sound came up. It is old technology. Eventually it catches up. Then you get an opportunity to add sound to the image and a drastic change happens. It happens for the good and it happens for the bad. You know what happened when sound came in? A lot of silent era people lost their space because they couldn't deal with sound. They were actually considered important and big, but when sound came in they couldn't deal with it. A lot of people lost their jobs, livelihood or calling in life. But then, if sound hadn't come in, then it wouldn't have caused all the revolutions that it did. Starting from the beginning it did. It changed the face of cinema. Cinema actually became cinema after sound came in. Not to say… I love some of the silent cinemas… I haven't obviously seen all of it, but of what I've seen, Fritz Lang and you know, great films. But it's all about how they dealt with emotions and how they dealt with the lack of sound. In Murnau’s Sunrise15 there is a scene in which the husband takes the wife out on a boat. His intention is to kill her because he went to the city and found a woman from the city who fell in love with him. Now he's torn between that woman and his very pretty, but very demure, very soft and rustic wife, and in a fit of craziness he decides that this is what he has to do. He takes her out and somewhere she looks at him and she realizes this. She cries and pleads. And all this is happening without sound. What a great scene that is! In contrast, you take Fellini's Nights of Cabiria 16 in which Giulietta Masina is a prostitute and she expects that she's getting a new lease of life because one guy wants to get
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married to her. She sells all her belongings and leaves that house with great happiness. They go around here and there and finally he takes her to a cliff. He has only one intention - to push her off the cliff. Before that, he wants to get her purse with all the money. She realizes this. It's in his eyes and she reads it. She cries and says, “If this is what you want, take it.” She throws the purse and she completely loses all hope. There is dialogue there and this music when she throws the purse at him. He just picks up the purse and runs away and she's standing there alone at a cliff. It's almost like you expect that she's going to fall off or jump off the cliff after such a betrayal. “Nothing can save me. What am I going to live for?” But she turns and walks and finds her way out of that patch of forest and what does she find? She finds Fellini's band passing by, a marching band with a bunch of clowns and this and that activity. There is some pomp happening there. There is joy in the air and there is this woman - tears streaming down her face - walking along. What a brilliant way to deal it with sound. You probably can find this kind of a scene in ten more films. Eventually what is it? This thing is called atmosphere or ambience. If it needs to be used, it better have a valid reason to be there. More and more what we find is that if a film is not being shot to lend itself to a design with sound - then you're heavily constrained. The only thing you can do is you can sit down and say, "Okay the scene is - they are going down in a car in Bombay in this old city.” So you have to have that." I did a film called Delhi Belly.17 Dwarak Warrier and I did the sound design. Now Dwarak is a very experienced sound designer and a very good friend of mine. We have been colleagues. He left the business and now he's a Dolby representative because he couldn't take this bullshit. He got an opportunity to leave and he took it. But when he worked on this film, Harri asked me "Vinod, you have some kind of a plan in terms of the sound design for this film?" I said that I'm thinking about it and I did think about it for a whole week. I came back to him and said, “I have drawn a blank. I don't know.” The film wasn't shot to lend itself that way. All I could think of doing was to keep it absolutely silent, almost like it's in a rarefied space with no connect to the outside world, as long as we were inside that hotel room where all that activity takes place with the Russian guy and Vijay Raj going and torturing him. We will not hear any sounds from outside, even though it is not realistic. Even in a five-star hotel with a double glazed window, you hear sound - especially this kind of sound the sound of traffic honking from outside. It pierces through anything. These are bullets from which no steel armor can save you. You can triple glaze your window and you will still hear it. So my microphones don't show you that, but when you're out like in the middle of old Delhi city with all that chasing and running
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around we tried to include as much of real sound and the cacophony of that space. We did try to do certain things like bringing in isolated elements - bring them in and take them out. For example, if the car is passing through a narrow lane, some music was brought in as if it was playing somewhere. As it came closer to the source, you hear with the effect of the cars passing by it and then we took it out. We had to be careful because there would have been copyright issues if it had been recognizable. Now, that's another thing. You can't just go out and use any piece of music, which is good just like that. So, we tried doing things with that. And of course as soon as the guns started getting fired in that room basically the gunshots, we had issues there because no handgun can go through a brick wall and come out from the other side and break chandeliers and champagne glasses. It is not realistic. Q: Do you think that filmmakers, even the sound designers, are generally a bit reluctant to include the real ambience in the outdoor sequences? For example, I'm getting your voice here and I'm not using any filter. My intention is to get your voice. But in cinema, you need production people to close the street. Why? Isn't it realistic to include all the ambient sounds? V: You are right, but in a different way. There is a process involved. The process being keeping the primary focus on getting the dialogue clean when you are recording sound on a location. All other elements can be added later. So, you have the dialogue coming out of the center speaker on a surround system. The only two things that come out of the centre speaker are dialogues and Foley, like footsteps etc. Atmospheres and ambiences come out of the left, right and the surround speakers. Thus we want to keep things quiet when we record dialogue, so that we can add these separately and create a balance between the two and have some control over it. We need to have control. Otherwise it is going to interfere so much with the dialogue that they will not be intelligible. There is a danger of losing intelligibility. That's essentially why people go through the extent of muting out footsteps even. Like, we put carpets on the ground when people are walking, so that we don't get footsteps. Footsteps can be added later as part of the sound post. Anyway we're going to do Foley for the film. So that can be done. At times, some footsteps sound unique because of the space in which the person is walking. I remember working with Wong Kar Wai18 on a short film - he called it a film, so I will also call it a film. It was a commercial for Chivas Regal. In seven days of shoot, I only recorded one whisper of this girl. That was all I recorded. But I was there watching this gentleman work, and my God! He had something that I couldn't yet find in any Indian director that I have worked with. There could be. I hope there are. But the clarity with which he knows what he
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wants and how he achieves it! And when he achieves it you know that he has achieved it as well. If you closely look at what is happening, the difference between take 1, 2, 3 and take 4 where he says "Okay now we're moving on to the next shot," is palpably different. For that matter, I have worked with Wes Anderson on The Darjeeling Limited19, and in that film Wes would shoot take after take without even cutting the camera. I think we shot around 22,000 feet of film on one day. Just to give you an example of the way he used to shoot. Thousand foot rolls in the Panavision cameras just running. He too had a quest to get things better, and if one by one the elements were getting better, he would keep going till all the elements got better. There are some methods in his madness as well. So, Wong Kar Wai asked me to record footsteps in that film. I recorded a lot of footsteps. We were shooting in the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jaipur and there is this huge dome in this heritage hotel. We were shooting at night. So, the woman was walking on her heels in this huge domed area and the reflections and reverberations of that space make that whole thing sound different. It’d be very difficult to emulate that and get exactly what was there. Not that if I emulated Foley footsteps and created her reverberation sense to it, audiences would say, "No, this does not sound like it was recorded there." For heaven’s sake! Then I'm not good at what I'm doing. I could do that. But Wong Kar Wai wanted those footsteps to be recorded. So, we got both the actors. Chang Chen, his main actor in all his films, was there. The girl was China's leading supermodel that year or something. He made them walk 10 times up and down that space and we recorded that in different perspectives - walking up close to the mic, away from the mic, the mic following the footsteps up close, the mic following from a moderate distance - we did a lot of that. So, my point is that unless atmospheres and ambiences make real sense, they eventually end up becoming fillers to support the visual. Suppose the visual is like you said - that you're able to hear me and you're having all this ambient noise of traffic and people talking there and whatever and you are focused on what I'm saying. Would you still be able to focus if you are watching a film, and its content does not attract you, if it wasn’t magnetic to you? Right now, you are focusing on what I'm saying because it is important to you and your project. We’re talking about something that is of meaning to you and you want to know my point of view. That is why the focus is there. If it wasn’t this, would you not let your mind drift here and there and a few of my words go away like that to a corner? I'm still speaking, but your recording is not going to get me in the same way as your brain wants. You won’t cognize what I'm saying, you're hearing but you're not
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listening. Sounds going through your cochlea and into your brain so you can sense that I'm speaking but you're not listening to what I'm saying. Q: What is the reason that you decided to sit here and not inside? V: I wanted to sit here is because, one, I wanted to smoke. The second is that it is a lot more difficult to focus in a space like this. It is probably easier to focus over there, but it is also easier to drift when you're in there. Out here, I've certainly not been very precise in my answers, because even the topic is also not so that one can be very precise with answers, I guess, and I can say what I want to say in four sentences and be done with. Maybe I don't have that kind of clarity in my mind to be able to achieve that. It's an admixture of all this. Yet somehow, despite the fact that it is noisy out here, it's not that noisy that we cannot have a conversation sitting on this table. It’s the best of both worlds in a sense. Rather than sitting inside and feeling comfortable and therefore getting lost, I would rather be in a situation similar to one when I'm actually on location and working. There are mosquitoes here and I'm sweating, there is traffic and noise, and there are distractions like people coming. In the middle of all these, if I can come up with conducive sensible answers to your questions… Not that it is an answer that you're looking for. It’s rather an explanation or my take. It’s better if I'm able to sit on the side of a road, recording sound for a film one whole night or day, and I need to keep my concentration when I'm working. I should be able to keep the same level of concentration if I'm here talking about sound. Maybe that's why I said that this is better. Q: Is it not analogous to the transition happening in Indian cinema - from a very comfortable zone of clean sounds, people are coming outdoor and recording ambiences and recording location sounds more and more? V: It has also got to do with the nature of the content. If you actually look at it, not many films have been shot in absolutely realistic… I'm talking especially about Bollywood. When there was this thing called parallel cinema, almost all of them recorded sound on location. Mani Kaul did in all his films. He was a master and he had his ways, his own approach to sound, which is quite unique. Q: Did he do location sound? V: Yes he did. Q: But Mani Kaul's soundtrack sounds like everything is dubbed - there is no ambience at all. Take Duvidha, for example. V: That is a stylistic element of his. I have seen Duvidha20 a very long time ago, and I haven't seen it again. I would like to. I'm hoping that after he passed away NFDC is going to wake up and get their socks together
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and releases his films as proper DVDs. I don't know if that ever is going to happen. But it should. I would like to see it again. I saw a print of it at least 16 or 17 years ago. What I remember of that film now is that absolute desolation in that landscape. I remember the beginning of the film. The first scene of the film is this guy walking down the desert with his feet in the sand. Then you realize that he's pulling a rope, which is tied to a bucket that is inside a well and he has got to walk that far, which means the water is that deep - maybe 100 m deep. To access that water, he needs to send the bucket hundred metres down and let it get filled with water. Then he has to walk with that rope. That is a scene I remember well. Now, that is the space. The moment people say desert, people want to add the ambience. But he did not want that. He had a reason to not want it. If you were there and you asked why, he would have presented his exact reasons to you. From what I think, he did not want it probably because he felt that it was an element that wasn't required. Having said that - did you see Duvidha? Did you see a good print of it? Q: Yes, in DVD. V: Maybe you're not able to hear the ambience on that DVD because of the transfers. Q: Probably yes. But relatively speaking, his films have almost no ambience, even in films like The Idiot.21 V: I feel that more than a lack of sound knowledge, which I anyway wouldn't expect a person like Mani Kaul to be inflicted by, it was an aesthetic consideration for him. You look at the parallel cinema of that time. Almost all of them recorded sound on location. Q: Yes, for example Shyam Benegal. V: Shyam Benegal still does. Whenever he makes a film, he still does. But we're talking about Ketan, we're talking about all those people in that socalled parallel cinema movement. After a certain point, parallel cinema, as they say, died. There was no parallel cinema for a while, or maybe very little. The only cinema that you could see was Bollywood. If you look at the forms and content of Bollywood in the 80s, that is probably when parallel cinema was dwindling - post 80s or so into the 90s. Look at the films. Even films like Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan22 or Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Parinda23, all were supposedly realistic films in realistic conditions. It is only Kamal Hassan there instead of the real Nayakan, who might not be as good looking and handsome as Kamal Hassan, but Kamal does a very nice job in that doing whatever he does. He handles the melodrama and all that very nicely. In the music Ilaya Raja's brilliance is heard of course. The one thing that people don't realize, and I hope they do, is his ability to create
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background music for the film, which, to me, is greater than his songs in terms of its content, application, and musicality. When you have such a strong element like that, are you going to allow this thing called realism come in and start interfering? Possibly not. Maybe it was a conscious decision by Mani Ratnam and the others working on that film to not have realistic soundscape in the film. I don't know. But that could be a reason. It also could be that they did not know how to do it. But I'm probably not right to say that there were no sound people who knew how to record atmospheres and put them in the film. I think it is more of an aesthetic reason why it wasn't or very little of it was included. There is a certain nature to the best. At the same time, if you think about a film that was shot around the same time in Hollywood or in Europe, it's like a period piece. Nayakan reflected a time in the past. Their quest for authenticity and recreation is a lot more than ours because the sense in our film is defined and decided by the melodrama. In their film, it's not melodrama. They go by the classical idiom and essentially they have a very strong quest for authenticity. That is why everything looks very authentic in their period piece. (Firecrackers in the back) It did not affect me. Q: Since I have been in Europe, I have a much lower… V: Yes. You wouldn't hear something like that unless it is a particular day and there are going to be fireworks. I know. Sometimes I'm very scared of this - that as a sound guy, my sensibility and sensitivity to sound is at risk all the time. I'm being invaded. Q: I think we have to wrap up slowly because it is already 9:30. One thing is that earlier films had ambience in the centre. Taking the reference of a mono mix, as you said, Tarkovsky’s ambiences were kept in the centre creating an atmosphere even in a mono mixing of sound. But contemporary films are spreading the ambience more and more in the surround. What's the difference? V: The difference is in the way you hear it. You hear the sound spread around you, engulfing you in some way. Q: Yes, but how does it influence the perception in the audience’s end? V: It makes sense only if it is used in a meaningful way. Part of the whole problem is that we inundate our films with the need for realism. So we need it to be like that. Now that we've got a way to engulf the audience… For example, you are sitting here and you close your eyes and you can hear the sound all around you - from behind you, from the front from the left and the right. We have this glass wall here on this side, next to which we are sitting. Stuff is getting reflected from there as well. But even if you ignore that at least 180°, you've got sound coming and hitting your ears
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from behind you, from the front and from one side at least. If you turn to the side, your left ear and your right ear, if you close your eyes you can actually locate that the sources of sound is moving, traffic etc. So, it's a complex soundscape of various sounds and noises. If your film defines the need for being realistic and defines that to be a primary need, then you're stuck with this. You are not going to be able to do anything except try to emulate reality. But if your film is not that, if you're trying to separate the reality of the world in which you are seeing these actors and do something else, then comes the scope to add something else to it. Otherwise, no. Take Jean-Luc Godard for instance. How many times in his films have you seen somebody ask a question, and the other person starts explaining? You, as the audience, want to hear the explanation. And what does he do? He completely obliterates that by having a plane pass overhead. All you can see is the lips of this person who is giving the explanation to the question, moving, and the words are obliterated. Why does he do that? Because he thinks that explanation is not important to his audience. But the process of drawing the audience to sit up and say, "Now I'm going to get an explanation" and have something so completely… It can happen. Why not? Doesn’t it happen when you're on the phone? Look at how our sense of communication today is. You were searching for this place, and I made one call. It got cut off and I was not very happy with my explanation of how to get here because it got cut off suddenly. I wanted to call you back and complete that process. I kept trying and I couldn't get through to you. It said that this phone couldn't be reached right now. So all I could do was sit here and hope that you will find your way eventually, which you did. That whole process of me trying to explain the way to get here to you couldn't happen. We face this kind of truncation in life all the time. What Godard is doing is just actually… Q: Oh! V: You have run out of battery. I was wondering how long these batteries would last. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that every filmmaker needs to have an urge to understand what he wants to say deeper, and find the right kind of vehicle to take that to the audience in cinema and cinematic elements. Even if the image is showing a real situation, there is no hard and fast rule that every scene should have ambience and it should be realistic. But people take the easy way out. The moment they want to do something like that, they put music. Music is the biggest crutch. You know what Bresson has said about music? You have read Notes on the Cinematographer.24 I don't need to explain that to you. If you see a film like Pickpocket25, where does it bring in music? At times when you least expect it, at times when you most expect it. What kind of music? He's
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getting a Bach piece played at you. It is fucking powerful man! And what is the imagery? He has drawn the thing out. He's drawing it out. It is like shoving the thing through a small hole and drawing out a filament. He has cut down the fat from the flesh. It is like sushi meat with not a gram of fat in it. Then he suddenly hits you with this absolutely deep involving music from Bach. He does it! How does it do it? Why does he do it? He added that moment of time. He felt that the musical element, one of the elements of cinema, is apt for that moment. In how many of his films do you hear ambience? Even in the best prints of some of Bresson's films that I have seen in festivals. Not festivals in those packages that used to come. Q: That is because of optical recording. It couldn't add ambience. But you can add as much ambience as possible in digital recording. V: Exactly the same thing, which applies to the fact that now that you have all the space, are you going to utilize it in the right way? I have all the elements. I can now even take the sound of a honk under a dialogue and take it out without affecting the word. Does that mean that I have to subject myself to a noisy location? For this film that I worked on, I bought a super CMIT microphone from a German company called Schoeps. This is a digital shotgun microphone. What it does is if the mic is pointed at me, it reduces anything that is coming off axis by 15 dB. It is incredible. It is a game changer. But if the mic is not correctly pointed at me and is slightly away, even my voice goes off axis. It starts truncating my voice also, which you don't want. So it needs to be operated very carefully in the hands of a very fine boom operator. I used this mic extensively on the film that I just did. When this film came to me, we had a situation where the director said we are going to ratify locations only if you are okay with them. I said this is the first time a director is telling me this. Otherwise I go to a location scout and find that the locations are already decided. All I'm doing is just looking at it and gauging what kind of trouble I'm going to face. It is like an x-ray of my stomach that is going to tell me that I have an ulcer. There is no prognosis there. I cannot imagine anything. I'm only seeing the problems as they are. A lot of problems are going to come which I cannot see because they are not evident. Many a times this happened in my work, then what do I do? It started this way that we were going to go and look at locations. The film is set between 1975 and 1985, which meant that a lot of vehicular traffic needed to sound different and there shouldn't be any cellphones. But very quickly, that film transformed into yet another film. That important position that was given to sound suddenly just dwindled. Then it came down to a point where I got an SMS from the director saying, "Well they said to me that our sound guy is really great. So he will be able to manage it." What am I? A fucking magician or
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what? If you give me a location like this and say, “it is 1980 Bombay,” how am I going to take the sound of these bloody rickshaws? I can't. But I tried. So I got these microphones that reject all these off axis noise. I put them in the hands of the finest boom operator in India – Jahangir - my brother and my colleague for years. Between the two of us, we did what we could. Now, when it goes to the post, they are going to enjoy the fruits of my labor and my technical proficiency that made me go out and get this microphone. But as we went into the film, the compromises in the sound department grew. They only grow. They don't go backwards. I would be ecstatic the day that happens. I would almost be in a state of grace or something. Q: Well, I think we should stop here.
Notes 1
Duration: 2:04:52 and 00:08:06 Name abbreviations: Vinod Subramanian – V, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q 2 Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) 3 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 4 Bandit Queen (Shekhar Kapur 1994) 5 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 6 The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra 2013) 7 The Bold and the Beautiful (1987) is an American television soap opera created by William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell for CBS. 8 Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee 2012) 9 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) 10 Simon Hayes is the Oscar-wining sound mixer in Les Misérables (Tom Hooper 2012) 11 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky 1979) 12 Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky 1966) 13 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979) 14 Baga Beach (Laxmikant Shetgaonkar 2013) 15 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau 1927) 16 Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini 1957) 17 Delhi Belly (Abhinay Deo 2011) 18 Wong Kar-wai is an acclaimed Hong Kong film director with a distinctive style of poetic filmmaking. 19 The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson 2007) 20 Duvidha (Mani Kaul 1973) 21 Idiot (Mani Kaul 1992) 22 Nayakan (Mani Ratnam 1987) 23 Parinda (Vidhu Vinod Chopra 1989)
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Bresson, Robert (1977). Notes on the Cinematographer (transl. Jonathan Griffin). NY: Urizen Books. 25 Pickpocket (Robert Bresson 1959)
CHAPTER 22 P M SATHEESH1
Q: Did you start your career with sync sound after the film school? S: When I graduated, there was hardly any sync sound. I did not want to do anything, which was just going to be a reference and not be used in films. So, I did not really want to take the pilot recording route at all. I did not know anybody in Bombay in particular, and just one friend was doing some location sound for a documentary. He was a senior of mine. Apart from that, there was not much happening in terms of sync sound, particularly for fiction. There was probably an art film scenario, where a few directors would do it and they all had their chosen people. Otherwise, it was mostly pilot sound. I did not directly join sync sound because I couldn't get an opportunity to break in. So I joined a tiny studio where I could do independent work. It was various music, documentary postproduction, film work and stuff like that with a senior of mine called Niyogi. I did about five months of work there. By then, I got to know Bombay and people a bit more. Gradually I moved to sync sound, which was mainly for documentary. Television work was just emerging in that scale. So I thought that even if it is television, it is usable sound from the location. You are doing something that is going to be used, which I was very particular about. As usual, nobody encouraged. Nobody wanted to go around slinging the Nagra. It was considered really bad stuff. I think music recording was at the topmost and then, maybe mixing. Studio related sound was considered the happening thing and location sound with a Nagra and running around was the last in the hierarchy and the least fashionable. I had to really look for it and propagate it for feature films and fiction and really push for it. You keep waiting for very long periods of time and then you get one project, and then you don't know when the next one is coming. Maybe after six months. Still I was ready for it and pursued stuff. Hardly any equipment was available for sync sound. A few people like Anand Patwardhan and Shyam Benegal had some recorders and mixers that they owned personally, because they were among the very few who were doing serious location sound. So we had to build it up from nothing. Well, I would not say anything. There were a few glimpses like
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Vikram Joglekar, Niyogi and Dileep Subramaniam. They were doing foreign television documentary work. So I would assist them once in a while or they would send us for the flash and stuff like that. But that was mainly non-fiction. Then Dev Benegal's English, August 2 was getting recorded, and that was fully sync sound with non-linear Avid and stuff like that, which were just coming in. That's how it started. Then I got an opportunity in Pune itself with Mr. Nachiket Patwardhan. I don't know if you know him. He along with his wife makes so-called art films or serious comedies. They had a theatre background, so I started with that. I got this opportunity immediately after film school to do a feature film, where they were thinking about sync sound. So I convinced them that that is the way to go. Their performers were all having theatre background - they project really high - and it was in the middle of the old Pune city, where there's a lot of traffic and it is very noisy. So I somehow convinced and he went for it and we got hundred percent sound on location. It was really quite a lot of work and a lot of excitement. It was my first time and I did not want to fail. Controlling traffic on major streets and highways, we did a lot of such crazy things to make that a successful venture. We managed to do it well and it gave a lot of encouragement. There was no looking back after that. Q: Which year was that? S: That might have been in 93. Q: Quite unusual because sync sound is usually understood as the Post Lagaan case.3 S: That would be the mainstream. Lagaan would be the mainstream sync sound film. People would think that Lagaan was the first sync sound film, but that is nowhere near the fact. Even a feature film like English, August was completely sync sound. All of Shyam Benegal’s films were done in sync sound, but they were not mainstream films. I would say even some mainstream films were done before but never with stars. You never dared to do sync sound with stars because they control the show. They won't even turn up you know. It's like one and a half shift schedule and the superstar will walk in and say that he only has two hours to get a shot done. Then what sound control are you talking about? You can't even talk to the director or the producer saying that we have a problem with sound, “can we delay this? Can we wait for that?” It will be so funny to even ask for that. So, nobody dared to do mainstream with superstars, and Lagaan that way was the first. But sync sound has been there for quite a bit in all its glory before. We ourselves have been recording sync sound before that. I was doing another children's feature film, Pankaj Advani’s Sunday4, and
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that was in sync sound, except for dialogues because the camera was noisy. We literally used everything else from the location. Q: I have read one of your interviews, I think in Cinematography magazine, a long time ago, when I was in film school. You were speaking about sync sound. At that time we had long dialogues and discussions and debates about sync sound because we understood the coming of sync sound is evident. We were a bit reluctant, or trying to understand what it means. During this phase, your reviews on sync sound came up in one of those film school journals. Did you prefer to record the sync effects alongside the voice in the early days of sync sound? S: Yes, the thing is that postproduction was clearly in its elementary stage. The concept of postproduction was literally an editor laying tracks on a Steenbeck for maximum a week. A week is like the outer limit. The sound recordist would be sitting next to him and providing the material that was recorded on the location mostly. There was hardly any concept of a library, of people having a library of sound effects. The only sound effects library that I could think about are ones in which the only sound effects were like “dhish dhish”, and some crash and some glass falling. These typical sounds were there which would be on stripe in one studio. I used to work in one of those studios. My first day in Bombay at studio was doing music recording, next to which this well-known transfer room called Arithy transfer room. These transfer rooms are quite important because they have all these sounds either on Nagra or on stripe tape. From a tape they will transfer onto another tape however much you want. So when I walked in, I could only hear the sound of these punches for hours and hours. These guys were transferring it for various films. You take that 35mm stripe to the editor and they cut it and place it wherever. That is when I used to wonder, because coming from a film school background we hardly get to see these kinds of films but they exist, you know. So for hours you hear these “dhish dhish” sounds and only that. Maybe three or four variations, but imagine these transfers going on for hours. Imagine how many films must have been using that! It's quite shocking. Like that they would have a few effects and they would transfer it and charge a good fee for it. That is how they used to make money. That is the concept of the sound library. Most of the time you record sounds around the location, or when the artists are not shooting there, you go back there and record extra bits or to similar locations. If it is water related, you would go to Pashan Lake, everybody goes to Pashan Lake. This is how it used to be. Then you bring it over and give it to the editor and the editor places it in the few days of postproduction. That is nothing much, you know. Because of that you tend to record as much as possible on location and then stereo-
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recording crept in pretty soon. I mean, we all studied stereo, but in India sound was hugely ignored and nobody was interested in realistic sound and location sound. It was mainly this “dhish dhish” sound and dialogue and some Foley and some music. Music is the main, dialogue and music, and if there is any gap there would be some Foley, which was again for some serious crashes or breakings and things like that. Footsteps would be like very monophonic, left or right a few tips will be the same, and it would be just one tone. So, it was pretty bad. Foley guys were of course there and they were recording, but they never used perspectives and did very close miking. Tonality-wise it would all be the same and the mixing engineer would push. When there was nothing else, Foley was used and that is how it used to be. Even now, if you work with music directors, their concept of sound design is Foley. Till date, they would use Foley. For them, it is just dialogue, music and Foley. There is no other categorization of design or anything till today. So when I'm working with music directors, they keep asking "So Foley will come here? So Foley will come there? So, why don't you bounce the Foley sound and give it to me?" Then you tell them that Foley is like violin. For instance, it's just one aspect of your music. It used to be an entirely different scenario. A: At that time, music directors used to sit for the mix, no? S: Music work was pretty serious then because it was live. You just looked at the picture and orchestrate fully there, like big hall with hundreds of violins. It’s an elaborate setup that they were looking at. They didn't really need to sit with the mix as such, because there was nothing else. What else is there? When the dialogue comes in, the music has to go down and when the dialogue is not there the music has to be pushed in. So there is no need for them as such to be there. They had no paranoia that their music will go down because there was nothing else. That paranoia started coming in with sound design because then they realized that if they are not there, their music is going down. They are used to music full on, upfront, which even now is a battle. It is quite a battle to get rid of those notions and I don't think these notions would vanish that fast unless the directors change. Q: In those days, like in the film from 1993, you mostly worked with magnetic recording? Using Nagra with single channel or mono? S: Single channel or you hire a stereo Nagra when you want two tracks. You have to do a production mix, of course. You're mixing things down. Radio mics have just appeared. Q: Was it mostly on boom? S: Multiple booms. If at all you have a radio mic or maybe a coded lavelier mic, like in a wide shot it is hidden and wired, so artists can't be walking
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around. I remember we used to have radio mics and used to keep the receivers really close, the technology was just emerging so the transmitter and receiver had to be really close. Even if the artist turned a little bit, we used to go out of range. So you get a “kshhhh” kind of sound. But that was a standby operation mainly for wider shots. If the shot is really wide, you can't get any sound. So we used to do this. We always used to look down on the radio mics because its signal-to-noise ratio is not good, transmission techniques were not as advanced. Q: It is evident that there were limitations with magnetic recording primarily due to its signal to noise ratio and dynamic range. How did you manipulate with that? S: Actually there was no limitation at that time. The limitation is when you look at it from a present-day perspective. But at any stage, in which technologies evolved, at that particular point there is no limitation because that is all you have. Also you are there from another point of development. So it is like you're using the latest. Like now, you know, after one-year people could look down on the technology we are using currently. It is an ever-growing process. There was no such thing as limitation because cameras and everything was like that. The setup was such that it was oriented for the devices that are available at that time. This was with everything, not just sound. Non-linear editing hadn't started, so it was literally Steenbeck at that time. Q: Or may be even Moviewalla. S: No, by that time Steenbeck was there very much. So everything was limited in its own ways, if you look at it from present-day perspective. But for us, it was quite elaborate. Production mix is something that people do even now. Often people prefer to mix down boom mics onto one track and radio mics on to another. It’s still valid, it is not outdated. A: But still in India, when you're doing location sound you're getting all the separate mics and you are also editing in that terms. S: Right now, yes, of course the postproduction is like that. But when you are recording on location and you know that this has to be mixed down, you are taking care of that and that is the way. You are devising everything like that. So, let's say, you have three boom microphones. All you need to do when one boom is picking up a dialogue and the other booms are not in use is that they should not be relaxed and they should not be giving handling noise because three channels are going into one. Unnecessary handling of an unused boom can create a problem. Though the sound recordist is supposed to take those faders in, but suppose he fails, if they keep quiet, you're getting a clean sound on the boom. Then
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the only issue is radio mics. If you have multiple radio mics, and if one artist is not speaking, they will not be careful. They will be careless and they will hit here and there and that can get onto the mixed lapel channel. So in that kind of thing what you do is you don't worry about the boom mics, which one to open and which one to close. You leave that, the unimportant booms you keep it a little down but you don't fade out. You fade out the unwanted radio mics entirely, so that you only use radio mics of the artists who speak. If the corresponding artists’ sequences are there, only their mics you keep on. Then you are getting a clean track between the two. In fact, it is much easier in the edit. You don't have to select various things. You will know while editing itself if the sound is good or not and what needs to be dubbed. These days no editor can tell what needs to be dubbed, because it has to be after the sound editor steps in and in the sound postproduction somewhere in the late stage we would make a list of tracks to be dubbed. There could be tracks, which are hidden in the eight tracks which are good and which can be used, and that will be only gone during the dialogue editing states. So I would not call it any limitation as such, and also you don't have the habit of using so many radio mics because you don't have that many channels in the mixer. Anyway, it is all going to be mixed down. So you use it in a better way I would say. It is like when you started shooting on video or digital rather than on celluloid. On celluloid, you tend to plan your shot very well, thoroughly because you cannot afford to waste celluloid. But with video or digital you keep shooting, and that did not improve any quality, rather the quality deteriorated because you don't have to be responsible for it. So I wouldn't think that these were limitations. Even signal-to-noise ratio - because sound shifted from optical or photographic medium to a magnetic medium in a very early stage the signal-to-noise ratio that we get are actually very high. Of course it is not as much as the digital, but that is like 5 dB or 10 dB, which wouldn't make any sense really in terms of difference. Probably tape-to-tape generation loss, it adds a hiss, a 3 dB tape noise for every transfer. But considering the fact of quality, it really doesn’t count. In fact we are going back to that analog. If anybody gives the Nagra to record on location now, anyone will jump on because the way sound is perceived in the analog domain is far superior to digital. We realize that as we go forward. If you just hear a vinyl recording, with its dynamic range which is far less than magnetic medium, but the way you hear an analog sound like a voice for instance of those recordings, you will be stunned. We realize where we stand now. At our time, the changeover was happening and we did not value vinyl or magnetic as much because we looked forward to the digital and its clinical sound because we went for signal to
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noise ratio, no tape noise and there is no head alignment and all that. We were quite unaware that this is affecting our perceived hearing. After a few years I think, I was playing a vinyl recording in my studio. Though many musicians and many people used to say that analog had great quality and all, we were not really convinced. But when I heard a vinyl recording and an analog recording after a few years of hearing only digital, that is when I realized “Oh my god!” In olden times, valve radios and transistor radios were there. I remember very clearly even now how the valve radios sounded, the newsreaders and everything that sounded - it was like a dream. I haven't heard anything like that afterwards, ever. Even when I go to Chore Bazar these days and I see a valve radio, I get stuck over there because the sound is still in my head like the newsreaders on All India Radio broadcast and the music. So I wouldn't say it really mattered. Even the edge that we get in terms of signal-to-noise ratio in the digital domain, we hardly care about that. I don't really consider that anything precious. When it was the analog domain and things were getting distorted, the distortions were never like the digital distortions. Digital distortions are redundant, you cannot use it. But analog distortions would first color the sound and not render it redundant. Transience analog would take much nicely, much nicer than digital. In digital, when anything goes beyond the limits it becomes meaningless. But we were completely unaware of that and I don't think anything really limited us in any which way. Even looking back at it now, I would consider it the good old days rather than anything to be limited. Of course, tape noise was a bit of an issue, like when you keep transferring from one medium to another, which has to happen by the time you mix, but for that what we used to do was we always used good clean sound. For instance, somebody is providing us a source material from a consumer cassette deck, and then we would use it only if it is absolutely necessary, like Kishori Amonkar’s older recording, which cannot be replaced. 5 Otherwise we wouldn't use cassette purely because we know that the tape noise will add on to the program as we go. It was to avoid anything that had inherent noise. That was the way to go. Q: Yes. So the integration or revival of analog recordings can be parallel to the digital development. It is a kind of hybrid situation as of now, which is termed as Post Digital. But what I am interested to know is: even though there is a sense of glorification of analog recording, digital recording offers the separation of channels, multichannel recording and also the multichannel projection systems. Given those kinds of possibilities, will you not consider digital technology as something that offers more flexibility, and creativity?
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S: When technology develops, if you have noticed, it always gives you a better option as far as the logistics and the intermediate stages are concerned. Be it films or coloring or Pixelation, anything in that digital picture media - they don't want to carry the film everywhere. Even with the release prints - a person has to carry it to every theatre and that is the first thing they are told. They said, "Why don't you use digital projectors? You don't have to carry films. It is so easy. Maybe you can even download and show it in cinema halls." This was the first step for digital projection. At that particular point of time, if you really look at it, it was complete crap in terms of cinema projection versus digital projection. The only advantage was logistics and the intermediate stages were made easy. Not the final product and it never has been so. There will always be a catch. They will package it for you and you will find it attractive because you don't have to do this and that. All you need to do is compromise a little bit in the output. So, if you talk about digital's intermediate stages, of course there is nothing that can replace that and nothing in the analog medium could imagine that. That is how they crept in. So what we lost is, or what one is craving about in analog is, the way it sounded, which matters the most. In terms of you as a person who perceives the output, an audience, does it matter to you how they carried the film or the video or whether it was downloaded? It does not. All that matters to you is hearing, and that is being compromised and there is no doubt about that. But not the paths to attain that. They were all easy. Any new technology coming in is easy. Cameramen still crave for 35mm's contrast ratio in spite of DI and anything that you can manipulate; they still talk about that because they have tasted the blood. So it is like that. We have played around on Nagra, and then what are we getting satisfied with. If you really look at what we're getting satisfied with, it is a shame. In terms of the final quality we have compromised hugely. But for what? Flexibility and multi-tracks. Multi-tracks could have been in analog as well, and cross talks were last of the issues, you just need wider films and you had two inch films with 24 tracks for music recording with loud sounds next to each other. So it was all in place in analog by that time. My period was more of a transition thing. Without digital itself, whatever we're doing now has been achieved by analog on magnetic tape. I'm not talking about 35mm striped magnetic or full-court magnetic but tapes like half inch or quarter inch which were interlocked with any machine, be it video or film - just the way it is right now. It is linear that is all. But with n-number of tracks and you can even edit things. But I would say non-linear editing is much faster than anything linear, there is no doubt about that. Whether it is picture edit or sound, there is random access at any point of time to anything. So let us be aware
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of what it gives, but not justify the sound quality ultimately. We are human beings and we have senses and everything is analogous, and we perceive things in an analogous way. So it is our domain and we deviate to digital for convenience’s sake. Sometimes when people offer digital speakers, I wonder what is a digital speaker? What are we trying to do? Just fooling people around. The ear cannot hear digitally, unless we can access the brain directly and bypass our eardrums. A: Are you saying that we have completely deviated from the organic? S: I would say the way we were used to, the way we played around, the way we were trained, the way we studied and the way we looked up at, digital hasn't replaced the way we perceive sound. A: It is completely compromised. Is it? S: Certainly. There is no doubt about it. I mean it is approximation. When you had something real, you chose a technology, which is approximation of the real. Because it was convenient, it was easy… A: That is why people started decoding it on 96 kHz, trying to reduce the approximation. S: Yes, you try to get it closer and closer. But you have deviated from something real and something closest. Digital has other merits, like you can handle it any way you want. Now it is not just sound. Now technology about anything is getting into digital because it is one universal language, which means any intermediate stages or even gadgets… You can see, for instance, your laptop charger and your mobile charger, everything is USB now. That is a very good sign to depict anything. Earlier we used to have transformer-based or FET-based chargers. But now there is no such thing. If you have a USB on everything and it is a standard, then gadgets can be sold really cheap because there is no difference between anything. So the manufacturers who manufacture USB ports would manufacture in millions so that they can cut the cost down. When you make everything digital, it is one single language and it is so easy. So, all you do is an analog to digital converter for video, one for audio and one could be for a weighing scale and for pressure sensitive devices, like that anything you take. It is very easy. It is literally like globalization, it scares you as well. It standardizes everything. It basically doesn't have disparity between two. The variety is gone in various things. I'm not saying these varieties are absolutely needed, but that is what we were used to and that is what we crave for in everything, in human beings, in characters. It sees everybody wants cheaper gadgets, “so why not?” Now you have something like this. I remember in the olden times, when we were getting cassette recorders like Walkman, it was this professional Walkman, which is slightly bigger than
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this, and it was a great pleasure to use that for recordings instead of a Nagra. In discreet documentary situations, one would be using that and accordingly put pulse on one track and the information on the other track. That pulse would be later used to lock the sound to the camera. To that extent we had. Now when you talk about your recorder, you feel inferior about it because you know that a similar-sized gadget can produce top grade quality. It is no more the size. So how do you reduce the size? If you have one language across the platform, you can have a gadget, which is so tiny. Literally one chip would do everything about sound and another chip would do video. Even the developments that are happening in video in terms of digital is like what sound has gone through 20 years back, and it is just wiping things out. Q: Standardization was also not a problem with magnetic media because we had RCA connectors, which were standardized, then IEEE connectors… S: But different standards - now it is no more. Imagine you have a tape deck, and you know how many connectors are there behind it? They were all differently standardized. Starting with Nagra, it had a banana pin. Then it had RCA, and two shell and so many accessory connectors and XLR connectors, so various standards. Now they're trying to knock off all that with a serial bus! Q: At one point of time, by Wi-Fi and wireless technology, everything can be connected. All the digital systems in this room can be connected to USB, and they can make array like exchanging information and stuff. S: Wi-Fi is going to be the killer. It is going to take over everything. Every device is going to be wireless. It is all going to be Wi-Fi. Your entire building will have about a hundred search cameras controlled entirely by Wi-Fi, and nobody needs to go there. You don't need to wire, which is very easy. Every gadget or every tiny camera or sound device will have a Wi-Fi receptor and you can control it. Q: Everything will be in sync. S: Yes. It is fabulous, but you compromise. It is like the Internet era - it compressed everything. Why do we compress the sound? Sound on MP3? Everything got really reduced, access became more important than quality of sound. As I said, the logistics and convenience and the intermediate stage could all be dealt with very easily. So, we went for it. Now who cares? Even the poor quality MP3s that you play on iTunes, you think that is the quality. You have forgotten what you were using. A: If you talk like this, people will tell you that it is a very Brahmanical view.
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S: No, but we don't talk about that because we have experience and we know what is good and bad. The public does not know. They just take what they are fed. A: There are two aspects to this. This is a kind of centralization because there are so many connectors behind a tape deck. To know that thing, you have to have some kind of knowledge. Not that any common man can come and connect it and use it. Knowledge is very accessible also. S: It should be easily accessible even if you compromise the best of quality, which is the most crucial. Even then accessibility is the thing. For instance, you buy a high-end Nikon camera, which takes 10 MB still picture and what do you do? To upload you don't have that kind of speed and you don't want to clutter. You want to put it on Facebook and they don't want to deal with a 10 MB still image, so they will compress and in terms of look, if you don't magnify, it will look quite nice. It might be just 80 K. A: I used to click a lot of pictures with Vivitar and 35 MM… And then I bought a DSLR and now I'm clicking with this. Now I'm not able to click like the older times. My whole thing has changed. Now I'm clicking with these square-ish compositions, with Instagram on my mind. Every photograph is like Instagram edited on my mind and then I click it. Q: This particular aspect of ubiquity and pervasiveness – for this reason people consider digital so handy. S: Of course! Nobody is disputing that. It's like as he's saying - he's thinking about Instagram when he's composing a picture or taking a picture. These pictures are anyway in your mind and gone. Films that we used to admire remained in our mind for a long period of time. Now, the content is coming from everywhere. So you don't have time to keep anything in your head. Nothing surprises you beyond a few moments. That is not how we were all playing around and brought up, and our lives have not been like that. Okay, if you look at a certain kind of age, this generational issue - I'm not getting into that because I'm only talking about the senses that we have. We have achieved the kind of quality to nurture these senses and all I'm talking about is we are going far away from that. I'm not disputing anything else. When you said about the convenience of digital, of course, I did not dispute that at all. So, what is the priority for you? If the listening experience would be the most important for you, then I would hold onto what I was talking about. But if you want fancy projections and multiple projections and various controls with many things combined together, it is only possible in that kind of a medium. There is no doubt about that. Even kids born and brought up in a later era would
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only get to see what they are provided with and what is around. That is their domain and they don't know anything else. But we have gone through something else, and we know that exists and professionalism is always about getting the highest quality. I only talked about it because we are professionals and we're talking about the medium that we are in and we would always talk about the best quality that can be achieved. Q: Yes. A: I think it’s a very different kind of view. Q: But, I think, there is a chance of a mistake if we compare digital and analog all the time because analog and digital are different mediums. Digital has its own aesthetics. It might be cold. It might be less noisy; you can manage greater frequency range. It can be ubiquitous, or it can be pervasive. It has its own aesthetics like that. I think we did a mistake by mimicking or imitating analog from the very beginning, for example 24 kHz, 96 kHz and stuff like that - in camera, developments like 2K and 4K etc. A: I remember reading one of the interviews of Roger Deakins about Skyfall.6 He was asking why are we comparing 35mm film with Alexa. Q: Yes, it is a different realm. Either you choose analog or you choose digital. They are completely two different worlds. One does not need to imitate the other. S: That is not the point. The point is that you tasted the best in terms of perception that we are capable of. So when you're replacing that with something else, because it is a progression that is happening in terms of technological development, you always feel that you have not matched the quality of the final output of the analog domain. You have attained everything else in terms of speed, operational abilities and all that. But you have not attained the final output quality. So you always want to match up to that, because it is only then that this can really become an alternate by all means. Rather than looking at it as two mediums, if you look at technology development and its progression, of course analog is going to be replaced. It is moving forward. To be truthful to that aspect of moving forward, you can only move forward if you have made everything better. Here there is always a notch, which always holds you back saying, "Look I am here, analog. I produced better hundred years back. You have no match to that." It is on that level. Of course, the reality of things is that if I get a new software or a new hardware to get under the digital better, I'm always looking for that. It does not mean that I'm not working in the medium or anything like that. I wish we could achieve in digital the quality that we perceive in analog, in whatever way. You crave for that because that has
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the highest quality experience that you have had. I'm sure even when you're watching a digital projection, in these days it is probably better than analog maybe. But till then, you will always feel, “Oh! Those 35mm days or those 70mm days! The good old days.” So, I think that if something has triggered in your perception, something that you felt magical, it will always be knocking at your door if you haven't achieved that through other mediums. Q: One needs to have an experience of analog texture. If we primarily talk about quality I think we will talk about texture of analog recording. If one has an experience of analog recording only then can he or she compare it with digital recording. But the new generation is not at all exposed to analog medium. They have no experience apart from old recordings coming up in MP3. They have no experience of what analog recording sounded like. S: See, that is one; but let's leave this analog - digital discourse apart. If you look at the new generation itself, they have been using video cameras and sound recorders in the magnetic medium to the Internet era. In that era, they themselves have shifted from CDs to MP3s with higher compressions. It is not that they were not exposed to CDs. They themselves know the quality, but they have gotten used to it or they deliberately got used to it, because, as I said, it is handy. You don't need cassettes or various gadgets. Now everything is in one and you can download. People even use cheap mobiles with those tiny speakers, if you can call it a speaker, and they get used to hearing that and all they hear about the song is its melody. As long as the melodies are there in their head, no one is paying attention to details. It is not that the new generation is not exposed to things but everything is degrading in its quality. There is no doubt about that. You have material bombarding towards you from everywhere. There was a time when you asked a question to your teacher and they would answer. Now you just type the question and the answer will be there on the net - anything that you want. This was wonderful. Incredibly interesting. Anything will be answered. But now, when you search for something, your problem is how to limit because you are getting too many information, which you don't want. So, in an era like that, of course you're going to narrow things down. You're not thinking about the full-spectrum and details of things. Rather than paying attention to details, you're trying to narrow down and focus onto the thing that sticks out of anything, what is most important. Criteria in an ensemble - that is what you focus on. You have so many ensembles bombarding you, so you don't have time to pay attention to any detail. I like the melody of this, this is interesting and then there are 1000 other things. So I'll pick one out of it
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on the basis of that and not on the basis of any more detail. This is in every field. We're narrowing things down and we don't want to pay attention to details. That is where we are going. Because of the bulk that is bombarded to us. I would say it is because of that and not because of any awareness of… If you're looking for the highest quality of anything, let's say a picture which is going to be blown up you would still go for professional cameras which would have the best quality and also analogous quality as well, or when you convert to analog format what would stand up the best. You go for that and surprise the audience. Though it is getting marginalized, it is always there in any field. Just because everybody's doing it in a consumerist domain, it can work. But if you're building a bridge, for instance, and you need a crane, you will go for a solid crane that can really take the load. You're not going to compromise with something easy. This is a matter of something, which is about strength and longevity and so the parameters are fixed. There is no confusion about that. How'd you want to listen to if you are looking at your day-to-day listening? If you were not paying any attention to the details of what you're hearing it would be fine, any MP3 would do. But if you're a person who is interested in details, then you will choose a format that suits you, which has always been the case. That is why many people remained in vinyl or some format they liked. We look up at them and call them connoisseur. So let's not think that the mainstream rules the day and that is everything. That's the distinguishing point we have to make. This is the time of consumerism and things are to reach masses in the cheapest and easiest of ways. But that doesn't distinguish us from people who are interested in serious stuff or value their own receptors. Ultimately we have five senses and it can take certain bandwidths, and whether you want to feed information with that bandwidth that it is designed for or not. What satisfies you? Some people want that great pleasure of taking it in its bandwidth that is designed for rather than just fulfill something. Q: Coming back to cinema, when we come to recording materials for film, there are different elements like voice, effects and then ambience. When we come to the digital realm of contemporary films, we see that there are a lot of ambiences. The levels, the layers and the different elements in ambiences have incredibly increased. S: Are you talking about Indian cinema? Q: Yes, Indian cinema. Let's look at contemporary films, like say, Highway.7 The first part of the film has an immense amount of ambience in its surround setting. We will come later to the surround format, but probably just the recording format of digital technology. I will ask you whether you think this is right or not: digital recording technology allows
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for including more layers of locational ambience, which is one of the elements of the film, to be recorded in a much more specific and qualitative way. Do you think this is correct? S: Is it right to attribute that to digital format? Now that you have mentioned about Highway or films like that, Highway has ambience because there is no music. Music is not used in the conventional way that Bollywood films would use. You see so many ambiences for the first time in a mainstream film. Not because of its existence, but because of the nonexistence of music. In most of the films that we do, there is elaborate ambience, whether it is heard or not is the director's choice. When we design they all want ambience because there is no music composed till then. So they will make us work elaborately on the tiniest of atmospheric sounds. In the earlier days we meticulously worked on that with all sincerity, but now we don't. Now we know that nothing of this is going to exist. This is going to be overwritten by music. So, even when the director says that we need ambience here and there we make discretion, we do some job where we have some reference music above. We are given some reference music from stock – wherever there is reference music we won't work on ambience. We will just put some room or atmospheric tone and everywhere else we work elaborately so that our work is not wasted. So it is mainly because of the music. If you really look at some Turkish films or Iranian films there is no music, so there is elaborate atmosphere. That is when you realize the power of the content. It is not making you emote. The music will tell you to do this and do that before the sequence comes, like, “now get ready to cry” and “now be ready to be happy.” It is going to emote and tell you to do everything. All of a sudden you realize that without this it is so powerful, because everything is intrinsic and coming out of the sequence. Everything that is coming out of the film is designed to its surrounding. You need very elaborate work on its atmosphere. We talk about atmosphere as if it is a sound from outside. It is like when you shoot anything or conceive a shot; it's an audiovisual medium. So if you have a shot, you have to think about what was the shot existing in. It has to have an atmosphere. Often, while writing scripts that are never thought about. People are always thinking about activities and visual stuff, and not thinking about the atmosphere and the extent to which it can be played around with. I don't know if you have seen this Turkish film called Three Monkeys. The way atmosphere is playing; that is when I realized where we have reached. A: The filmmaker is Nuri Bilge Ceylan.8 He has done a lot of that... S: Yes. That is when you realize how much work in sound he has done at the scripting stage itself. Without that it cannot be achieved. It is not like
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after the film is shot you have the greatest of sound designers who you call in to elaborate things. You have a limitation. All you can do is fill a job for what has been done. But when you're scripting, this guy has conceptualized things and he has used anything that can be communicated through sound, like visuals. He has used these two mediums brilliantly and put something together. When you're watching you realize that there are various ways you can communicate things and why should it all be upfront and in your eyes, it doesn't have to be. So, your question was about the digital medium and how the format is contributing to the atmosphere. Atmosphere is actually a simple recording methodology. You need a stereo recording or 5.1 recording. I don't think it has any consequence to do with the digital or analog format. It is not like a complicated music recording scenario where you have 96 tracks or anything like that. Atmosphere recording is like you contemplate; you think, you spend time at one place. It’s literally like making a soup, which you cook for a long period of time. It is not about jugglery of things and stuff like that. It does not have the complexity of recording. Rather it has maturity rather than complexity in using and how to use it. So, I don't think the digital domain has anything to do with the atmosphere. It is entirely to do with the taste and if your director wants to use that. In technique, it is far less complex than anything else. Of course, if you have an eight-track digital recorder or a 5.1 microphone, it is probably easier to put into this recorder because the size is smaller. But I don't think that really counts because even the 5.1 microphone is analogous in nature. So it is not about the digital technology that has to do anything. Digital technology helps in terms of tons of tracks and stuff like that. In the atmosphere of things, it is not really got much to do with the number of tracks. Of course it will have a number of tracks, but not as complex as the rest of the elements that we are dealing with in sound. Q: But in the magnetic era or dubbing era so to speak, for example in 1960s to the late 1990s, we don't hear ambience at all in Indian cinema. Generally speaking, there is no ambience. S: As I was saying at one point of time that has to do entirely with what was Indian sound. If you look at the history of sound in Indian cinema, it is dialogue and music. Mixing engineers were the worst in the world. We were all told that they were seniors from your film school and I really looked down upon each one of them. They had no craft and they were mixing things that were so intolerably loud that you couldn’t even stand there. Forget about subtlety, you couldn’t even make out huge difference in things. They would mix to that level and their only skill was to push and pull. Push dialogue in and pull music out. Polyphony and all is entirely
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western and has nothing to do with Indian cinema, honestly speaking. We have forgotten what we have taken from the West and the best need not mean the Americans, it's mostly the Europeans and East Asians like Japanese and stuff like that. But it has nothing to do with our own. We never had that subtlety in listening except in classical music ensembles. We never had that history; we were always craving for everything up front and excessively expressed. Polyphony existed everywhere in India. You go to a market or a road and you will find so much of polyphonic sounds and gradation of things that we should have been the people who have come up with such elaborate schemes of sound. Rather, we see Westerners coming to India and we learn from them looking at Indian sound scenarios. I've seen in the 90s where Western sound recordists or musicians would come to India and listen and say "My God! This is fabulous. Everything coexists here. This is such a polyphonic ensemble." That is what they used to say, and that is when I started paying attention to it. It is ours but we never valued it. We never looked at it in that way. Our cinemas have never ever had that. We started having that because sound design started coming in India, and then we started putting multiple tracks with various things that were recorded separately and started creating an atmosphere. Particularly Dolby came up with surround so we had a track around and that is how it all started. I was into location sound and in the late 90s I realized that nobody even hears whatever we're recording on location. It is in the box and never used even by the editor. To use the sound that we record on location and to put that in cinema, we realized that remaining just a sound recordist on location is not going to do the job. Initially I thought that being a sound recordist on location and recording the real sound and giving it to the director would bring in interesting elements in sound, but it did not. Then we realized that this has to happen in the post-production stage, where somebody has to hear the sound I have recorded and somebody has to edit and use it. That is when I started setting up a sound studio, and mine was the first sound design studio. We started in 98. Then again, you're going through every detail, and that is when you put these sounds together and put it across to the directors who'd come for a week’s sound post-production. In one week you couldn’t do anything in sound post-production in those days. You needed at least a month or two. You couldn’t even ask for a month, which was a dream. So what you did is, in seven days you did one reel and showed it to them. This was being really bold and taking high-risks. You showed it to them and said that “this is sound design for reel one” and they would get stunned. Then we would explain that it took seven days for one reel. So we needed time, we needed a month. We said that money does not matter,
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they didn’t need to pay. My studio was designed for us to work and for us to live over there, including a shower and bathroom and everything. We wouldn't make any money, not even get the money that we put in. But at least there would be some interesting work in sound - that would be interesting atmosphere in sound, and various sound effects. So, we started playing around with all that and convinced the directors. This was alternative cinema and in alternative cinema it is easy for them to pick it up. Afterwards the mainstream started looking at it, because it wasn't designed for mainstream at all. The studio was not designed for mainstream and I never expected mainstream to come there. In literally two years’ time the mainstream sensed the difference and they started pouring in and it became a 2 and 1/2 months and sometimes three months of sound postproduction. We really worked hard and earned that. That's how atmosphere came in. Earlier, when there was a fight sequence in a street corner, they would normally put a typical music to pump it up. But when you put very elaborate soundscapes in these situations that are coming from surround speakers, the audience feels that they are literally in the street corner and everything is surrounding them. That experience stunned the directors and they accepted it. It is entirely to do with taste and how you make them buy this. It's literally like Gorbachev cleverly switching over from a communist era without bloodshed. It is literally like that, by hook or crook we have devised this. We would sense that we could push atmosphere to this director and he would buy it. A lot of clever stuff is devised consciously and very meticulously propagated by just a very few bunch of people. Everybody ridiculed us and said, "sound in Indian cinema? That is not going to happen." Everybody sounded sure. So many people told me, "That is not going to happen in the next two decades. I can guarantee you." It took only 2 to 3 years and we cracked it. In 10 years’ time there are sound design rooms literally mushrooming all over Bombay streets. It has no value now and it has now almost become a standard. Sound postproduction is huge and that brings in production value of the film, and it is everywhere. The transition has happened meticulously and very cleverly with very few of us doing that. I don't think anybody would remember this and we did not do it for us to be remembered. It just happened and we needed to sell the stuff to them. Our basics were all the films that we had seen from Europe and in the film school. We were the ones who literally pushed this down their throats. It did not evolve out of technology or anything. Of course, technology was part of it - non-linear machineries and Pro Tools were part of it, for us to afford these things. In the olden days, you were the guy if you had the equipment. It was not the man behind it - it was the equipment because equipment was very
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expensive. So, you begged and pleaded for money everywhere to have Pro Tools. That is how we raised it. Once you have the basic Pro Tools, you can do whatever you want. Otherwise you can't because you have to hire Pro Tools, and the meter is down and you have to cough up a huge amount of money. That isn’t commercially viable. So once we attained the machine and we were not thinking about moneymaking, and we have our own studio built and we're not paying rent, then nobody is there to ask us. We can do whatever we want. This is how it was designed and setup, thinking about the future. We propagated and propelled and made it by literally jumping into fire, very vigorously and boldly. There was no support from anybody and just passion. Now it is easy to look back and think about it. If you look at the history it has been cleverly given rather than it came out of filmmakers. Nobody paid any attention to it and it was really brutal. For anything interesting in sound in Indian cinema, there were no takers. We can talk about Satyajit Ray or a few filmmakers in Kerala like Aravindan9 and people like that. But you have to leave them apart because they were very few in number and their films would happen once in a blue moon. That couldn't really make the difference. The difference was made by changing the stuff in middle-of-the-road movies and then soon after, in mainstream cinema. In that context, I respect Nakul's Lagaan. We have been doing a lot of location sound work. I was doing and Resul was assisting me, and then he took over and took it forward quite a bit. I moved on to sound design and post-production. But the change that Nakul made is making a change in the mainstream with stars. That is a huge thing. And that brought in huge changes in the mainstream. Ultimately it is when things change in the mainstream that it becomes a norm. Q: Yes, absolutely. S: So that was Lagaan. Whatever hard work we were doing, we never believed in the mainstream. So we couldn't be really a part of it as such to our core. We were not and that was the difference. The mainstream changing to more atmospheric sounds is because of a very tiny group of us working deliberately, and now it has spread out and a lot of people do it not knowing the history of it or where it came from. A: As a personal question I want to ask, especially in regional films - I worked in Malayalam films - there it is as if without background music cinema does not have an independent existence. If you take out music, you cannot watch the film. We all studied Sculpting In Time 10 and good cinema, cinematic time, but now most of the time background music is used to compress the time. People should not feel the passing of time in
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cinema. This is a very contradictory thing. It is actually going against the basis of film. S: It is like fear and success. You want to tell a story and Indians could not tell a story without consuming 3 1/2 hours, and that is the history. A: It is the weakness of filmmaking that we are facing. You were talking about this Turkish experience of Three Monkeys 11 , and I've seen other movies. They can all tell a story without using music. But here we can't conceive a single scene without music. S: If you want to make the audience feel that they have spent this much time or not, and you fear your box office and various other parameters… It is not ethical to say that if you subtract the music, the film will not hold. That is because you are taking a design element out of the film. If the music wasn’t there, it would have been designed differently and then you would have been able to watch. A: In regional cinema they are not using sound only because of music. S: No, that is because it is an easy way out. A: It is like you can easily make somebody cry by using violin music. S: Yes, it is only that. But if you take the music out and work on sound, it will be watchable. Most of the times it is the insecurity of the director. From my experience, and what I'm sick of to an extent where I'm seriously thinking if it is worth continuing in this medium, is that every director is so excited when they come and you're giving them sound ideas. Once you're giving ideas they are so forthcoming. They will make you meticulously design such elaborate sound schemes that you’ll wonder, “My God, these directors exist. They are so brilliant!” And when it comes to the mixing room, they are shitting bricks. They want music everywhere and they have completely and shamelessly forgotten that they made us design such elaborate schemes. Out of the 96 tracks, they would say one track has that sound slightly coming, the sound of a motor coming from as far as a kilometer away. “I can still hear that and that has to go down by a few dBs.” To that extent they would talk. They would make you do such meticulous work and they would be overriding this entire thing with music so that nothing can be heard. They have no shame in making us to that. The same director in his next picture will do exactly the same, and you point out that you are going to put music over this and they would say, “no, that we will decide later” and most likely there won't be anything there. Then it becomes just them being clever and using you for their own convenience and not even for the craft, which is sad.
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A: Even my experience is the same for the last 2 or 3 years. It was emotionally very difficult to take it like that. It was the same thing. S: Then why did you put it? It is somebody's craft. It is meticulously crafted and it's not easy. A: It is a kind of cheating. They say that we have to work out this way, and you put all your energy into that and later once the BGM comes in, everything is like… S: It is their insecurity. The producer is also there and probably it is the last few days before the release is going to happen. So they think that it is just not going to work without the music. In India, traditionally it has always been musically oriented. Any form of storytelling is entirely music driven and that too very obvious and upfront stuff. Everybody’s into top melody and nobody is into harmony. We are so bad at harmony. If you really look at our classical or any other music tradition, we were way behind on harmony. That came from the West. The way we use harmony these days is entirely from the West. We were stunned by their harmony because they pay attention to very subtle details, which we don't. We have been like that. Q: Our music has been modal, meaning that it can be sung by one person only, and if it comes to multiple people singing at the same time, our understanding really falls apart. We do not have the concept of polyphony here. We don't have a good concept of harmony, in that sense. So when it comes to cinema, there is this upfront foreground music, which comes from this perspective. S: Yes. If you look at Ray's films, it had atmosphere everywhere. Aravindan's films are entirely atmospheric because there is not much else like music or anything. Most of the time, it is silent or dialogues. Bhuvan Shome, for instance, is entirely atmospheric.12 If at all the sound of wind and that sort is being put, it is atmospheric. You asked me about Highway and I'm talking about Bhuvan Shome. Where is the connection? It is in terms of utilization of sound. Two-track, I don't even think it’s two-track, it is more mono-track Nagra in Bhuvan Shome. And in Highway, purely in terms of atmosphere, because there is no other comparison. Have we achieved anything in terms of the brilliance or exuberance of atmosphere? No. It is not the technology. It is purely taste. Even with mono, I can absolutely create an elaborate atmosphere because creation of a stereo is all that makes a difference in any which way. So two mono-s nicely or cleverly put together in atmosphere, you can get stereophony sound.
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Q: But then, you don't have what is called off screen space. If you have 5.1 or 7.1 or Atmos you have in your hand off screen space. In stereo or mono you don't have that. S: The only difference is mono and stereo. There is no difference of 5.1 or 7.1 or 14.1. We're not going to perceive anything on that respect. So it is literally mono or stereo. That is why I said that to create a stereo for an atmospheric sound I can cleverly put together two mono sounds and get away with it. You can simulate a stereo situation in that very easily, if it is purely atmospheric. So by doing multiple layering of sounds on multiple tracks with mono tracks you can attain a lot of it. Or the maximum you need is a stereophonic sound. When you go with a 5.1 microphone to record atmosphere, what you're replacing is what you have been doing with monophonic or stereo sounds, but placing them meticulously in an envelope and getting them. That is being replaced - I wouldn't call it replaced, not at all in practice but theoretically, with 5.1 which has more elements from all sides and you can get an atmospheric surround feel with one single microphone. But in most of the cases it will not work because you want everything to be as per your desire. So, if I stand here and use a 5.1 microphone, I will have the traffic, the birds, and the fan. I have everything along with the 5.1 envelop. I don't want them like that. We don't want this fan and we don't want the traffic but we want the bird, of course, and we want the distant car horn. So, what I would rather do is, do a stereophonic sound of the atmosphere which we are talking in. It is where I have a bit more control as in I can face the microphone and avoid these fans and record that. Then I fill in with mono or stereophonic sounds of the birds or the traffic, which are recorded at different instances in the same room, which are better controlled. I would rather stitch that up than use a 5.1 microphone in an uncontrollable situation. This way I can get a better simulation. Anyway there is nothing natural in this because whether it is a 5.1 or surround that we are hearing, our senses are just two… As long as stereophony is taken care of, there is nothing more than that. Q: When the sound comes from behind or from a far corner to my ears… S: All of which are meticulously panned monophonic sounds. Even now when we're talking about 5.1 or 7.1 or even Dolby Atmos, they are all monophonic sounds panned and precisely put. So it is mostly monophonic sound in a stereo envelop. Or you create a 5.1 envelop with these elements. Q: If you have in your hands five channels instead of two or even instead of one, you have possibilities to pan them around so you can create an enveloping atmosphere…
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S: Yes. You could put two stereo tracks behind, two stereo tracks in front and pan mono tracks wherever. But again, this is not like really advanced technology or anything. It doesn't have to be a product of digital. This can all be achieved as long as you have a stereo recorder. Till now, it is used like that. How many people use a 5.1 microphone? As I said, in an uncontrollable situation it does not work. Even if you record something with a 5.1 microphone, you're going to pump in stereophonic and monophonic sounds in it to create that. Of course as an output format we have 5.1 and 7.1, and 5.1 outputs in film format that was brought in by digital. Dolby licensed space on film where they put digital sounds because only digital sounds were possible there. You didn't have space for analog tracks and a sound head to reproduce it. That is probably the contribution of digital in cinema, in films or in celluloid. Q: More space. S: An absent space in celluloid, the space between the sprockets is being used to reproduce digital sound. So embedding digital information there was a huge leap in sound. But these days everything is in digital format and you don't have films anymore. Hence putting a 5.1 is no big deal. You can even have analog sound if you want. Now it is free for all and is in a different format structure and it is not about 35mm as such. What I'm trying to say is that, this is not anything to do with the format as such, but as a format it is much easier to work on this. Nowadays if you want to isolate 64 tracks on a Dolby Atmos, it is possible. In film output format, 64 channels information encoding is purely digital. You cannot even think about that in analog because it will become bulky to incorporate. But in any case these developments has nothing much to do with the digital or analog overstress for these developments, these are conceptual developments. Formats have only made it easy for us to incorporate. It is like pure science research. They utilize the maximum human perception and surround sounds coming from surround will make you feel that you are standing in that space, which is nothing much to do with technology. Q: Yes, I agree. But I would like to ask you whether this conceptual development has some sort of a historical thread or tradition? S: Isn't this the natural way to go? Like 3-D, we have two eyes and threedimensional is derived and now where do we go? You have to sell. First of all, these are not artistic requirements. They are entirely commercial stuff. I hate the new 3-Ds that are coming in. Everybody wants 3-D. 3-D on TV, 3-D on… It is such a silly stuff. It makes everything small and you can't even enjoy the story. Unless it is a gimmicky film where there is a lot of action and special effects happening, it is fun to watch it. Apart from that,
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it comes straight in the way of your storytelling. But the new kids have been brought up around this. They want 3-D or if you say 4-D or 5-D they will jump into it. They wouldn't even know what is what. This is where life is changing, culture is changing and everything else is changing. What will you tell children with Facebook and the Internet at their fingertips? They're not even going to respect teachers the way we respected our teachers because the teachers were the wealth of knowledge for us and for these kids it would be Wikipedia. Constantly changing games! You want something new every second day. It is a different trip in life. It is going to be like that and it is not going to be our way. It doesn't have to be. We can just be happy about the quality of life that we lived and consider to be good. It is something else for somebody else. At least we have the ability to see and understand the era that we, and our previous generations have passed through. We look at a piece of furniture that is 200 years old and we say “Wow, what a craft!” We appreciate it and think about what kind of life it would have been in those eras, how wonderful that must have been. The newer generation wouldn't be able to appreciate what that was. They wouldn't even find anything interesting in it rather they would think how primitive it was. So, it is a different thing and perception. We see it, find it interesting and value it. A: You are saying that the aesthetic changes like using ambience are purely because of the tastes of the directors and they have nothing to do with the digital technology. S: Absolutely not. If you look at European cinema of the last hundred years, they have been fully playing with atmosphere. What are we talking about? There is nothing new. We’re talking about Highway! It is a shame because hundred years later we have one film that did not use so much of music that we crave for. If you look at Iranian films, which now every Tom Dick and Harry is talking about, what are they? The entire cinema is that. We ourselves don't realize the grounds on which we stand. Like our democracy and everything else in this country, mediocrity has set the rules. Even intelligentsia is drenched in that. Nobody is able to distinguish, and have forgotten where they stand or where the world is standing. Often the frustration is that we pretend that these are new developments that are happening here. But these are age-old stuff that is wearing out everywhere else and we are struggling to put that across. In a very whimsical way we're trying to put it across and even that is not reaching. When one film reaches, we clap. That is where we are. Bhuvan Shome, for instance, is etched in your head once you have seen it, and it is the entire landscape and the soundtrack that is in your head. When was that? In the 70s? Q: Yes, 69. It was in 1969.
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S: Yes. And we've forgotten. We think that we have a Highway. That is where we stand. I'm not old enough to… I mean Bhuvan Shome is not my generation. I wasn't even born then, but things are changing sporadically and we're jumping a lot of stages that elsewhere in the world technology has taken people through certain graph and certain routes. We have jumped all that and it does not mean that we have experienced or improved anything. A: By not going through we have lost that maturity. S: Exactly. So we jumped in straight into the New Wave and the Facebook stage, which has no value for anything. Also, the format doesn't allow you for anything in detail. So, what would you do? People think that they get to interact and read poetry and stories, but we don't realize that this is a tiny group of people, your friend circle and it is their mediocrity that is being propagated. You’re missing out on the largest chunk of that which is happening around the world. Without realizing, you're going smaller and smaller and smaller and think that this is your niche world. That does not make me stay away from it. I don't have to stay away from it as long as I discriminate it. We place it where it should be and use its strength. If we want to propagate something easily to people, earlier it was not possible. Now you just need to put it in there, and a few thousand people would see it and propagate it. It is like a chain reaction and it is great for that. Q: Personally speaking, I am inspired by the recent developments. I was really fed up with the ways in which sound was being designed earlier in Indian cinema. But the inspiration comes from the fact that in recent films - maybe we could here think of LSD13 and Shanghai14 also - these two films really triggered that inspiration. These new films in particular are giving attention and respect to primary elements that were never given attention to, such as locative ambience. So my question would be although we spoke a bit about it: what is your philosophy about ambience in cinema? S: As I said before, if there is a shot, there will be sound. That is the sound we're talking about. Dialogue is an element of storytelling but for any shot or video to exist, because we don't live in vacuum or outer space, there will be something that is always there. It is primordial to play around with that because that is the base and that is existence. The films you're talking about and in all new Indian films, directors are trying more and more not to use music. That is happening now, and it is going that way. They have used it in such excess that even heart thumping music can't do a thing in the audience because it is saturated. If you want some interesting effect on people, it has to be sound and music. Just music won't work and that they
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know. Now it has to be sound and music because they are afraid that just sound will not work. They don't want to explore that much. So, at least sound with music or sound with musical elements - this might be sound design and not music as such, but musical elements - that they would allow. You can create impact. People are thinking in terms of impact because if you can bring in an impact, then it is a market success. These films, content wise and approach wise, are great films, really bringing in interesting ways of looking at things and ultimately they are addressing day-to-day life more than glamour and glitter. It is getting into the dirty areas of life that we have been living. That is our story, and they have started saying real stories with real people and stuff like that. So ambience is going to invariably be a part of it, if you want that kind of feel, look and treatment. You can't hide away from that. If you pump up only music from the beginning to the end, it is not going to work. The very fact that it is working is because it is dealing with the subjects in a different and very ordinary way. To be honest, it is really a very ordinary way. You're playing around with that and making that more exotic and saleable because that has not been the history for us. So anything new that you can propagate and there is going to be takers for that. It is great that all this is happening. If you ask what is atmosphere to me, I thrive in it. That is my playground, my pedestal. With respect to that, I play around with anything else. For me, the ugliest noise and everything are part of atmosphere and I play around with that. My design is primarily with that. The pedestal of my design is atmosphere. From that I play around with various things. It has been most crucial to me ever since I got into sound design in 1998 and since then anything I'm doing is primarily playing around with atmosphere in various ways and deriving elements of design from the atmosphere and going back to the atmosphere and deriving transitions, which are very crucial elements of sound design, from within rather than from outside, as elaborately as possible. Q: Personally, I'm nurturing this question: What does ambience serve to cinema? Apart from providing an atmospheric sense, psychologically speaking - from the point of view of perception - what does the presence of ambience in cinematic sound provide for the audience or for the practitioner himself or herself? S: Functionally, the most important thing is that it brings in the cinematic realism that is intended in that sequence in the cinema. To me, it is more of a pedestal. If you ask me in generic terms, that is where I start to design my elements and go back to. But there would be loads of atmospheric related design. So the design - sometimes it would be with Foley sounds, sometime with dialogues, sometimes with the atmosphere, sometimes with
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musical sounds or with special effects sounds. What matters to me is what is effective at that moment, in that particular sequence. Depending on the sequence, the importance of atmosphere in the design would be derived. But for me, unlike most of the industry when they would just put one single continuous track for atmosphere, every atmosphere is special and for every shot we would be creating atmosphere. We will never cut and paste atmosphere and get away with it because they're all sounding generic. It doesn't work like that for me or any editor in my studio. The day we hire somebody from outside, because we have so much to do, we see how they work and they will just take a big chunk and just slap it and that is atmosphere, they're just fillers. It is not like that at all for me. The mood of the film and the characters’ demeanor is directly talking to the atmosphere. These days, one of the biggest challenges in sound design for me is crafting the Walla sound. Do you know what Walla sound is? It is a Hollywood terminology. It is basically in a shot if you have people around who are not important - just extras or peripheral things or suggestion of peripheral things, like in a teashop, you’re a tea maker - it is a tight shot of you but the things and the human voices that are happening around, the people around and what they talk and how that is placed and not interfering with the dialogues of the story. That would give a strong presence of what is happening around. It is not just the calm frozen moment, it can be dynamic. It can be dynamic to dictate the story and the mode of the story in the frame. For me, the challenge is to get these guys to the dubbing room and make them talk. Often it would be deliberately scripted then and there and then spoil it and give it perspective and place it in such a way that it is not distracting the story. Some words would stand out and suggest what kind of an atmospheric it is and the nature in which people speak. This is the biggest challenge for me now. Traditionally in India, what people do is just go to some place like a restaurant and pick up some voice and just put it over there. Often when you're mixing, the director will find this and say, "Why is this? People talking. I don't want that. Bring it down or take it off." They will subdue it. But my task is to record it and cleverly manipulate it. Place it and destroy it and push it back nicely. It would really bring in some interesting moments in the film and make it much more dynamic. That is an area where I work in. Q: Is it not possible that you can record it directly from the location where the camera also records the visual elements? S: No. It is not a documentary situation. As I said, you are a tea maker and I have a close-up of you, there is nobody in the background. They are not even called in that particular day. If you want to tell them what to speak and all that, people would think you are nuts. The director would think you
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are nuts. Time is money here and you're talking about a background orchestration of sound. What is needed itself is not being picked up properly. A: Most of the time it does not work. S: It is like you are talking and I'm not even allowed or given time to record your talk by controlling everything else. Forget about all that, it is never going to happen. Not only that, if you're not recording in a studio, what you can do is record in similar spaces elsewhere later and then manipulate the stuff. But I must tell you: in feature films everybody likes it when it is entirely controlled. Like everything that is in there is planted. Ultimately people like it that way because it is put together as per somebody's imagination. So you want it to be orchestrated in the perfect way that you wanted it to be. I was recording for Mira Nair’s Reluctant Fundamentalist15 and because she has been working in New York they have a habit of recording and budgeting for wallas. So, for the first time we could really ask for money. Otherwise, if I tell Indian producers that I want to record these peripheral voices, they will say go and record anywhere. Nobody is going to give a budget and call all these extras to a studio to record and an assistant director or somebody sit in and script it to say this and that. So I was lucky to… A: But don't we have mostly these crowd dubs here? S: Those crowd dubs are like when you see 20 people shouting "Inquilab Zindabad". It has nothing to do with what we're talking about now. Like, if we're talking here and let's say my door was opened and somebody is talking in the corridor. Or in that building somebody is shouting or two people are talking two buildings away on the terrace, which is in the shot, and I want to simulate that talk between the two, while a conversation is happening in here. I will only hear certain edges of the conversation and it has to be nicely crafted and a lot of thinking has to go into it. A: In Hollywood films you often hear it, like in hallways… S: Of course you will hear it in any other industry. Not only in Hollywood, in any other industry people will pay attention to that and take effort and spend money to do that nicely and make it sound interesting. We would watch these films and always wonder why it is never there in our films. It is because we don't take care. It is as simple as that. Q: I remember in Jacques Tati's films like Playtime16 and other films, the ambience is much higher in volume than that of the voices. Sometimes you don't even get any information from the dialogue but you get more information from the ambience itself. The ambience not only gives idea about the narrative, but also provides information about the places and
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helps you navigating through the space and carry a thread of the narrative, because you get to recognize the places. The dialogue doesn’t carry that amount of information compared to the ambience. S: Depending on the dialogues. Q: Yes, depending on the dialogues. Sometimes the dialogues are not even audible. They are like murmurs. S: That is true. Q: In Indian cinemas, there has not been any experimentation in that sense with dialogue. Dialogue has been always upfront. There is a primacy of dialogue in Indian films in general. S: That is because our culture has been spoon-feeding. As you said, in spite of taking all this care and dialogue being the highest-level sound, producers and directors would still think 10 times if it is really communicating: "I think the atmosphere of the sound effect there is coming in the way." Even if dialogue is like 99% or 95% and the other sounds that you're putting might be 20%, even then they would be thinking. But that is changing in terms of music at least. When you're mixing music and sound in many of the new Indian films, you don't take the music down the way we used to do conventionally, dialogue and music push and pull. That is gone. Now, music is there and you have to make an effort to understand the dialogue. Of course, the atmosphere is not pushed up so much to, say, the way you were talking about. But in films like Paris, Texas you can have heavy wind and the artist is murmuring something and whatever few words you're able to hear out of that would be enough for you to communicate what is being presented. Those films like Highway could do, if they wanted. A: When you spoke about Highway, I felt that there are many films before Highway that were made using a lot of ambience. In fact, I wanted more of ambience in Highway and I wanted the geography that they were going through. S: That could have been a feast. You rarely get an opportunity like that. You need time as well at different geographies. I was doing an animation film in which music wasn't heavily used. It is called Arjun - the Warrior Prince17 and it is happening in various places in the country and we could put atmosphere from different places. We painstakingly went and recorded at different places and utilized that. But there was much more opportunity in this film and was not used that much. A: And the dialogues could have been inaudible sometimes - like in the truck sequence. But still it was upfront very conventionally.
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S: It is the spoon-feeding thing actually. The idea is not to bring the dialogue level as such per se for the gimmick of it. Sometimes it is not necessary that you pump in everything. Even when you give verbal abuse, I have noticed sometimes, it is so obvious even if the abuse is not there, from the way the guys behaving it is obvious what he's saying. I notice these things because when films are sent for censors and they say bad words are to be chopped off, otherwise they will give an A certificate and it comes back to us to beep it or whatever. I ask the director “What is the need to beep? Let it not be there. Nothing is going to be lost. Everybody's going to get what the guy has said.” Even if he's just hummed it, it is obvious what he is saying. But somehow it is getting hammered in. Audio as a medium to communicate in films is heavily underused in our country. That you see, even people like us who are in sound, when we see these Turkish films and all that we realize how much of it can be done in the scripting level. Then it's hammered. We have to do that, we have to follow that. The guy is showing a house near a railway track. You never get to see the railway track. But there is a window shot always. So you hear the sound of the train and everything is worked around that. Finally his wife is jumping onto the track from the house and killing herself. But in physicality there is no track over there. It is entirely conceptual. A: Just two or three shots where that guy is walking on the tracks… S: But all that is separately shot. You never show the house and the tracks in the same shot. So, it is conceptual and if you have put it in the script then it has to be designed accordingly. There is no deviation from that. Of course this is being taught to us by all the great masters that we have studied - the French new wave and European and Japanese films. But over a period of working in the industry, you have forgotten all of this and you have lost your ground and you are in some other reality and when you keep watching these films that are happening now, you realize “Shit! Where have you reached?” Even during workshops that I take at FTII and SRFTI, students ask me about the scripting stage and how sound should be incorporated into it. I've been getting sick of this question of the involvement of sound at an early stage. I tell them “Look, this is all talks. It is all concepts. But finally a script is written, a film is shot and cut, and a locked picture is given to you. It has nothing to do even with the script in terms of sound.” So in terms of sound, unless you get a locked edit, you need to know what shot is coming before and after - to that extent your design is crucial. That you don't know unless it is locked because the film has gone way away from what is being talked about. So what is the point in discussing these things in the scripting stage? Forget about scripting stage, even after it is shot, I cannot discuss sound design with the director
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because he does not know what is coming. So I tell them, “What is the point? You don't concentrate on those things. Rather concentrate on postproduction, or post locking.” This is what I have been telling students. Then I see these films and pity myself, thinking, “Where have we reached?” This is what I need to teach students of cinema, if this is where it is going. The degradation and things have happened to that extent. We do fill up sound and we do sound design after it is locked. That is where we are. Most of the design comes from me and not the director. Of course they are very smart. If you design something and present it to them, it triggers a thought process in them. It is not that they are incapable of thinking in sound. It is just that they are not used to it anymore and it is about the ground reality that they are all thinking. So even those people who have a sound script simply forget about it, and the entire postproduction of the film is a new reality for them to reorganize or reorient themselves. As I said, once you give some ideas on top of that, there will be such fabulous and interesting sound ideas coming from directors that you just need to trigger things. Then again, it diminishes and vanishes in the mix with the music. But there has to be some really radical stuff that has to happen. But of course I understand where you're coming from. Looking at all this, I'm not being negative about it. I see changes happening. But the paces at which these changes are happening are really slow and scary, but it is happening. I feel that in the coming years you will see more experiments happening without music, purely because they know that people are saturated with music. Something else, not for the sake of cinema or innovation in cinema. Of course Dibakar has been doing innovative stuff. There is no doubt about that. I wouldn't categorize that as part of this talk. A: But Dibakar is putting all the stuff in the editing stage itself and editing with the noise. Namrata 18 was telling me that they designed the thing there, and was giving in to the designer for more enhancement of the design and better sounds. But they used to give their ideas in the editing stage itself. S: That depends on the director and the editor, and what they can think about. A: As you said it's completely the taste of the director. S: Which is fine. If it comes from the director, we don't have a problem because we will take it way ahead. But that is happening more also because the editor is into sound. That also does not mean that if the editor and the director were not, the sound guy wouldn't do it or anything like that. But certain things are to happen at the structural period. If they
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incorporate certain things keeping in mind the sound. Every editor has to and rarely editors do that except very few people. Others who can't even think about sound will cut and then you are limited. It is like you have an architect and structure of a building and as an interior designer the shape of the house is defined. You can play around with paint, with the furniture and what tiles to be used on the floor, but the spacing is done. My sitting room is in the shape. I can probably knock off the kitchen wall and make the kitchen a little open but beyond that I cannot. But if the editor incorporates, I can decide the shape of this before it is constructed. When the structure is coming, I can play around with the layout of the house. It is literally that. So I, as an interior designer, get much more scope in playing around in defining the spaces. I would think that if the editor and the director think about it during the edit or they incorporate a sound designer at the scripting stage itself, then he's going to come in. Even when the edit is happening or even before, he will start talking about it and defining the sound and come up with interesting stuff. Q: We have to make an editing of our interview time because I'm taking a lot of your time. So the final question would be: how do you use the extra channels provided by surround sound? S: That is a good question. I hate playing gimmicks with sound and giving directions to every sound. For me, when I watch a film, the story is most important and I find success in a story telling when it engrosses the audience into it as much as possible, and not taking them out of it. If the subject does not demand, I do not play around with the sound by unnecessarily giving directions to it and making the audience aware of these directions if that is not there in the plot. If it is there in the plot I would do that nicely and modestly rather than making the audience jump out of their seat, unless it is a horror film where the target is to make them jump out of their seat. Then that is a different story. So, for me, giving directions through extra channels are entirely to do with storytelling and I would mainly focus on the storytelling and modestly play with sound around that. Within that, I would play a lot with it, using its scope in terms of channels. It does not have to be giving directions but it can throw in content, and play around with polyphony in surround sounds and even putting full spectrum sounds. Not just base sounds or ambient sounds, but putting more content into that, without distracting the audience from the plot of the cinema or the subject. That is very crucial for me, but of course I would like to play around. Like when I experienced Atmos, I realised that for certain films it would be so incredibly interesting to play around with and they chose that kind of films to show us as well. A: Gravity for example.19
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S: Also there is this other film about water and surfing. Because there is this volume of water around and it is another state of matter, and various things happening there and precisely doing things. If you are precise about the direction and if you equalize the sounds and give perspective in the right way, nobody is going to turn around. They know that and are aware of the presence of things, which is the challenge. Rather than planned something over there and people turn around, if you bring them in the right spirit and the right awareness, you can plant anything and it will all go for the frontal story. Nobody is going to be all of a sudden jerking and checking around. A: The correct perspective. S: Yes. Then it is obvious. If you see something over there and it is true to that, there would be things happening and it will all be helping the story move forward, contributing to it rather than distracting the audience. That is my trip entirely with atmosphere. For that, as many tracks, I don't mind. I don't need these tracks really to have direction in the back because that I even asked once to the Dolby guys that when they have 7.1 they have four channels in the side and back and three channels in the front. And your directivity is all to do with the front. You have much more sense of direction frontally than back. So I was asking them “Why do we have for channels in the back and three in the front?” My trip is not to have as much directivity in the back with channels. Rather if I have more channels, I can play around with polyphony and various things in that. For the envelope, for the size, it should be a comfortable number of channels as well. But my trip is not to play around and make you aware that I am here at various points. Q: What role does ambiences play in this particular scenario with expanding channels? S: Since they're giving more and more channels in the back, in the surround, I think beyond a point it is not going to be any more, the number of channels. You need sufficient enough, that is all. If you keep increasing that to n-number, it is not going to do anything more. It is actually to support the film that is happening in the front. If we have two more eyes at the back, will our film experience be any more… Q: Surveillance. S: Yes, it would reduce to that. I think what we have now is good enough. Now it is not about technology. In India, it is not about 5.1 jumping to 7.1 or to 14.1 or Dolby Atmos. We do not use even the available 5.1 nicely. We don't have the time to use it nicely. The production will not allow you to use it nicely even if you don't charge. They just don't have the time or
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the interest for it. What are you talking about? It is not about technology development for us, it is the craft development that has to be in place. Often we are far behind in that. Not because we are not at par, we can be at par and produce as good as anything international but given a challenge as a spark, not on an average. We are far from international levels on an average, but if you really pick out you can be at par. It is a tricky situation. If somebody tells me that you guys have not reached the level the world has reached, that is wrong. We have reached that also. But our average film is still pathetic. Of course, if you tell me that in olden days it was only dialogue and music and now there is atmosphere, and Foley, and sound design, but when? How many years did it take? Q: What roles will ambience play in those expanded channels? S: Again you are linking it more to technology. Again I would say it is like concept and directors and it is not technology. As I said even with 5.1, we could have been doing as much atmosphere - it is not about Dolby Atmos or 64 tracks or 104 channels. That is not going to make much of a difference. It is a conceptual and creative call that the directors and the sound designers take. If they gave a little more space and reduce excess use of music, of course everybody's going to do atmospheric sound and they will take it seriously because in India unlike in Europe or places like that, we have such rich atmosphere. There is so much happening here. Even in the remotest Himalayas, you will find 1 million things like bells of cattle and so many things. It is polyphony everywhere – sometimes it is cacophony. We should be masters in handling atmosphere and the subtleties of atmosphere, rather than keeping silent. If you're doing a European film and in it you’ve woken up in the middle of the night, what will you hear? Nothing. You hear the fridge and you hear the tick-tock of the clock. You hear interior but you rarely hear exterior. But here you play around with exterior, there will be Azaan going, and if it's near the water, there will still be boatmen's calls and singing like in West Bengal, for instance. I mean if in the middle of the night you wake up, there will be nocturnal birds and bats and whatnot. It's tropical and full of creatures and sounds. So atmosphere should be our cup of tea, it is our feast to play around. Again, it is not the number of channels that has exponentially made any difference. Why I caught Highway is because you brought it in. The film has less music or hardly any music, and not the number of channels that has allowed you. Even if that was a stereophonic sound the way you're going to perceive this film on an aircraft or on the Internet or an MOV download, will be two-track. It will still make you feel exactly the same. You would think, “wow! Rich in atmosphere!” - even though they have repeated sound libraries and it may not be genuine. I'm not
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looking at the quality of the atmosphere that they have put in, but only looking at the amount of atmosphere that has been put, the length of atmosphere that has been put in the film, you will feel the same. Even if it is a mono output in a C-grade theatre, the atmosphere will be exactly the same. You will feel that this film has a lot of atmosphere and you'll feel that the film is powerful as opposed to the rest. Q: What are those extra channels doing? Why are they here? S: I'm not saying that it is not making… As I said, when you're sitting in a theatre with surround sound channels, it'll make you feel that you are sitting in an atmosphere of that sort. It directly takes you to the location over there. Believe me, I can give it to you in writing, from the 5.1 to the 7.1 or Atmos, the impact is not as much as you think. The impact that the creative call is bringing in, nothing will bring it in. None of the number of channels or increasing the number of channels in the back is going to bring it in. They are peripheral. 5.1 to 7.1, you will find nothing in terms of atmospheric impact. Of course if it is Dolby Atmos - it has much more channels all around. You will feel that you are drenched in that. This is the difference. But with the way you associate with the film, you will have a cinematic experience in an Atmos theatre. But cinema, the way you perceive atmosphere and other sounds and the story that you will feel even in two-track front. There is no doubt about that. You will associate the film in all those elements except the experience of hearing that and viewing that. I want to ask you, this film that you are talking about, if you see it on your computer with two good speakers, what way will this film be different if you watch it in a big stereo projection cinema? Q: Lot more details will come in. I can orient myself more accurately. S: Size. Q: Yes. Size. S: And the experience of watching it. Q: Yes, a social experience with other people. S: But the content is the same for you in both? Q: About that I am actually a bit doubtful. S: The content is the same. It is only the experience of the content. Isn’t it? Q: The transmission of the content means to me that I have no information from my behind when I listen to it on a pair of headphones from a stereo download. No information about what is happening in the surround channels, even in my left and right. What is coming is entirely from that two channel mix of that particular content. Also, I think that it is degraded in terms of mixing because a lot of information has already been
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compressed to make that stereo mix. So I'm not getting the entire spectrum of what has been produced. S: Yes. That detail or the experience of watching it will take you to the location a little more than a frontal stereo. But even stereo information placed correctly, will make you feel it as something coming from equidistance and it will give you most of the information from the centre and you wouldn't miss much of the… This is more to do with the experience of watching rather than anything else. Q: That makes me develop another question which is rather peripheral: there are more and more complex and complicated designs like multichannel sounds where many elements are coming in, and they are being played in smaller devices like an iPad or iPhone with mostly, a pair of stereo headphones by the new generations. How are we going to perceive these complex, multilayered designs in smaller platforms, and how is it going to be compensated? Do we at all need a complex design? S: That contradicts your own… Q: Yes. S: For me, many cinema halls are not aligned properly. Rather, most of it is not aligned properly. So even with 5.1, when you put atmospheric sounds in the back, it all integrates to give you an experience that you're watching something in the front and everything else is surrounding you. If it is not aligned properly while the film is going on, a surround track, which is supposed to be an atmospheric track, because these speakers are not aligned you hear something and look back. It was an atmospheric peripheral voice, which has no significance but it shoots out of a speaker because it is not aligned correctly. The other speaker is a mismatch and so it does not reproduce the base and many things properly. So there is an imbalance everywhere. In our country, 5.1 is a big complicated thing. Theatres won't align anything properly. Even the frontal speakers don't. You might be thinking that I'm having a great experience going to a cinema hall and that day the subwoofer might not be playing and the left side might not be playing at all. So you get satisfied with that experience because you're not going there to check if the speakers are working or not. You just want to see the film. So in whatever distorted, fluctuated way that you hear it, as long as it is more or less okay, it all gets integrated. This is why I'm saying that it is not the number of channels that you provide with, it also has to be properly aligned, and correctly placed. And its fidelity is to be considered. If the Twitter of a speaker is gone, it cannot reproduce high frequency. In most of the case one speaker's Twitter is not there and one speaker's sub is not there and another one is distorted completely. It is
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a mess in this country. They don't even want the Dolby guys to come there and align it for a paltry amount. They are least interested. Forget about all this, the loudness at which the film is mixed and the film is to be played in most of the theatres now to protect the speakers they don't want to play high sound. So they reduce the sound level more than half. The experience that you are talking about, forget about the atmosphere, the main sounds that are standing out like dialogue and music, even those are like hardly there in the prescribed level. This is all just like an ideal talk and what we confront there is something else. You, as a connoisseur, might be going to the right PVR cinema hall you know, and you know that screen number one is the right one. Or maybe I know that because I know the Dolby guys who are aligning this, and they would say to go here and that will be the correct, and so we go there. People hear this 5.1 in tiny speakers which cannot even reproduce anything, placing it all around along with your gas stove going and the TV being on and your mother watching television in the side room and various other things happening, and you think you're hearing a 5.1 atmosphere. It’s crap. That is where it is all going anyways. Companies want to sell it as 5.1, so you think 5.1 on my table! There has to be a right distance between speakers, and the positions of the speakers have to be right and various other things. So, in a country where mediocrity thrives, what do you do? This is how it works! Everybody's trying to push you to sell things. I have seen sound studios with fancy looking speakers with a tiny speaker inside which cannot even reproduce anything, and they will say that they have a 5.1 room. We can design 5.1. This is how it goes. Of course basic technologies needed, as long as you have a surround channel running, one or two or a few channels, it is well and good. Giving more of that is not going to make any difference, it is not really needed. Human perception itself is limited to a number of sources that you can identify. For fancy’s sake you can put n-number of channels in the rear and satisfy yourself. But that is not going to make any huge difference to your perception. Now, the main issue is standardization. We don't have standardization in anything now. Earlier Dolby guys used to standardize things and they used to scrutinize. Now it is free for all. Yes. Now nobody knows. What format? Where? How? Nobody knows. It is in a mess and it has deteriorated… A: It is like winning a lottery now. If you can hear your mix correctly and cleanly outside, it is like winning a lottery. S: Every format… I mean you don't even know how to put compression formats on the Internet because size wise it is compressed, a pair of small tabletop speakers, headphones - still true to that some reference you have, but it is a real mess. If you think that digital has done a wonderful thing, at
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this point of time, it is a sheer mess. This is a process of development. It will go to some extent and come back to standardization. It is always from requirement that we invent things. Now it is free for all, and it is everywhere. It is like the Internet, you don't know what to do with it. You know that it is good, it's providing everything. Now, how to get things correctly and the way you want it? We will have to move to that direction and understand things rather than playing around with gimmicks like 3-D. The need for 3-D comes from the six-year-old son of yours. What does he know? It is cultural and it is around. What is the buzz? He watches TV and he hears from his friends. He comes back and says "Papa, I want to see 3D not 2-D. I want a 3-D TV in the house." So, we go and don't even think about what we are getting into. Q: Are the sound designers aware that more and more films are being played back on the Internet and smaller devices? S: We are in a mess. Total mess. How to get an output correct? And it has to be perceived the way we have mixed it, which is impossible. Yes, we are doing a mix for aircrafts, another mix for the Internet assuming that the speakers would be laptop speakers or tiny speakers on the desktop. We're doing another mix for DVDs, and these mixes are not compressed much these days because there is a good chance that everybody has a home theatre and subwoofer. So it might be able to take it. But that doesn't mean that everybody will have good ones. Everything is kept for a modest and a middle-of-the-road kind of stuff. It is a mess and we don't even have a single theatre to watch a film after we mix it. We don't know what to do. So it’s about the issues and the areas of problems that we are facing and not about the number of channels. We are fighting for the crucial and rudimentary stuff, for the audience to receive what we had intended at the time of design, and the kind of levels we had kept and the kind of mix we had done. This is a big battle. On any given day these are my primary concerns than having a few more channels in the back.
Notes 1
Duration: 2:21:20. Name abbreviations: P M Satheesh – S, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Jayadevan C - A 2 English, August (Dev Benegal 1994) 3 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 4 Sunday (Pankaj Advani 1993) 5 Kishori Amonkar was one of the foremost Indian classical vocalist belonging to the Jaipur gharana of musical style.
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Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012) Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 8 Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a Turkish film director, who won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, for his film Winter Sleep (2014). 9 G. Aravindan, Indian film author working in the Malayalam language, noted for his socially realist films. 10 Tarkovsky, Andrei (1989). Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. 11 Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2008) 12 Bhuvan Shome (Mrinal Sen 1969) 13 Love Sex Aur Dhokha (Dibakar Banerjee 2010) 14 Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee 2012) 15 The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mira Nair 2012) 16 Playtime (Jacques Tati 1967) 17 Arjun: The Warrior Prince (Arnab Chaudhuri 2012) 18 Namrata Rao, film editor, a graduate of SRFTI. 19 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) 7
CHAPTER 23 BISHWADEEP CHATTERJEE1
Q: Before this particular phase of your work, you have also worked in magnetic era – for instance with Nagra and magnetic mixing and started with magnetic media, isn’t it? B: See, our generation was a very interesting one because when we came in, this whole back into technology of optical was kind of going. We just caught the tail end of that. I mean we actually didn’t work on those. But we just caught the tail end and kind of saw it. The large part of it has been analog - magnetic, solid state, electronics have been the large part of our generation. Then we saw the coming-in in the early 90’s, of the digital format. So, as a generation, I think, we are very lucky because we have cut the optical sound, we have cut magnetic tapes and we are now working on the digital workstation. We are a very lucky bunch. We have seen that, heard that. And certain things just stay with you. So yeah, as a generation I think we are just the lucky bunch. Q: In a generic way, what do you find different in terms of not only the technology itself but also technology that provides for certain scopes, tendencies to choose certain elements that you finally are getting into, from optical to magnetic to digital, format wise, technology wise or the media wise? B: You mean what I am finding different? Q: Yes, different. B: Okay! To start with, recording in India has always been film oriented. Our training has been at the film institute in Pune, where we trained in sound engineering but it was focused more on films. It was more film oriented. But we had our little moments of music recording, location recording for films, and the only non-film recording was mostly the music recordings - music and song recording. But that too, in India, has always been for films. I attribute this to our colonial past. Because of our colonial past, what has happened is we have evolved in cinema, almost at par with the West technologically. Whatever cameras, recorders or editing machines we were using were very much at par with whatever they were
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doing in the West: in Europe and the U.S. But we did not evolve so much in television. We entered into television in the 70’s, whereas America and the West were already in television in 40’s. Also, we did not have an independent music industry as such of this magnitude. We do not have an independent music industry, which again was there in America and the West. I mean, in the 50’s they had radios in their cars, they had independent music blockbusters. But our musical entertainment has been solely cinema. Therefore, our technology has mostly been concentrated around films. So, I found out that my interest - though I did the sound engineering course in Pune, which involved location sound recording, film post production, music recording to a certain extent and film mixing - we were geared more towards film post production. So, when I came to Bombay, I saw most of the songs that were being recorded. I am talking about songs because a large part of my career has been song and music recording. In Bombay, I saw that even the songs that were being recorded were recorded on 35 mm. There were these 4 tracks 6 tracks dubbers, which were locked with several of 4 track and 6 track dubbers to get a multi-track recording. Now in our generation, I found it a little over the top and expensive and very elaborate to have this whole set up just because we were recording songs for films. It was a very expensive format. For song and music recording in the West you had multi-track recorders like 8 track half-inch recorders, 16 track half-inch recorders, 24 tracks two-inch recorders. So, it would be very logical perhaps and even more economical to get a two-inch 24-track recorder to record your songs. Q: Hm. B: But it was being done for film and everybody kind of thought that you always needed to record on film so that when you are playing back and when sync was a huge issue, that it will go a little out of sync if you are recording in any other format. It was true. What we did was we used to record and then subsequently, as in when technology started opening up, the government got a little friendlier vis-à-vis input in machinery. So, in one of the studios that I had set up, I had got a 2 inch 24 track recorder with the Dolby SR in every channel. Then there was this question of how do we sync it? Like if I am recording on a 2 inch 24 track and if I am mixing it down onto a 2 track and they go back on location, they picturise the song and then they come back and they find the whole thing going out sync. Then we figured out that the 2 inch 24 track had to be locked to a constant, to something, which was a crystal source, so that the speed was constant and that we do not have any variations. So then we locked it with the steady crystal source, which at that point was a Umatic recorder. The Umatic did not have any functions because it was a video recorder. But I
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had a video recorder to which I locked my 2 inch 24 tracks so that I could get that stability, almost like a crystal. That’s how we recorded songs. We figured that was a cheaper way, quality wise it was much better and it was not so elaborate because you’re playing 35 mm full coat tapes and you are locking some 7-8 machines together. Some of the studios had that 7-8 machines together and you’re multiplying your tracks with four tracks into 4 dubbers or 6 dubbers. That’s how they multiplied the tracks into 16 or 24 tracks and that was a very elaborate one and that used up a lot of tapes. But the quality though was very nice because the film dubbers would move at 24 frames per second, which was almost 19 IPS (Inches per second). The higher the tape speed was in recording, the better the highs were. So, we had an option on those multi-track recorders that were recording at higher speed or at standard speed. Like in the Nagra. So you had 7 and ½ or you had 15 IPS, 15 inches per second. But then, we had to strike a balance and economize on tapes, you know. More speed means more numbers of tapes you are using. So you had to be careful about how you utilize that. But what happened was that we did our recordings like that and it took a while for people to understand that even though the studio was small, you are compensating the volume of the studio with the number of tracks. So the generation before ours, unless they saw spaces they did not realize that, you know. They thought that we should have a huge space, we should have a lot of musicians together and that’s how you can get the whole quality, power and volume. It should sound big. One tried to convince them that, “Look you can do that to get multi-track recording.” A large part of your time was spent trying to convince the then seniors that multi-track can do this and all these kind of processing can give you that sort of an impact that you are looking at and probably better quality. But subsequently the newer generation then started coming in and they started adapting to the new technology at that time. That’s how we kind of started, that’s how our workflow then started being a little different. We had to adapt ourselves to the current ways of the industry. So, if you had 24 tracks in your set up, the need was for having automation on your desk. What we would do was we would have like 2 or 3 guys sitting on the mixer and riding the faders at whichever point the strings are coming. There is a run of the strings coming and you need to increase that and then bring it down again for the other guys to come in. This whole thing had to be choreographed physically between the music director, myself, and the arrangers sitting over there. That’s how we kind of would work on the thing. What was also happening was later I got automation for my work. That was a new concept. You could automate your faders, you could automate your EQ’s, you could automate your mutes. And all this I
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am talking about is the linear days, the analog linear days. That’s how we used to work. When the automation started coming in, it was a question of economics as well. I remember one music composer coming in and saying: “Look, if you can automate the mix then we can work faster.” I said on the contrary. What is happening is because you can automate the mixer - you are going to take more time. You will have 300 rehearsals, but you will have that one perfect take. So, you will not let that go. That’s how we started working and they started getting hooked on to this fact that, you know, you could go to every bar and every beat and work on the mix. That came as a huge help to me. A lot of the then engineers started complaining with faders you don’t get that feel and all that. I kind of attributed all that to mechanics. I would rather concentrate on the program, on the finesse of the program rather than the mechanics of the whole thing. That was my point of view. Subsequently digital started coming in - linear digital, tapebased digital. Then the cheaper digital model started coming and people, including myself, were not really very happy with it. This, I later realized, was not the fault of the digital recorder, but the ADDA conversion. If you had cheap ADDA converters, then obviously the kind of sound that you are used to is being compromised. Slowly, they started developing on that. Now, what was happening was we suddenly jumped into digital. Again comparing with the West, they had a very linear growth in terms of, you know, first they went into that analog, then multi-track analog, then more number of tracks in analog and that’s how they were developing till they came to tape based digital. For us, it was a sudden shift. While we were recording on 2 inch 24 tracks and all that, suddenly the machines like the A-DAT and the high 8, the modular tape machines started coming in. We had to adapt to that because that was proven to be the current rage and it was doing good things. It was easy to lock the musical instruments with them, so all that was happening. How we used to trigger from our recorder, the programs would then come to the studio to program, and we used to trigger them with MIDI. I used to have an SMPT to MIDI converter interface. My safety that I would record on the tape would trigger the MIDI signal to the musicians and they would be hooked up with each other with MIDI clock. So, that was the way of recording. Then, of course, when the workstations came, the whole workflow changed. But today, what I am seeing is that we are all speaking the same language thanks to the workstations - the computers that we are working on. Everybody around the world is more or less working in the same way like we are. The way we make our sessions, I’ve had people coming from LA, from Europe and I have also been to those places and I have seen the way people work, it’s not very different from us. I mean, technologically we
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are almost at par with each other. They have the time and they have the budgets and they have a broader distribution, therefore they have all that. For us, we have somehow kind of evolved and made ourselves, you know, tailored our methods of working to our requirements and our industry outlines. So today, I think, we are speaking more or less the same language. But there was a phase when it was distinctly different over here. Conceptually, the song recording itself was very new and very different from what they had in the West. They had discontinued that. They had films like My Fair Lady 2 and Sound of Music. 3 You know, they had musicals. This whole synchronization thing, the whole playback thing, it was there. I mean it’s all there, if you’ve seen Singing in the Rain4 and stuff like that. So we stretched that, we carried that and we are still carrying that with us. That’s something unique for us. We need a song and dance ritual in our films. Therefore, because of the technology today and because our work culture has changed, our perception has changed, and I think we have evolved, we are coming out with fantastic quality. Earlier it used to be an issue, “How can they get that quality and why can’t we get that quality?” But today, I think, we are generating some of the best tracks in the world. There are people who are coming here. I have recorded the strings section, I have recorded the violin section for people who wanted to take this music with them over there and produce the music further, for example, in London. They wanted a distinct Hollywood string section sound. A lot of crossover has started happening. A lot of interaction musically has started happening. We have opened up a lot. Today, thanks to the Internet, thanks to broader networking, we are almost on the same page with people working all over the world. Earlier when we were in film school, our only window to the outside world was our library and the journals that were subscribed in the libraries. At that time MIDI was still a theory. We read about MIDI, but we got a chance to work on MIDI only when we came into the industry. Q: How is it quality-wise? Some people are saying that there is a degradation of sound from the analog era to the digital era. B: That is very subjective. I don’t see that. Because of the digital, I am getting some extremely clean lows and I am getting extremely clean highs, which I could not get in analog. Analog gave me fantastic vocals, percussions, some light solo instruments. I love those on analog recordings, the violin section. So, for me, it was a combination of both of these that created that whole sound. We were so used to that kind of quality, you know, we were so used to the analog type of sound, that we perceived that as good quality. I would say that. This was an alien quality so it was disturbing when you had something, which was reproducing such
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clean sound. So, I perceive that as noise or I perceive that as a drop in quality or a compromise. It was not true. People are very happy with whatever is happening. The digital recording platform has evolved further. We have higher sounding frequencies; we have higher bitrates now. That is not an issue anymore. However, I do miss the analog mixer. A good high-end analog mixer in what I miss when I am recording. People have broken that down to channel strips and they have made mic pre-amps. Big companies like SSL and MIEV have made good analog compressors. They have come up with these things where you could not, suppose you cannot today afford or they don’t even manufacture a large analog desk unless it’s special and made to order. By and large, it’s these modules that you are buying and you’re lining them up and recording in them. So yes, a very good quality mic pre-amp and a very good quality analog compressor is very welcome because that stage where you capture on mic and the stage where you listen are always going to be analog. I don’t think we are going to go out of that for a long time. Q: How was it different texture-wise? Was magnetic media different from digital? Not only the texture, but the dynamic range or the signal to noise ratio and then, beyond that, the sonic texture that you capture? B: See, the texture is what you have in your mind. I mean, apart from the technologies that we used to work with in those days, our perceptions are changing. I am a different person today. The stuff that I mixed ten years ago will be mixed differently today because that is not a constant. We are changing every day. Our reproduction systems are changing. I mean our sound reproduction systems, our speakers, our monitors, our home theaters, our home music systems, consumer music system - they are all changing. So, we are getting a new kind of sound. Q: Hm. B: There are softwares and plug-ins coming out, which are trying to simulate an analog sound. There are plug-ins which are trying to simulate certain microphone sounds. Since we have heard the analog sounds, since we have been there and done that, I think it still requires time to get to that level. That simulation, for me, is still not up to the mark. Q: You said that the level was of good quality, much better in fact. B: No, I am talking about the simulation. I am talking about the plug-in that I’m trying to simulate, like your voice if he can simulate your voice, since I have heard your voice. Q: Yes.
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B: If he is mimicking your voice, it’s very close to how you are talking. Still, it’s not you for me because I’ve heard you. I have heard Kishore Kumar. But if somebody is going to sing like Kishore Kumar, he is probably mimicking him well. Yet, I am still not getting that Kishore Kumar. That is irrespective of good or of bad quality. It’s just not the same. That’s all I’m saying. But I have no regrets. I am liking certain situations where you try and simulate that kind of recording, that kind of reverb, that kind of times in the films that you are working on when you do want to create a situation where it’s a 60’s recording or a 60’s scene happening, you are trying to simulate that with plug-ins and the kind of mixers that you used to use in those days. When it comes to period setting in a film, it gives me a chance to work on that kind of sound. Q: So, the simulation shows that there is a need or people are missing something. Like you said, you miss the analog mixer. What is that particular element that you miss? B: See, I have worked on the new digital mixers that have come out. I have worked with them, I’ve recorded on them and I’m talking about highend digital mixers. I was missing that warmth. I was missing the thickness that I would get in an analog mixer. It’s not for tape, mind you, that I am talking about. It’s the electronics that I am talking about. That is what I miss today. It is that warmth. I think it is that punch. It is very difficult even technically to describe what I am missing. Q: Okay. B: When I am using a digital mixer I am not getting that kind of a result the kind of punch that I would have when somebody’s singing or when somebody’s playing a musical instrument, probably because the mic pre-s were not adequate or the electronics are different. But I am still missing that, very frankly. But that is only to capture on tape. Once I have captured on tape, once I have recorded it - we say still capture on tape though we are recording it digitally. Once I have done that, then I don’t have an issue. Then in the final mix, I know that I have got that. So, for the final mix I don’t need that mixer then. I can work within my workstation. There are certain things that you miss in it sometimes also. Yes, it is the reverb in it, the signal processor. There are some wonderful plug-ins that have come out, which give you very good reverbs and very good delays. Yet, I miss a Lexicon or a TC Electronics reverb, M5000. Or I would love to have a reverb unit over here. These are the some of the things that you do in this. But you just have to work your way a little harder to try and achieve that because you have that sound in your mind. It is not impossible on this. It’s just that there are so many probabilities that you can definitely come out
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with a sound that you are wanting. Anyway, it’s a question of economics. So, if I do buy those elements, my client will not necessarily pay me extra. Q: Hm. So it’s not necessarily an upgrade or a qualitative shift from magnetic to digital. Just the platform got changed. The question would be whether it got better or it got different. Do you think it’s got better or it got only different? B: Better is very subjective. Different is a safe word, I would say. See, it’s different. I mean, if you’re hearing a Frank Sinatra, if you are hearing a Mohammad Rafi, it’s very different from, you know, what you hear in terms of today’s recordings. So, it’s different. Even the compositions are different. There is a melodic structure as it was in the 60’s and the 70’s. That whole melodic structure sounds a little different, a little old. That had its beauty. But today if I were to compose a song that, you know, would compose a style that was there in the 60’s and the 70’s, it would have that very typical 60’s or 70’s kind of a flavor. I mean, it would be different, today - the compositions are different. The way the younger generation thinks is different. They think non-linear. Q: But very technically speaking, analog optical would have less than 78db headroom, while magnetic recording has higher headroom depending on the material itself, may be 90. B: Optical had about 30db headroom. Q: Yes, practically speaking. Increase in the headroom and dynamic range – e.g. in digital, you have 120db. This shift in dynamic range is clearly getting better. B: Yes. Q: This dynamic range and wider headroom are not something better? B: Of course, they are. Q: But how is it reflected in the work? How is it reflected in the kind of recording produced in these eras? B: You know, when I was new in Bombay, when they were recording a song, I used to wonder why the base guitar is just standing over there because ultimately in the mix you can’t hear the base guitar. There was so much put inside that, there was no proper base. I mean, a large part of that I would blame the arrangement. They had the bassist standing over there but you could hardly hear the guy. What we were trying to do was we were trying to squeeze everything within that, in 30db dynamic range in optical. So, the arrangement became more elaborate. The arrangements started getting more complex. But technically we were still there. We had not evolved technically. Meanwhile many instruments were coming in. If
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you hear the 50’s and 60’s recordings, Indian recordings, whether it’s regional or whether it’s Hindi cinema, whatever. I found those were very clean and very good recordings. They were really nice. Why? Because it was minimalistic in terms of arrangement. One tabla, one dholak, one vocal. Even if it is a slightly western kind of an arrangement it was simplistic. It had a double bass, it had some clarinets, it had woodwind, it had little strings. It had a chamber kind of a feel. It had the voice so that was not very difficult to fit into that whole 30db dynamics range. But in the 70’s and 80’s, I personally found the quality of recordings started getting poorer. What was happening was a lot of other instruments started coming in. The keyboards came in, the various tones of keyboard came in. People wanted to have more guitars, you know. They wanted to imbibe all in their recordings in our Hindi films. They wanted the rock guitar, they wanted drums, they wanted Latin percussions. So, our Bollywood was a combination, a hotchpotch, a combination of Latino music, our own tabla, dholak and you know Indian music, western melodies and harmonies. So it started and we started evolving as a genre by which I mean people say Bollywood. But we started evolving as a genre without realizing it, because it was more populist. The technology did not permit, you know. People were still coping with how to arrange all that and yet be heard. When magnetic came and when the dynamic range started getting better, we started hearing things. In the music industry, we could hear the music in cassettes. We could hear a lot of stuff in our tape recorders. Then again, in the film we couldn’t hear that because in film it was one mono speaker and it was still that 30db dynamic range. That became another issue. So when we were recording for non-film stuff, we were usually happier with that because we knew that we could hear all that being reproduced. But the moment it went to film, we went into a depression again because all that got squashed. The way it was, people tried to give a very high compression and squeeze all that into a narrow dynamic range. More often than not, it would distort. Suddenly, that distortion became distorted violin, distorted percussions – people started liking that. That suddenly became the sound. We, as a younger generation in the 80’s, were bewildered with it. I have had an instance where a composer from the popular studios in those days said, “No I want strings sounding like that.” So, I would say, “But those are distorted.” He said, “I want that sound, distorted or not.” Fortunately for our generation, when we came in and the composers and the creators of our generation also started coming in, the sound started changing and we started evolving. Thanks to the dynamic range getting bigger, we started getting more adventurous with our arrangements. We started hearing things. Then, of course, when Dolby
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stepped in we were more than happy because that 30db fatwa was gone. Now we had unlimited dynamic range. So we could practically have everything. We had to be careful because how you would decorate your track and arrange it within the right proportions so that it is heard like it should be. Q: You said that the digital technology offered extreme low and extreme high. Do you find the recordings produced are doing justice to the headroom available within that wider range? B: See, what has now happened is our hearing range between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz is covered. I have nothing to complain about. Earlier, it would not match. I mean I couldn’t hear anything in the optical, you know. I could hardly hear anything below 50-60 hertz and it would taper down. A similar thing went into the highs. So I missed those highs, I missed the clean sound that we hear. For me, what I hear is what I want to record. It should all be there, because I have a hearing range of this frequency, of course. Theoretically it is 20-20, but our hearing is far superior to what was being available on the analog tape. So, the digital coming over there has fulfilled that, you know, constant hunger of wanting to hear certain frequencies. Q: Hm. B: So people started exploring and experimenting. They started making music with extreme lows and subs and stuff like that. Interestingly, what happened was that since we had such a narrow dynamic range, people didn’t know that they actually missed that depth and missed the lows. So, they would try and compensate that with volume. The moment you walked into a film studio, which was blaring a Hindi film song, you had to run out because it was so loud. People thought that if you played loud it would sound like full. But that was not it, because when you have a whole frequency range from your good lows to your highs you don’t have to hear that loud because you are getting everything. It’s a balanced track. Then you would rather ask them to tone down. Even today, some of the guys who are used to mixing in the analog, whenever there’s a song, they crank up the volume. I have seen people getting so uncomfortable that they walk out during a song. They are going with that mindset. They are trying to pack everything in so that it plays at a decent volume outside. But you really don’t have to do that anymore because you are producing the lowest and the highest frequencies. I am getting a full track and so I’m happy with 85 to 90 decibel volume. I don’t have to crank it up to 100-120db to still try and feel that power. With digital, I am getting a complete sound spectrum in my ears because the entire range is being reproduced.
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Q: When we shift our discussion from music recording to other kinds of recordings - film recordings like voice, sync effects and ambience - do you think that you can draw a parallel between music recording and the other recordings? Did they also develop from optical? B: See, music is much more complex in terms of frequencies because what happens is that when I calibrate my speakers, I listen to a song because it produces that low frequency. A dialogue probably would not produce that low, or it would not produce that amount of high that you are looking at. A dialogue has its very small narrow range - similar to certain effects. When I ultimately shifted from music to sound design – I still mix my songs, I still do my music – the whole sound design to me is like a composition. It is not just laying effects tracks. I have dialogues, Foley, non-sync effects, and the way I arrange my tracks. It somehow comes to me that my whole effects track arrangement layout is also very like music. The effects tracks for me, the ambience tracks, and the atmospheric sounds are like the padtracks. Then you have your dynamics, you have certain things moving, you create those dynamics with all the other effects that are coming in. Q: What does “pad-track” mean? B: Like in songs you have a harmonic pad, for example. Q: Okay. B: So you have these pad-tracks, which are giving you a fill, like a cameraman says, “fill lighting”. This is kind of giving you that fill. My atmospheric sound is more or less like that. When we’re talking, when we are outside, there is an atmospheric sound. And that atmospheric sound changes with the location in the film. You are trying to create that. And the rest actually depends on the film, on the director. So now, if he gives me that space, then there’s a lot we can do. Q: Yeah. When you look back at the films produced during optical era, magnetic era and digital era, do you think that this use of atmospheric tracks like ambience - the use of ambience, was more or less homogenized or has it evolved itself following the technological trajectory? B: Again, coming back to our dynamic range and our complete reproduction these days, I’ll call that complete reproduction because we hear everything today. Our film sound design has naturally become much more complex. I can virtually hear everything in that. It’s like our brain, it’s like how I perceive. Like now both of us are sitting and talking. There’s an air conditioner sound happening, there’s somebody fidgeting in the background and there’s somebody clicking on the mouse, there’s a distant noise in the corridor that is happening. But our mind is the mixer. What is happening is it’s giving a lot more focus on our dialogue at the
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moment and subduing every other effect and that is what you’re trying to simulate artificially on screen. Only when somebody bangs open the door, you stop your conversation and you look around. If you’re doing it in film, it is mostly intentional, to take your attention somewhere else. So you’ll have to be careful, like you don’t bring up the other sounds that it tries and interferes with the dialogue, which at that moment is information. Or you don’t have a song and a dialogue track playing at the same time because you don’t know what to concentrate on. Should I concentrate on the song or should I concentrate on the dialogue? I should not have a popular song or a popular piece of music playing over there, behind a particular scene. That piece itself will be a distraction. You cannot have a Godfather5 piece playing behind. You cannot be that ignorant and just put Godfather’s theme behind a particular scene because as an audience I’ll wonder why Godfather has suddenly come in. Then you are trying to find a connection between what you are watching on screen and Godfather. Is the director trying to make a statement? So these are some of the things. For example, in one of the student exercises, the guy decided to put one song in the film. He did not know it was Hotel California. I asked him, “Is there any reason why you put Hotel California? Because that’s an iconic song, I mean it’s a cult thing nowadays.” He had no clue that it was a popular song. He was not exposed to that kind of music. But the attention suddenly shifted from his film and went into the song. So, how you arrange and what you arrange first of all depends on the kind of film you are working on and how you will treat that particular thing. I think we are getting more complex in India as well. Our whole song and dance ritual is becoming slightly minimalistic. A lot of alternative kind of filmmaking is happening, a lot of different kind of cinema is happening. We are slowly getting opportunities to, you know, show our effects, show dialogue, putting elements into the film. People are becoming much more perceptive. The younger generation has understood. They know what good sound is. They know what good sound design is. They know what good camera work is. They know what a good film is. You can’t fool them. Q: Between 60’s and the late 90’s, most of the films, generally speaking, almost didn’t use any ambience. But post-2000, we find in the popular mainstream context, more and more films are coming up with a lot more elaborate use of ambience. B: In mainstream, I think, one of the best sound design I have seen is in the film called Sholay.6 Watch that film over and over again. There’s a lot of intelligent sound design that has gone into that film. Q: But Sholay was an exception and not many films followed the path of Sholay. Sholay was specially done and with a particular sensibility.
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B: What I’m trying to say is that there were films that had this thing. Everybody sat up and noticed Sholay. It was never that the ambience track was not there. The ambience track was there. There were ambience tracks, there was this night cricket, there were the birds and all those things were there. It’s just that we didn’t know they were there. When people watched the film, they only knew the actor and the actress. They didn’t know that there’s a whole industry behind that. They didn’t know that there was a director to start with, let alone the technicians. They went and saw the stars. Q: It was from a mono source we were listening. A very music-oriented storytelling was happening at that time. B: See, that entirely depends on design. There had been cases where the music was probably doing better justice and there have been a lot of cases where I’ve had to remove all the music because it was distracting. This is entirely dependent on the film, on the story, on the situation in the film. Q: But with the invention of this multi-channel surround sound and all these things, people have started using more ambiences in the sound design. B: Let me tell you one thing, a mix for me is irrespective of whether it is mono, stereo or in surround. When I am mixing a film or a song, I want to hear something. I want to hear everything in the right proportion. It does not matter, very frankly, whether the source is a mono or a stereo or a surround. The mix should not be compromised or the mix should not be different. The soul of the mix cannot be different. If you’re mixing a song, you cannot treat it differently because it is surround. I don’t want people to sit there and look sideways and do this because, you know, then it gets into a gimmicky space. I want them to feel. My whole thing is that if I am hearing it in mono I have a certain perception. It’s a good mix. But if I’m hearing it in stereo, I’ll get a little more width. If I’m hearing it in surround, I should still be concentrating on the song. I will feel a little more relaxed. It’s like instead of sitting on a tight chair, I’ll spread out a little and sit down. But I will not be distracted. I should not be distracted by a surround mix. Q: Here, I would like to underscore what you said - to get relaxed. What do you mean by that? B: By relaxed I’m basically talking about space. Or I’m talking about a figure of speech that you’re going to spread out a little and you’ll hear it in the larger perspective. It’s like you have a small thing that you’re looking through. But suddenly if you open the curtain and you have this large window, which is giving you the whole view, you will perceive that
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differently as opposed to, you know, peep into the whole scenario. So, if somebody draws the curtains and opens the windows out to you, you will not try too hard to concentrate on what you’re looking at, what you’re listening to. It’ll all come to you. So that mix of yours, when I’m playing it off a telephone - today the phone is a mono source - I should be able to hear a correct mix inside my telephone, when I’m watching a YouTube video or watching some kind of a thing. Then when I’m hearing a song or when I’m watching a film on this, I should get a decent sound on this. But when I’m listening to this I’m not expecting because I’m just taking information and I’m looking at somebody’s video or somebody’s music video through a small screen which has its small source. But the mix is not compromised. A good mix, whether you’re listening to it on your phone or in your music system or in your home theater or in your public theater, the mix should not change culturally. That’s what I mean. Q: Two questions come up with this. One is, as you mentioned a bit about the mono, stereo or surround spreading out of space, how do you see yourself adapting to that expanded space? How do you design? Did you shift your work method to fill up those spaces? B: Because our hearing is 360 degrees, our hearing is three-dimensional. So, when I’m having a situation where I’m able to reproduce the sound like that, then naturally I will feel much more liberated. But you should be careful as to what you’re putting in your surrounds. I was trying to tell you before that there are certain sounds, which are happening behind me when I’m talking to you. But I’m not turning around every time. Why would I turn around? If it is bothering me, I’ll turn around. If it is getting louder and attracting my attention, I will. If suddenly somebody calls me from behind, I will turn around. So, I have certain things that I don’t like to put in surround. I don’t like to put dialogues in surround. That is a huge distraction. I don’t want people to turn around and say, “Oh, where is that coming from?” Like, if somebody is shouting at me, if somebody is calling out and if the character is behind the camera, I don’t want the voice also to come from behind the camera saying: “Here I am”. Then everybody turns around to see - that’s a huge distraction. I would rather diffuse that quality and make it sound roomier, but the source will be from the front. That will not take away my this thing… You have to be very careful as to how you design your tracks. Earlier, when stereo had happened, people would put the tabla on one side, put the voice on one side. They would have drums on one side and Beatles would have voice on the other side. They were experimenting with the new format. It was very interesting. Like, you know, “Look, here is this and here is that.” It was interesting. You had the tabla playing here and you had the voice singing
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here and it was stereo. But today, I think we can’t really do that. It seems very basic or it will seem almost juvenile if we start with that sort of a thing. But that did happen with the surround, when the surround came in. They did put in a lot of information. I have done it and I have realized how miserable it sounds. It is that sense of balance and that sense of proportion that you should know where to curb. You should know where to balance it right so that I am not distracted from the film or from the story. I cannot have certain elements in the surround, which will keep disturbing me over there. You’ll have to be very careful. If it’s an intense scene, I cannot have some noise happening over there which will disturb me. Yet, if I’m trying to create some dynamic situation like a movement, or like an animal which has suddenly scurried away, or like if I enter a church or I enter a large building, I can have a pigeon flying by and going over there. That almost makes me sense that musty smell. It almost gives me that whole realistic thing. When I enter, it kind of becomes dramatic at that point. You’re giving space. You’re establishing the fact that there are pigeons in here. You’re establishing a setting in audio. Q: Was that possible in stereo? B: It was. It was possible irrespective, again, of mono. You could have that in mono. Q: But then, the pigeon would be in the centre only, or maximum on the two sides. B: Yeah, you process it that way. If I had a pigeon flying, suppose that’s a room, which has RT of 5 seconds and if I give that pigeon an RT of 5 seconds, I can push and give that illusion that it is distant. It is in that room as opposed to the source, which is the dialogue, which is in the foreground. I can create that in mono as well. Of course I can. Q: But what are those extra channels doing here? B: They are distributing the sound like it should in a theater. The very reason why people started coming back to the theater, I think, is because of surround sound. I would love it. Of course it will be a very good experience if the jet plane flies over my head and goes away. I mixed the first Hindi film to be mixed in native Dolby Atmos, the new format. It was Madras Café. 7 It provided me that I could play around with my soundscape. I did have helicopters flying over my head, speakers on top and we had speakers around. So, I did have helicopters blaring and exiting. All of them were flying above. When an explosion was happening, I did have a debris fall from top all around me. I did move when the camera showed a Bazooka being shot, or a rocket launcher being shot – did have that impact of the guy falling. That film provided me that scope to do that.
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Q: As a sound designer, what do you think this particular practice will do to the audience? B: They are very comfortable with it. But again, I’m saying that you have to be very discreet. If people say that it’s great camera work or it’s great sound work, then you’ve lost him. It’s like you walking into a restaurant. You shouldn’t remember the waiter’s face. You should remember the service. Q: Still, when you are doing these works - you are designing and you are mixing - you are always thinking of the audience who are going to watch the film. B: I think of myself first. I am the first audience. If I don’t like it, chances are you will not. You will see that in your case also. If there is something that you like, chances are there that others will like it. If I myself don’t like what I’m doing, chances are that the others will not like that. That goes for a guy who is making a film also. That actually goes for a guy who is creating anything. What is happening is that if I’m watching a film and I’m not liking what I’ve done, then there are a lot of people who will understand that it’s not working. You have tried something and it’s not working. So, I have to be happy first. I have to understand first. I should not turn around and do this when I’m watching a film. Q: I am basically trying to understand what does this particular aspect of surround do to the audience, to his or her perception or experience. What does it do compared to mono or stereo? Is it something enveloping his or her senses or something more? You said that, “we feel relaxed.” I would like to explore that statement. Why do you think that way? B: Why did we evolve from black and white to color? Black and white had its space. We saw those films. People were happy watching those films. Those were wonderful films in black and white - whether it was Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak or Guru Dutt or Raj Kapoor, they were all black and white films. And they were entertainers. People loved them. People danced, people sang. Why was there a need to evolve out of that? There wasn’t a need to evolve. It was a great thing when you could see color. It was a great thing when you saw the sky was blue and the heroine was wearing red and the hero was wearing blue. When I’m looking at color, when I’m looking at all that, it is a feast to my eyes. It’s something, which I have not experienced in films. Why am I changing my “dubba” television to an LED or an LCD? Why have we evolved to HD, high definition? See slowly what is happening is when this change in technology visually is happening, audio wise also. We are looking at 70mm picture. Why? You could watch on a normal standard format. But
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why was there this need for Panavision? Why was there this need for a broader thing? Your horizons have spread out, your perception is opening up. The same goes for sound. So, when I am having such large canvas in front of me, how can I not complement it with sound? Q: Okay. B: It was only natural. Even sound was kind of spread. There was this need. You had a huge screen, you had 70mm but you had that one mono source. Q: Do you think that psychologically it is contributing to a sense of comfort in the experience of the audience? B: We still have a packed house today. Q: If somebody has seen the film in surround sound it means that when they are made to watch a film in mono, they might find it quite inferior as an experience. B: Yes it will. But what happens is, you are conditioning yourself. Your mind is conditioning. When I am watching a film like it should be watched sitting in a theater, that is my ultimate satisfaction. I have not been able to see Gravity8 because I was busy in a project. I would love to see Gravity sitting in Dolby Atmos and perceiving that whole experience. Tomorrow, Gravity will come on television. I will listen to it with my headphones. But I will miss that experience. I will get my information. I do get my information in my phone. I do see a few clips or a few films on this. I do hear a few songs people mail me on this. But definitely it’s not going to be… because my mind is conditioned. I know what was the information, what was the intention. But if you tell me that, “No, you have to judge the quality out of this and then tell me”, to an extent I can do that. But it won’t be the ideal way. Here my quality judgment would be, “Look, in this limited source I can hear precisely everything and in the right proportion. But this would not be an ideal way of watching”. Somebody said, “Oh! You can download the film and watch it on your phone or your computer.” You are not going to be satisfied. Of course, there’s this whole other thing about taking your family out and together watching a film and all that. That’s another thing. But perception vis-à-vis cinema for an audience, if you ask anybody, “Did you enjoy the film in the theater or did you enjoy the film on television?” 90% of the chances are that he will say, “I enjoyed it in the theater.” There’s no discomfort factor over there for the audience. Discomfort happens when it’s a bad film, if it’s a badly made film, which includes all the faculties of filmmaking. That is where discomfort happens. Then they feel deprived.
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Q: In Europe, I find that more and more people are experiencing films on headphones and smaller devices like mobile phones, iPads, and iPods, iPod touch. But in India, we have so many mobile devices and people are using them for communication – I think at one point of time Indian audience will turn to smaller devices too. B: What do you mean one point of time? They already have. Q: Yes, they have. Do the sound designers think of this particular digital realm of watching or experiencing films on smaller devices? And if they are aware of that, do they think that their designs also need to cater to that end? B: When I am mixing a film, I am mixing with an ideal theater in mind and my mix should have an ideal balance vis-à-vis a real theater. Q: Hm. B: If that is right, you play it on your phone or you hear it on television or you hear it anywhere, it sounds more or less the same. There will be certain losses, for example, in broadcast you have little losses in the highs and stuff. But by and large, culturally it will not sound very different. If they have provided with all these facilities, they have also provided you with volume and tone control. So, you are watching that film in your living room or if you are listening to that song in your living room, you are equalizing your amplifiers as per your taste since you have that facility and flexibility of going and increasing the highs or reducing the lows vis-à-vis your room or vis-à-vis your listening environment. It could be your car, it could be your room, it could be your computer, and it could be your headphones. You are setting it as per your requirement. Q: Do you calibrate? B: You calibrate also as per your requirement. Q: Coming back to use of ambience in films, in your opinion, what does it do to the film sound experience? If ambience is used or not used, will that make a difference? B: It’ll make a huge difference because there will suddenly not be one soundtrack. You will miss something in the whole film. You need an ambient track. When we are talking, when we are moving around, have you ever been to a very quiet place - like an anechoic chamber? I have not been in an anechoic chamber but I have been to a very quiet place. You know what happens over there? You tend to lose your balance and you tend to fall down. Why? Because there’s no ambience, there’s no point of reference. When I’m sitting and talking to you, this room has got one particular treatment. When I step out into the corridor, there is another
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kind of a treatment over there. So, when you are closing your eyes, your space is being defined by your hearing. You are defining your space. Your mind is getting conditioned. You walk into a church and a blind man can tell you that this is a very large area because of your delayed reflections of your voice. When you are stuck in a very tight closet, for example, you have a different response. If somebody locks you in a bathroom, you will have a different response. Your point of reference is the ambience around you. You are simulating that. You are artificially trying to create that ambience. There is no silence. Even when you are creating silence in the film, I mean, there’s something, some element that you’re putting over there, which is being perceived as silence. It just could be when you are walking into a hollow cave. It can just be a water drop somewhere. That water drop will now draw your attention. It will give you that feeling of absolute silence, but it’s not really silence. You have a slight wind blowing in that tunnel. All your relative sounds are lower. That way you can create an illusion of silence. It’s never really silent. When you are sitting and watching a film in the theater, there is almost a 35db noise happening all around. It’s never really silent. But your mind tells you otherwise. When everybody is watching a film in spellbound silence, there are other sounds happening everywhere. But your mind is now focused on that sequence of that particular film. Any moment this thing can appear, any moment the killer can come out, any moment the gunshot can happen. It’s psychoacoustics. It’s your mind playing tricks. So, when you are creating an ambient track it depends on what kind of ambience you are creating. Is there scope for stylization? Is it giving you a chance to stylize certain things? Q: In recent films we hear more ambience - it’s a very unquestionable thing that in recent films we hear more ambience. There might be reasons as to why people are using more amount of ambience. But I would like to ask you whether you find it giving “relaxation”. Do you think that with the wide range of ambience the audience feels more relaxed? B: It’s like from an economy class, you’re sitting in first class. But you’re travelling on the same flight. So, you are just having a comfortable journey. That’s all I am saying. Not just Ambience in particular, but it is the entire soundscape or the entire film experience. We, being sound professionals, will always, you know, focus on the sound elements. We will always try and read in between the lines. But a regular guy who is watching a film perceives it as a film. Even when I am watching a film, you know, I just want to go and watch the film. I don’t want to go and see sound, I don’t want to go and see camera. I want to go and see the film first. When I am reading a book, I am not looking at the style of writing. I
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am first of all reading the content in it. So, I am going to see the content. How best you can make it soothing for me? How you can make it a very good experience for me? Q: Okay. B: It could be soothing. It could be a complete experience. That would be a more right way of putting it. How could I find a complete experience? I can find good camera, good acting, and good direction. If I’m watching a film I want a good story to start with. Everything else will fall in place. Q: Now a lot of people are doing sync sound. B: Yeah. Q: So, do you think that sync sound is changing the sound design? You were doing dubbing in the films. Now you are doing the design very differently. So, how do you see sync sound? B: See, the kind of sound that I get in sync sound is very difficult to recreate in dubbing. Thanks to sync sound, I am getting natural good sound. Just the way it should sound, I am getting a very realistic sound. I am getting grains, you know. I am getting the texture, which would be very difficult to create in dubbing though we have to do it sometimes. Sync sound films also have to be dubbed. But I have matched dialogues and situations seamlessly. When you are dubbing, you have to be very careful. Why do they say that it is sounding artificial while dubbing a character? If you are not dubbing the person in the right way, it will sound artificial. When there is a situation where you are sitting on the platform in a railway station and you are talking to somebody next to you, how would you talk? When you are dubbing it, this is the way we are going to talk; this is the way we are going to communicate. But when you realize that there is a whole load of activity happening behind you – there’s a locomotive, which is creating noise behind you, there are coolies shouting, there are people running around – then what happens is you will automatically raise your pitch so that you can hear yourself above the din. So, you have to dub like that. You have to make sure that you are taking your environment into consideration when you are doing a dub. Otherwise, it is going to sound very fake, because then I have to reduce everything else to accommodate you. Why does that “Chanachur wala” (peanut vendor) sound like that? Q: He has to be heard. B: When he is selling his “Sing Dana or chanachur” (peanuts) you are putting filter on his voice. If he has to raise his volume above what is happening, which is easily 70-75 decibels of sound in a railway station,
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you will lose his voice in two hours. So, he has devised a plan where he has filtered his own voice and it’s cutting through the din. You have rolled off one particular frequency and you are boosting one particular frequency so that in that whole low, mid or heavy environment, this high frequency is piercing and you are turning around to look at it. You are hearing him. You have to create that in dubbing, which is hard work. It’s not impossible but it’s hard work and it can be done. Still, the kind of natural things that you get in sync sound is definitely far better than recreated sounds. If you have to recreate like that, it is possible in dubbing but it will take you much, much longer. Two weeks of dubbing shift is not enough for that. But sync sound definitely captures the location and it captures the way you would talk in that location. It’s very difficult for many actors to recreate that thing. Many of the actors don’t even understand pitch. If you are telling them to speak in high pitch, they shout! He thinks it is volume. Q: How much information do you keep in your design when the sync sound tracks are coming in? Do you clean the noise or you would prefer to keep a certain amount of incidental noises in the voice? B: It’s very important to record room tone at the end of the day in the particular location. That room tone is very important for all of us. I have to clean the sound to a certain extent because there is information in the dialogue that should not get compromised. So, your dialogue level should be above your existing noise level. Basically, it’s very important that you have your dialogues clean in order to be heard. I prefer to clean my dialogues as much as possible and I always fall back on the room tone and the subsequent sounds that we kind of layer. So, it has to stand above all that. Q: If it’s an outdoor sequence, then the room tone will not be there. But there will be – B: You are talking about ambience. Your room tone becomes your street tone. LG. Q: Yeah. Would you like to keep that room tone? B: You’ll have to. Q: Even after cleaning the voice? B: You have to because that’s defining your space. You are shooting next to the seashore. You will have that sea sound. You cannot have it. Q: Then again, you add ambience. Why do you do that? B: Because what is happening is when you are shooting on location, you are shooting in one focused area in that entire vast space. When you are capturing the dialogue, sync sound is basically capturing the sync elements
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in the film - the walk, the action and the dialogues. If I’m capturing a sound, I have to create a texture and I have to create other sounds as well. I have to create layers in order to make it sound complete - I have to create other layers as well. That particular area may not have that particular sound. I may require a huge sea wave. At that moment it is not there but I have to give that impression. So, I have to create a sea wave and just to give it a little feel, I want to have a distant ship horn. I want to have a few Seagulls screaming. So, I want to put these elements so that they take you to that particular location. It can create a kind of nostalgia - it can create a mood. It can create, you know, an environment. Thus, you will require so many tracks. You will want to extend your canvas. You have this much. Now you just want to create that whole space for them. You are just extending that. Q: Then it doesn’t become just information. It probably becomes… it is able to give sort of a feeling that it’s present there. B: No. Information I am talking about vis-à-vis dialogue. Q: Okay. B: When somebody is communicating, when I am saying, “Hello, how are you?” - it is an information. “I am fine. Where had you been?” “I was at the police station. Or I went to this sort of a hotel.” You are giving that information by way of dialogue. If there is information coming from that dialogue at that moment, that information is more important to me than everything else. But when I am sitting and thinking or when I am shooting in one particular room and I want to make it sound like it is near the seaside, I have to create a seaside. If I’m shooting in a set, I’m not necessarily going out. Or if I’m shooting here I want to make it sound like I am in London. I am in Westminster. If I am in Westminster, I will hear the Big Ben every half-an-hour. I will hear the traffic; I will hear the boats on The Thames. But I don’t have the budget to go and shoot over there. So, I am shooting in one particular room with English wallpaper behind and my London library playing the soundscape. I am artificially creating that. Q: When you look back to the 70’s or 80’s, most of the films – just take some examples: Deewaar9 or Dharmatma10 or films like that – don’t give any sort of location feel what you said. There is no room tone first of all. The use of ambience is minimal - it almost comes down to only bird chirping and nothing else. We have consumed those kinds of films; we have gotten entertained. How do you think that in those films the presence or absence of ambience play a role?
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B: If you look at the filmmaking process also, they were quite simplistic. I would call it simplistic by today’s standards. They were very good stories. The scripts were very good. That’s why we watched them and they did extremely well. But if you are looking at the craft of filmmaking, I don’t think I would be too happy with that kind of a craft. Today, I would not. Q: Okay. B: That’s definitely not the way. I would have thought in a different way. It all depends - it was exaggerated. I mean for God’s sake, every time a guy hit the other we had this “Dhishum” sound! Q: LG. B: LG. That was sound design in those days. It created an impact. There were people who were called to do all these sounds. It added to the drama, you know. But back in the day, I mean, that was the way it was. Q: The particular group who would keep on playing that. B: Yes. And the shouting and the excess – people did try out all those kind of things. But they tried in a different way and not necessarily with ambience and things but they did try with sound. They did try and create stuff. They did try and play around in whatever way, whatever effects it had. But it was way too simplistic compared to today.
Notes 1
Duration: 1:29:08 Name abbreviations: Bishwadeep Chatterjee – B, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q 2 My Fair Lady (George Cukor 1964) 3 The Sound of Music (Robert Wise 1965) 4 Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen 1952) 5 The iconic theme music from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola 1972) 6 Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) 7 Madras Cafe (Shoojit Sircar 2013) 8 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) 9 Deewaar (Yash Chopra 1975) 10 Dharmatma (Feroz Khan 1975)
CHAPTER 24 KUNAL SHARMA1
Q: Nowadays you work with Pro Tools and other digital systems - how is it different from the earlier days? K: The very first thing that was different is that you can see the sound. You can see what the tracks look like, the waveforms. You can see and you can hear, “Okay, this is the beat” and then you can cut the noise. It's a very interactive way of working. Q: But in magnetic recording you could also touch it. K: You could touch it; you could hear it. That was a different feel altogether. I mean, even nowadays we are trying to get back to the kind of sound quality we used to get on tape. We don’t have that anymore, you know. The tape has a completely different take on whatever you give it. Whatever you’ve done, whatever you give, it just makes it much nicer and warmer. Even with film, I think, when you do a DI then you take a print out, the print looks better than your digital version just because of the medium, I feel. I love that medium. The only problem is that it’s too expensive. Q: Do you find that working with the digital format having multiple channels offers you some flexibility? K: It does offer a lot of flexibility in terms of creative things that you put into that kind in analog because – we’ve mixed Devdas 2 in analog in Anand, Sanjay Bhansali. Leslie was there, me, Vikram, the designing head, and at a certain point everybody was on the mixer because there are so many channels you are operating on. I am operating four tracks, Vikram’s operating a couple, Leslie is doing the dialogue and the music. So, I mean, just to achieve something the way you wanted it to be was a little difficult. Now it has become very easy. But the problem is the aesthetics of the people is not the same. Because we had limitations at the time in which we were trained, we’d put the sound that was required. You couldn’t just put anything. So, limitation was good in terms of controlling the sound and making it better. Nowadays, with the new students, you have so many tracks and so many libraries that they just see the visuals
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and there’s no thought-process. There’s not something that you’re thinking about regarding storytelling or anything. It’s not the state of mind right now. Because of Facebook there’s so much of distraction around. You have an assistant sitting with you at the back, and probably he is not seeing your work and understanding something but probably checking his Facebook stuff on the phone. It’s a lot to do with the generation’s mindset also. I mean they want things really fast. They want to grow really fast. Just coming out of the institute they want to do two films, and then be a sound designer, or a director or an actor or whatever. But I feel that the period of struggle is very key for you in understanding what you are doing in terms of your craft, which I think is missing nowadays. There are very few people you will come across nowadays, who you will think have it and then you try to help them, you try to push them. That is one problem right now that I feel is there - the situation. Q: I am very curious about the use of ambience, and how it used to be – K: It’s beautiful. See, I’ll tell you how I got into it. I was under Aloke Dey. We had Pro Tools, we had ambiences. We did a few films in terms of sound effects. Otherwise, we used to do dialogue matching and stuff. We did a few of them and Dolby had just come in. I was there in the transition phase. And I saw people recording on stripe tape, putting some sound effects on stripe tape and they were very good and very fast in doing that manually. That was physical labour. You hear the sound, you mark it, cut it down, splice it and put it onto an RT. But they were really good. There was Sadanand Shetty and his team who I saw at that point. In every reel if you have 20 tracks, you’ll have 20 tapes. Q: Hm. K: So we used to put those tapes on dubbers and transport to mixing. They used to take four tracks at a time because we only had four tracks. So, I’ve seen those limitations. Once we had Pro Tools, I saw the possibility of what more you can achieve over here because of the limitations these guys had. Ambience used to be put directly into the mix earlier. So, what used to happen is, they used to do a dialogue pre-mix and effects pre-mix that’s the main sound effects - and music pre-mix. Then, whatever ambiences they felt they needed, they’d patch them in the mix itself. So we were supposed to do SFX. That was our job and we were was not entitled to do ambience. Then, Kathuria Sir opened his own studio called Kathuria Audio Techniques. He put me there. But instead of Pro Tools, he got in a PARIS, which was cheaper. So I started working over there on the PARIS for a while. I worked for him for a year and then I quit because we weren’t just getting along. I had creative differences or whatever. We were
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just getting into not a very good space. He was a friend of my dad’s and that’s how I got into sound. Otherwise, I’d have never been here. Probably I don’t know what the fuck I’d be doing, to be really honest, because I was not studying. I wasn’t doing anything. I was just wasting my time. Sound just opened so many other things in me. It changed me as a person. It changed my understanding and everything. Many things that I didn’t get from the books, I started understanding in terms of sound. So when I started working there and the sound effects work used to come, he told me to start putting ambiences also. Even then I never put ambiences. I only did sound effects, dubbing matching, and I used to send it to the mix theater. Q: For mono mix? K: No, for Dolby mix. We used to have a limitation of sixteen tracks. Everything had to come in sixteen tracks and that’s what you’d send to the mix, because it would not take anything over sixteen tracks. During 199798 I was in Sunny (sound studio). Then one year I was at Kathuria. In 1999, I joined this company called “Aawa.” They were the dealers in Pro Tools at that point. I was sick of PARIS because that was just cramping me a bit. So, I joined this company and over there, I started working on this film called Mission Kashmir.3 We were doing sound effects in Mission Kashmir. Manoj Sikka was there with me. There was another colleague of mine, Jatin, who was also there with me in Sunny under Aloke. I first started learning Pro Tools from him. But the work I actually learnt from Aloke Sir and Kathuria sir. In Aawa we did Mission Kashmir and Aloke was mixing the film at that time. Kathuria sir had just stopped mixing and Aloke was just starting mixing. So, I met him. He said, “Okay, 16, no? I know you need more for this film.” He gave me 24 tracks as the final output. “You give it to me in 24 tracks.” That’s what he could take on the Omni mix and the number of faders, his limitations. So he opened up his limitation by 8 more tracks and said, “Use more tracks, but do it nicely.” We started working on the film. When we started the climax - the last twenty minutes of the film - it took a month to do that. But see, the same thing is with limitations. Right now, we are playing with some 200/250 tracks of sound effects. Then I had only 24 tracks. In that, we did ambience as well as sound effects. So you picked and chose your sound. You went through libraries, you know. You just picked the right sound to put over there. I wasn’t from the FTII. I never knew how to EQ or use the compressor. So, I think, all the limitations actually worked better for me in just sourcing of the right sound and putting them. Eventually when I started doing that, that was the time when I was roaming around in the mountain or I was on the beach. I keep hearing a lot of stuff. Even now it
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happens to me. When I am in a space, I am just hearing a lot of the surrounding. That’s the way I’ve got tuned to it. There’s a lot of ambience - there is rhythm in nature, there is sadness in nature. Everything is there in nature. I mean, if you have noted - even a fan has a rhythm of its own if you just hear it. So it is just putting those sounds at the right point if you can. That’s the thing. But ambience is what makes it real, what makes those visuals real so that you, as a person, can identify with it generally, but you are not aware of it. It’s in your subconscious. I mean it’s all around you. But immediately if you hear those things on screen, you start relating with the space. If I am in a chawl, how does it sound? How does it sound if I am on a railway station? So once it sounds real, it’s more real for you as an experience to watch the film. That’s what I think. That is why my thing is in ambience - I’ve always done ambience since the beginning. Since Devdas, I think for Paanch4, Devdas, Mission Kashmir, I made ambiences. It’s been creating that space. That’s become more creative and fun for me rather than putting a gunshot or all of that, you know. That’s the kind of mood it sets. When you have so many variations of sound, which can probably make you feel a happy space or a sad space or whatever. That is just too much to play with. I am having too much fun and I want to continue it. Why do you think ambience is being used? You actually felt that people are using more ambiences nowadays! Q: Not only that it’s evident. But I am also thinking how the space itself, real space, is represented only in terms of ambience – the sheer amount of ambience. K: Right. Q: There is no ambience in earlier films of 70’s 80’s, even early 90’s. K: Have you seen Satyajit Ray’s films? Q: Satyajit Ray is like a reference point. K: Yeah. See, you always have people who use it and you always have people who don’t. You still have them. It is also the kind of mix. I’ve learnt from Aloke Sir that it is so much nicer… I understood the mixing bits and nuances from him once I started doing films with him that I had designed. So I know exactly what I’ve designed. Then he understands what I’ve done and he is coming with his own take with the music or softness or whatever. We haven’t tried to do the conventional way the films are mixed here, where everything is on your face and full loud or there is no aesthetics or you are not enjoying it because it’s hurting you. I personally want you to sit through a film, have a nice perspective towards the film and enjoy it the way I can present it to you maybe. I think my job is to make you sit through that film. Whether the film’s going to work or
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not is not my job. My job is to make you sit through the film and make you understand as much as I can about that space and time, the story that we are telling about, what is the director trying to tell over there. If you can watch all of that and come out with a smile and just say, “I had fun,” it’s good for me. It’s very good for me. I’ve done quite a lot of stuff, which are radical also. Gangs of Wasseypur (part 2) 5 was completely radical. Part 1 I loved and I had lots of fights in Part 1 mix with Aloke and Anurag. I thought there’s too much background score in the film, too much of music overall in the film, which just didn’t let you breathe. But that was a better film. Part 2 mix is much better, I think. The film is not as good. Q: I also felt that. K: Yeah. I think part 2 mix is one of the best mixes we came up with in my entire career. Before that, I thought Udaan6 was one of the best. Part 2 was very good and Sreejesh did something in the last track, which we didn’t expect at all. I just gave him the track and we were getting ready to go to Cannes and stuff. In like three or four hours, his first mix was ready and he called me. I went and saw it and I liked what he did. But I wasn’t sure because of so much of panic, how the audience would react because the sound was just moving all around. So I wasn’t very sure and I said, “I can still stay with the visual. Let me check with other people, you know.” Then I called Anurag. Then he saw the mix and he also liked it. He was skeptical in the beginning because Sreejesh had just muted it down, and just came up with a bang with the gunshot, which was perfect. But he didn’t realize it. When it came, he was just gone. He was just very happy. That’s how it happened. But I was still a little skeptical saying how people will react to this in the theater. So, we went to Cannes. We finished one scratch mix and we took it to Cannes for screening. We had back-to-back screening of part 1 and part 2. We sat for the screening; there were few people, not house full as such, but quite a few people. Within the first twenty minutes of part 1, I saw a few people walk out of the auditorium little bit heart-wrenching. Then part 1 finished. People went out to get a twenty-minute break and then part 2 started. People came back after those twenty minutes, which was encouraging because they wanted to see more of this. Then we went through part 2 and that climax came eventually. I knew when it was coming and what was going to happen. I was not looking at the screen. I was looking at everybody around me, like how they were reacting. Are the heads turning to the sounds around or they’re still with the visual and not leaving that? Nobody left the visual. Nobody turned around, nobody did anything. They were there. So it works. Q: Did the panning work?
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K: The panning, I mean in the sense, in that state of mind the climax was at the point where this man’s outbursts after being all of that. So it needed that state of mind that was my brief to Sreejesh. That is needed - 7.1, rest of the whole film was in 5.1. Only reel 6 and reel 8 were in 7.1. Q: Okay. K: Only those two sequences where the house is attacked and Nawaz runs to the terrace and jumps off, that reel is in 7.1 and that reel number 8 is in 7.1. That works. Throughout the first half, you are not used to listening to these speakers. Suddenly, they just open up the entire space. For me, personally, it was a problem in terms of the film because his mother dies in reel 8 after the shootout in the house and after that I thought the film actually dipped. It didn’t hold too much. So I did a lot of gimmicky things just to have fun. It was like a party thing. I mean we did till four hoursfour and a half hours. Now if I can just extend it and have a party, I’m going to have a party. That’s what we did in terms of the sound design we had a party in the climax. Q: The gunshots sound very realistic. Did you use the stock sounds of gun? K: We did use the stock sounds as references. But Mishaal was working with me at that point. He came on during the post. He had seen through Wasseypur. I took him to the shoot just for him to understand that entire process. I pushed him a lot in the post. Then he came out with some really good stuff. I left that bit onto him because I was mixing. He was working on the gunshots. He did one run, two runs on that. We saw it in the mix theater and I told him that it was not working. “Push it up a little more, make it a little more in your face,” and things like that. What he actually did was he used stock tracks and then he created different sounds underneath. So, every gunshot has probably got some 10-12 tracks underneath it. Everything has got a different EQ on it, going through a different compression and then coming up, with a different panning. He and Sreejesh actually collaborated for that bit. I had just my briefs and wanted them to play with and have a ball. “Do what the fuck you want to. As much as you want. You want to make a 7.1 show reel – just do it” - that was my brief. They had complete freedom to do whatever they wanted. That’s how it came out. I just had to oversee things and then finally just put them together and stuff. It was a brilliant job by Mishaal. Zahir was there. He was doing the dialogue clean ups and everything - brilliant job done by him. I was getting married and everything was too stressful. In the middle I was losing it and I had told them, “You guys only design it! Do what the fuck you want.” Eventually, I came back after my wedding
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because we had to go to Cannes. Then we started working. But the ground-work was so good by these guys, that I could take it to the next level. Q: Was it shot in sync? K: Yeah. Q: Did you use the voices, the dialogues primarily in sync or did you dub? K: Yes, mostly in sync. When I was shooting, I was very particular that even if I get 40% of this because there was so much noise around, so much ambiences, truck horns, this, that… I thought probably we would be dubbing 60% of the film. But eventually we managed dubbing only 1015% of the film because Zahir worked very hard. We had different takes and everything. I showed him ways and he picked up from there and then he just made the track, which was just fantastic. I didn’t have too much to say in it. So, that’s what I am saying. It’s been a team. I mean, Zahir is working with me and I had got him on the shoot during No Smoking.7 He’s been working with me from there. He has also evolved through Udaan, through all those films, Yellow Boots8 and everything. Finally, when this happened, he knew exactly how I push and whatever and delivered something that I was not expecting at all. Both of them. Mishaal wasn’t, but then I pushed him and then he came up with even better stuff. It just happened like that. Then I went to Sinoy. The machine was really bad, we had a bad Pro Tools and the machine would hang and stuff. Sinoy mixed on that. I would have broken that machine if I were mixing on that machine. Sinoy sat there and that part and he did a fantastic job. Everybody, I think every call I made in terms of people collaborating, it just helped. Sometimes these kinds of things happen. But if you see Lootera9, its ambiences… Q: Did you work in Lootera? K: I designed Lootera. Q: Okay. Wow. K: I did the ambiences of that film. Q: It’s a remarkable amount of ambience layering I found. I really liked that. K: Yeah, because the characters were really layered. I mean, apart from Pakhi, everybody around was layered and stuff. Her state of mind was layered when she was in Dalhousie. So reel number 5, the reel just after the interval, was just ambiences - probably one music piece or something. They were really nice, I mean, they worked really well. Q: Are those ambiences shot on location?
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K: They are created. Q: They are created? K: They are created from recorded ambient sounds. You have shot on location. You go and record ambiences. But finally you have to put them together the way you want to. Q: But those ambiences are from the same location? K: Yeah, the same location and we used some exotic birds here and there because we were showing a period. Q: Hm. K: There are some birds that we probably don’t hear now - we only hear traffic. The soundscape can’t be the same, if I have to make that. So I’ve to put a little bit of imagination and make it more believable in terms of space. You have to create those because you just don’t get it. Sometimes you just pick it out and put and it just works. Randomly you just pull and drag it into a session, you may have forgotten about it. You come and see it at that point and it just works! That’s the magic of working. Things happen also when you have the same thought process. Q: Was it also in sync? The dialogues were all in sync? K: Yeah. Most of them were in sync. Q: How do you find the difference between dialogue in-sync and dialogue dubbed? K: Huge difference. LG. Q: Yes. LG. K: I don’t like the dubbed dialogue track anymore. It’s also the case with my directors. We even try to dub whatever’s on location. The space, the environment, and the actor in that space - everything matters. It just matters. But, sometimes, you don’t have good locations and you’ll have to dub and try and make it sound like that is the location. Q: Do you clean up? K: Yeah. Q: How much do you clean? I mean there is so much of information. K: See, first of all, you try to keep it as open as possible for yourself to help you in post. Then you clean it. If you’ve given two mics to two characters, when you are talking this is picked up here as well. So I need to cut this, use this guy only when he is talking, that guy only when he is talking. That is the amount of work that you have to do with everything. Then there is a boom track, if you also have a stereo track. That’s what
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Zahir has mastered right now. If Zahir were not there, I’d have gotten fucked because I have left it onto him and he has taken it over. The same thing was with Mishaal - I left him to it and he came up and he took it over. That’s when the films design goes on to a different level. If I am only bothered about the groundwork and about cleaning up and doing everything myself, it won’t go to that level. Q: Yeah. K: So once they do those corrections and I get it to a level, I go to Aloke. Then he takes it to another level. That’s the way of working, I think. That’s the way a film should be done. Q: You said correct. How is that? It’s a very relative thing to be correct in dialogue cleaning. Cleaning means erasing a lot of information from the location about that site and its environments. K: Lots of unwanted information. Maybe there’s the gain, which is too loud, or maybe there’s a hiss in the track, which you don’t know. So you take the hiss out. Or there are traffic horns, which you don’t want in between the scene because you want the focus to be here and it’s disturbing you. So you cut that out and you layer it with something else. Even those are dialogue-editing job. That’s how you do. It’s like how you do film editing - you are taking one shot from here, one shot from there and putting them together, right? So, it’s the same thing that you have to do with sound. It’s not going to be like “I have got this thing for the sound and this is the best.” You’ve put this take, this is the sound. I don’t work like that. I try to see which one is a better take. If this is not working for me in a flow, then I go out in different takes. I take them out; we try and do that stuff. All those things are necessary. That’s the problem, you know. Nowadays you don’t have people who think that way and want to give that much of an effort. Q: And then the ambience. Coming back to ambience: do you think that handling of ambience will be much more elaborate in the multiple channels now available in your hand, like even in Atmos? K: To be frank, for me, it always was elaborate. With Atmos, I see even more possibility to do it. But I am scared about Atmos. it’s because it can easily overpower my visual. Q: Yes. K: I can easily overpower my visual in Atmos. I don’t want to do that. I never want to overpower my visual. Q: But why?
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K: Because they have to work in sync - as in the audio and the visual they have to get together. At any point if anyone is overpowering the other, then it doesn’t work for me. Q: Visuals for many years have already overpowered sound itself. K: Yeah, if they have done something that doesn’t mean that I have to do something wrong. LG. Q: LG. Probably some films may require that the sounds overpower. K: I mean, if you need. I’m not saying that you don’t use the space. I’m talking about overpowering in terms of loudness. I’m not saying I’m not going to use these speakers at all because they are going to overpower. It’s not that. It’s in terms of loudness that I’m talking about. My sound shouldn’t be louder than it should be. Q: Okay. K: Or my visual shouldn’t be softer than the sound, or whatever, it shouldn’t be that way. I’m not saying I’m not going to use this space. I want to use it even more. But it has to be subtle to hear. If I make it louder, then you as an audience – because I am seeing a few films nowadays where you go into a theater and there’s so much action and sound information in that film that at a certain point you as an audience are stuck in your seat. There’s so much (enacts gun firing sound), when finally that’ll be over you’re like “Ah!” I don’t want that. I want you to sit through and enjoy. Q: So the rear channels are the extra ones? K: No. In 5.1 you had 6 audio-tracks, now you’ve 64 discreet tracks. So, that’s a lot more possibility where your entire sound image can change. The kind of imaging that you were fighting and trying to get in 5.1, is much more possible in Atmos and it’ll be even better if you just use it correctly and nicely. Sometimes you might have to overpower it. That’s the way it is. Q: Hm. But do you frankly think that those extra speakers are needed at all? For what purpose are they needed? K: See, now you can get 5.1 in your house, on a TV channel. What’s the next thing for cinema to stay alive? You need these kinds of things. These are not bad things. I mean everything has a good use and a bad use. People, who use good stuff badly, would still use it badly. People who think there’s a possibility of making the good even better will do that. That’s all going to be there. So you can’t say that the technology is bad or what’s the need of these speakers. It’s a nice space if you can use it nicely to its potential and for what do you think is right. If it works for the film, it
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works. There’s nothing that is why would I use a motion control, or why would I use this or that. So, when technology is there, it’s enabling you to do a lot more stuff and there is a possibility. That is a very good thing. Q: Do you think that these extra channels will add to the kind of sonic environment that you would like to create? K: Absolutely. There’s so much more possibility. I’ve been doing 5.1 for the last twelve-thirteen years maybe. I have been doing my designing for 5.1 tracks and everything. Now there is Atmos - it’s better for me because I’m really sick and tired of 5.1. What more do I do? Now that this is there, I am looking at it from a different perspective altogether, like, “Wow I have even more to do now.” This can change a lot of other stuff. There’s a lot more possibility. It is much more improved. I can get these sounds right here in front of your face and probably image it like that and stuff. So there’s a lot more to do and think on that ground, which is better for me because this is more inspiring to think forward. Otherwise, I’d have probably been going down. So, I am looking at that bit. When I joined, I used to work in stereo. Stereo has gone to 5.1, 7.1. Now you’re going to 64. You have a possibility, which was never ever thought of or dreamt of. You haven’t ever thought that you’d be handling that kind of stuff. The things are changing and they will also get better – the usage of your technology. Q: Coming back to the transition from mono to stereo and to multi-channel formats like 5.1, 7.1 and Atmos: how do you see these transitions? What is your impression in terms of sound design, the placement of sound and the environment being created? K: See, to be honest, it wasn’t possible earlier. It was possible to a certain extent on a stereo. Just stereo is also good in the theater. But just imagine 5.1, the whole surround theater with the visual at that size and the characters speaking at that amplification, and the screen size. I mean, normal audience actually identifies with the characters and they think they know them. It’s a very strong connect. That’s what you want to achieve. If you can keep achieving that and you have this space to help you to do that, it is beautiful. Q: But in mono it could not be. K: It couldn’t. You just had one track. There was one speaker playing. I’ll give a simple example now. If I have to create this room in stereo, I have your dubbing which is going in the centre and I put the reverb of this space in my left and right. That will give you a slight feel of the space that you are in. In mono, it will come from that thing only. So, there’s a dialogue also behind you. You can’t register it that well. Your width is not as big.
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Now you have more width and this is even wider. So it gives more possibilities especially for music and ambiences. I don’t know that well; I am going to do my film in Atmos this year - my first film on Atmos. So I’m really going to be testing out a lot of stuff and will probably have even more fun. I just hope I don’t have too much fun and kill it. I’ve to be careful. Q: What are the instructions that you give to your collaborators? K: Nothing as yet. I have only spoken to Sreejesh because he is going to be mixing it. We had a brief chat about it. I’ve told him that I’m going to start off from the front and then eventually have the whole space take over at a certain point, which will happen after the edit. I haven’t had a design structure from the script. I have an idea roughly. But after the edit comes in place, I’ll start implementing those things. Q: Which film is it? K: Bombay Velvet.10 Q: I met Anurag Kashyap in Copenhagen in 2013. He told me that he is planning a film without any music. K: Yeah. That’s the one he is shooting in August, I think. That’s a small film. Q: Okay. It’s a short film or a feature? K: That I don’t know. Bombay Velvet is a jazz club. Q: Okay. K: There’s a lot of live jazz singing in terms of the feel, lip sync, artists performing. We have recorded everything on 96 KHz. That we are doing from Udaan. We mixed Udaan on 96 but the master was given on 48. Lootera we did it again - master went out on 96 as well, DCP. Q: So, 96 Hz is the kind of resolution you kept. Right? K: Yeah, that’s simply what you have in 2k and 4k projection. I mean, you shoot 4k and you project 2k. So, it’s more information that you have. Correct? Q: Yes. K: It’s the same thing with 48 KHz and 96. I have more information and more detail in terms of sound. This happened to me only because Vikram was directing Udaan. He is a very dear friend. He was shooting on super 16mm because he didn’t have the budget. So I went up to him and I said, “If you can’t shoot on film, let’s do sound like that. Let’s record sound on 96. What do you think?” He said, “Go ahead, if you feel like it. It’s your work.” That’s how we did that. Then I spoke to Amit and told him about
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recording the music. But you see that it’s just that openness in the sound in the soundtrack. This is much more open and a much softer mix. Same thing happened in Lootera. Bombay Velvet is also like that. We recorded everything on 96. Q: Is most of the music recorded live? Are they diegetic? K: Live. They’ve gone to Budapest and Prague and recorded strings and everything. So, everything is recorded and planned to be done throughout. Hopefully, we’ll get the Atmos mix on 96, which, I think, is not possible. Q: So, maybe, you have to down-mix on 48 then. K: No. We are figuring out ways to get what we want. I’ve spoken to Sreejesh about it and he is working on it also. It’ll start in September. So we still have time to figure out. Q: Great to talk to you. Thanks a lot. K: You are welcome.
Notes 1
Duration: 00:33:48 Name Abbreviations: Kunal Sharma – K; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Other Abbreviations: Laughter - LG 2 Devdas (Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2002) 3 Mission Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra 2000) 4 Paanch (Five, Anurag Kashyap 2003) 5 Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap 2012) 6 Udaan (Vikramaditya Motwane 2010) 7 No Smoking (Anurag Kashyap 2007) 8 That Girl in Yellow Boots (Anurag Kashyap 2010) 9 Lootera (Vikramaditya Motwane 2013) 10 Bombay Velvet (Anurag Kashyap 2015)
CHAPTER 25 GISSY MICHAEL1
Q: The first thing that I would like to learn about is how you came to sound. G: I grew up in Kerala. During graduation, I read about the Film Institute in the newspapers. Cinematographer Venu and Adoor Gopalakrishnan gave interviews where they talked about the Film Institute and stuff like that. That’s how I learned about it. I was particularly not interested in sound. I wanted to go to the Film Institute. For me it looked like I could get in sound rather than in camera or direction. So that’s how I decided to do sound. Q: But when you entered the sound department and started working with sound, did you get interested in the first place? As you said, you had interest in other departments… G: No, I didn’t know anything about filmmaking at that time. Like to go here or there or whatever. So, I just wanted to go there. Film Institute looked like a place where things were different. Meaning… LG. So, yeah, I wanted to go there. Once I joined, even there, the first year was a common course. We were doing everything. Then we started doing sound. Yeah, then I got interested in it because I knew that’s also another way of telling stories. Q: After passing out, did you come to Mumbai directly? G: Yeah, I did. Q: And you started working as a sound recordist or on location? What kind of profession did you choose? G: At the beginning, I joined the studio. Raj Kamal Mixing studio. I worked there for 3 months I think and then I left. When we were at the Institute it was all analog world. We did all our learning on analog magnetic tape. But as soon as we left the Institute and reached Bombay, things were changing. Even in the studios, they were changing to digital and stuff like that. So, when I joined Raj Kamal that process was going on and there was a lot of confusion inside the studio. I was there for 3 months
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and then I left. From then on I have been doing location sound. Actually both location sound and post, but mainly freelancing. Q: Why did you choose to freelance? Is it because the changeover was difficult to grasp or… G: No. When I was working at the studio, I used to be inside the studio the whole day. You will go inside the studio when there is daylight, you don’t come out the whole day and then when you come out it is all dark. It’s very depressing - that whole process of being inside this dark room. LG. The whole day being gone and when you come out, it’s already night. Anyway, when I left, I slowly started doing location sound, where you get to travel and see a different world. I found that more interesting. Then I continued doing it. Then, of course, when you are doing a film, you want to do the post. So, again you go back to the studio and work. Q: During the early days of location sound, did you use analog recording machines or you started with digital recorders. G: Maybe in the beginning, for a year or two. After that, it was all digital. Q: So the changeover from analog to digital took place for a long time. G: Hmm. Q: Do you think this changeover was helpful for your working or… What is your impression of this analog to digital large scale transition in Indian cinema sound? G: See, the digital gives you a lot more options than analog. You can do a lot with sound. Like, when you listen to some of the sounds that you did early on… you had to record in two tracks and in post also you didn’t have much choice, you know. You had to use it. But, you can have so many tracks even on location. You can record separately. And later, in post also you can do a lot with it. So yeah, that way it is a huge difference. Q: Yeah, so trackwise… G: Track in the sense the way you use sound. Q: Does it help to go to the deeper intricacies of a location? Because you were working on location, when you go… Analog recorders didn’t have many tracks. Only two. But digital recorders give you maybe number of tracks. 16 channels or 4 channels at least. This Sound Devices 702, 744 kind of recorders give that extra number of channels, how do you use those channels on location? G: Mainly we use it to separate all the mics that we use. All those tracks that we are not mixing. Technically, mixing them is not good. It’s bad sound.
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Q: Yeah, absolutely. LG. G: LG. So, you are actually getting a purer sound. Later, in post, you can decide which one you will use and in the mixing we can correct and mix. Q: Purer sounds you are getting. And with the multichannel recorders you also record ambience separately because in analog you had to mix everything together. G: Yeah, in analog. Even a DAT is a digital recorder which is tape-based. There are two tracks. You mix all the booms to one track and lapels to another and you do all the mixing, whatever way you do it there. So yeah, it was tough. LG… It is a tough decision to, sometimes you missed out on something and… Q: Is it not difficult for the one who is working inside a studio to handle all those purer sounds? G: Yes. Post has become huge now because you have to handle so many sounds. You have so many options. I do post also, so it becomes a longer process now. But, I think that’s good. I like it better than getting all mixed up sounds and then you don’t know… LG. Q: Do you work with sync sound as well? G: Yeah. Q: And when you do sync sound, do you record ambience while you record the action or after or before that? G: Normally, you finish a scene and record the ambience for that particular scene. Wherever you are. Q: Okay. G: Later on you record more ambience but while shooting that’s it. Q: Do you have anything particular to say about the atmosphere or ambience that you collect? G: In what way? Q: Your impressions. Like, what you think ambience does to cinema. G: Over a period of time, I think this happens to everybody, the way you use sound changes. In the beginning, you want to fill the track with all possible kinds of sounds. Like, I look at my diploma film now, I will be like, “My God! I have put all sorts of sound on that track.” I mean, you think, “It is possible here, put it. That is possible here, put it.” So, everything is there. But now, I can’t put sounds like that. I am always trying to remove sounds from my track now. I feel like, “this scene doesn’t need any sound.” LG.
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Q: So, it is kind of minimal work that is… G: Now I don’t feel like putting more sounds because I feel, no, this scene… I mean, you are distracting with that sound. Even if it is an ambient sound, I feel that often. So I end up removing a lot of sounds and the directors feel that I have not done much work on it. LG. Especially if the director is someone new, they also have the same thing. “Oh, can we put more things?” In the beginning you feel that way. Q: If there are no atmospheric sounds in the track, the information about the location where you shoot, whether it is a village or a train station or inside a room or in an airport… These kind of spaces, they come alive with ambiences. G: Yes. Q: But, if the ambience is not there then how do you relate to that particular place, in cinema? G: No, I didn’t mean that I won’t put any ambience. You have to create that space for that scene in a non-distracting way. An airport can also be created without all those distractions because if you sit in an airport you are not always hearing announcements or there might be some other kind of sounds. Normal sound is something else. Q: Yeah, you can just use that instead of, you know, flights flying and all that. G: Same for village. The other day, I was watching a film and whenever it was night, there was a dog barking. LG. It’s true that dogs bark at night. Even here, I hear dogs barking but… Sometime it just feels... No, I mean, maybe it is real but it doesn’t sound right for the scene. You need ambience. Maybe if you hear the ambience, it might just sound like noise. But when you use it in the film it won’t. It is something like subconsciously getting that feeling. Q: Like those two crows. If they are not there it doesn’t matter but if they are there it adds to that sense that you are situated somewhere. G: A lot of times we don’t hear or we don’t actually acknowledge the sound. We are hearing it but we don’t notice it, right? That’s because we are not concentrating on that. The same applies for a scene also. We don’t need it sometimes. Q: What is your emphasis on voice? Do you want to make your voice very intelligible, clean, clear and crisp? G: Yeah, I want to. I think in Indian films or anywhere for that matter, when somebody is saying something on screen, you want to hear it and everybody is not hearing it with Bitumen speakers, right? So, there is
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always a focus on making it clearer than it already is so that it can be heard everywhere. Q: But when we speak like we are speaking… G: Yeah, I know. Sometimes you miss. Logically it is true. LG. For example this film Interstellar… Have you seen it? Q: Yes. G: If you don’t have subtitles you don’t understand a thing. Q: Yes. G: LG. And half the time people don’t… Even English-speaking... even in the US people have complained, “We couldn’t understand the dialogues. What is it?” I mean, if you have a culture of listening to that kind of sound it is fine. But, we don’t. So, it’s okay. In fact the director also said, “It’s okay. If you don’t hear one dialogue it is fine because the scene is establishing it. So you don’t have to hear every word.” But that’s a different thought process. We have to reach that thought process. Q: There are situations where you see people are speaking but you don’t hear them. For example, Close Up by Abbas Kiarostami2 or La Notte by Antonioni.3 In that scene in La Notte, this woman is speaking with a man inside a car and we see that they are very intimately talking with each other but we don’t hear anything as it is raining. Our curiosity regarding what they are talking about is completely denied, as if the dialogue is hideous. And in Close up, this guy is passing by a very busy traffic - in those kind of situations which are part of our reality, this reality that we live in and in those situations which are very real, we often don’t get to hear what other people are saying. In cinema if we would like to make the sequences or scenes real, believable and authentic, then we don’t need to hear what people are saying. Isn’t it? G: It’s true. But see, the scene has to be constructed like that. It is not in our hands for that matter. If the scene is constructed like that, it is completely fine. But we don’t, at least here… I mean in some films, of course, people try that but the general trend is to hear everything and see everything. So.... Of course some people are breaking that and doing stuff. Q: Do you think that film is not a replica of reality? G: No, personally I don’t think that film should be reality. I think films should be something more than real. Q: More than real? G: Yes. That’s when it becomes art, no? If it is reality then what’s… Q: Okay.
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G: Not just sound-wise, I mean. As story or… Yeah. Q: That’s a very interesting perspective. Yes, films should be art and that is the reason they should not copy reality. But, if film is art, in your opinion then what are the parameters to consider it as good art or bad art or a failure. When is it good art? G: See, I think for different people different things are considered as art. Something could be art for me, may not be for you. So… LG. I feel any art, any painting, anything should speak to you in some way. It would speak to me in one way and to you differently, but it should speak in some way. I think that’s what will make it an art. It doesn’t mean that commercial films are not… You like some of the commercial films that you watch, right? Something that you liked about it, something you could connect with. So, those films also have something in them. You have to get that. Why is it that you can’t even watch some films? Even in fast forward mode, some films can’t be watched. Right? LG. Because, obviously, it is not saying anything to you, even with all the right whatever… Q: In terms of transformation of reality, you record reality and then you work on it to create another reality. As you said, it’s more like a transformation from reality to art. How do you see that transformation? Like, you record sound from a particular location with a particular story in mind and then you come to the studio, you cut down and you put them in place… G: Right. See, I have been working on films like… Generally, I am involved with it from the beginning and I like it that way. Sometimes I only do location sync sound, sometimes only post. But mostly I do from the beginning to the end. Location sound and then post, so you are involved in it from the beginning. In your head also the story changes when you read the script, then you shoot, then you see the edit and then you actually start working on it. When you actually start working on it and start putting sounds, you do a basic layering of sound, basic ambient track, dialogue and everything. Then you start going into details. Things you probably put in the first place thinking this is… But the sound for that scene may not work once you start doing all the detailing. You might think it is not working, it is not good, the sound is not good. That process goes on and on, throughout. You keep going, putting, removing, putting, and removing. And probably, yeah, you end up with something different by the end of it, at the time of the mixing. So, what you think at the beginning and what you come up with… The finished track might be something
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different. It is a process that you go through. And of course you are always working with the director. The two minds have to meet. Otherwise… Q: Do you have your own say when you work? Do you have enough independence in a way? Autonomy of what kind of sound you want… G: See, finally I feel it is not for me to decide. Finally, it is the director’s film. You can tell the director why you put a certain sound and if he or she doesn’t like it or connect to it then I can’t push further because it is not my film to push. Finally, it is her vision or his vision, so… Q: Yeah. But, when you work with sound you also have some sort of… G: So, we have discussions about certain sounds and how or why it is used. If the other person is okay with it, then yes. I mean, a lot of times the directors approve what I do. So, it’s not like… Because they approve, they like what they heard. Q: I am very curious to know about this transformation that you do. Because you record and then you reproduce sound. Produce sounds to make them ready for reproduction in the cinema. G: Right. When you are recording you are only concentrating on one sound, okay? For example: recording the ambience of this area. For this apartment, okay, I am recording an apartment ambience. So, when I am recording one sound, I am concentrating on that. But when you are working on the final film, you put that, and then you put 4 other sounds. So, it is no longer this one sound that you are hearing in the studio. That’s how I think the transformation starts. Then you are not at all thinking that this is an apartment. You are seeing it in the whole thing with the picture, what is happening on screen. Then you are thinking differently. So, then you are cutting out this sound, that sound and adding something else. Like that. Q: Through this process you make a journey from one cinematic reality to another? G: Yeah. Q: In terms of technological development, you said that digital technology was more advantageous, for example, many more tracks and various other kinds of affordances. But this is also a sort of recent changeover from 2000s. Even in late 90s all the films were mixed on mono and then a little period of stereophonic sound came and then suddenly there is 5.1 – so these are also transitions from mono to stereo, stereo to surround sound. This spatial dynamics surrounding the screen is also changing. What do you think about this? How do you look at this particular change of spatiality with sound?
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G: One thing with mono sound was that it was recorded on film. Finally, when the transfer happens, half the sounds are gone. Like, you could not hear a lot of low frequencies, high frequencies are distorted and those kinds of stuff. I haven’t done too many mono films. So I don’t have that kind of an experience other than the ones I did in Film Institute. By the time I came to Bombay and started working on films, they were already stereo or something else. So, in the Institute that used to happen. Like sounds being distorted, things not being there, all that. In 5.1, you knew this is going to be heard like this in theatre. So you didn’t have to think whether the sound was going to be there. That’s a big change. And then, you also know that this is the soundscape that you have created. This is going to be like this. When you finally hear it on a laptop, it is not there but still, at least in the theatre you know that it’s going to be there. Q: I am actually asking about the addition of tracks… G: That was one track. Mono means it is one track. Everything needs to come from one speaker. Among all the other sounds, dialogue gets preference and everything else is kind of struggling with it. But with 5.1, you have the option of spreading them out to different speakers or different tracks. So, dialogue is mainly coming from the centre track, ambience is coming from somewhere else, music is coming from the stereo. You could use it more freely or dynamically. You still have to worry about dialogues but you have more space to work with. So giving more space… Q: So, giving more space, meaning that sound is often coming outside of the screen. Like in mono, sound was coming from behind the screen. In stereophonic sound was coming from two sides of the screen. There was a little bit of spatiality between them. But then in surround sound and in Dolby Atmos, more we go forward, the sounds are coming from all areas, which are not covered by the screen. Do you think that there is a disjuncture between the screen and the sound? G: Most of the times in 5.1, the surround tracks are used mainly for that atmospheric feeling and not for some major sounds. All those major sounds come from the centre and left and right. It is for the atmosphere, just for a feeling. As you said, sound is a subconscious thing. You are hearing it subconsciously, not really like, “oh, it’s coming from here.” Both. Generally we put ambience and music on surround but in a very non-distracting way. So, I don’t think it’s disconnected from the screen. We use it like that. Q: For example, a bird passing over the top of your head, an airplane…
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G: Correct. See, for those kind of films, you see a plane passing. I think it works. LG. Yeah, it kind of works. Q: Kind of works. G: Like, not always. I mean, once or twice. You can’t have that kind of sound throughout the film obviously but it’s just... you use it for fun, once or twice. Q: So, what is the basic difference between when sound is coming from the centre and when sound is coming from the surround? Does it add? G: See, if you… No. I feel a distraction is a distraction if it’s some kind of a very specific sound. Suddenly you feel, “okay, somebody is…” Otherwise, if it is non-distracting ambience and music, I don’t think people find it… Yeah. Q: Distraction, you say, in terms of visual storytelling? G: Yeah. Q: So, you don’t want to distract the audience from the… G: Unless you want to. In the story if you want to distract, then it is part of the story. But sometimes it is unintentional. You don’t want to distract the audience but anyway they get distracted. People getting distracted by the sound is bad sound. Q: Often sound is not given a particular sonic or aural narrative. the visual narrative is kept dominant. Why are we discussing the idea of distraction? Distraction in terms of not giving a chance to the audience to look around, outside of the screen, to keep the audience glued to the screen. That is the reason we are saying that we should not distract the audience. So, here we are giving the visual narrative more dominant power than the sound. Sound should follow what the screen is saying, whatever is happening inside the screen. But, don’t you think that sound in cinema can have its own independent narrative? G: Yes, I mean, it can. That’s why I said, unless you don’t want that distraction to be a part of the story… Yes, you can have… If you want to, I mean, yeah… Like in 2001: A Space Odyssey4, the black screen is there in the beginning for a long time. And they start the music and people were distracted at that time to not see anything on screen… Q: What’s happening, yeah… G: So, that was the intention. I mean you get used to that. You internalize it. You can use it like that. But we don’t use it like that. We can, of course we can. But then, yeah, that’s what, it’s a part of the storytelling. It should
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come from the storyteller. He can’t, at the last minute, be like, “Let’s do it.” We can’t. It should be a part of the storytelling. Q: And that storytelling will be mostly carried out by the visual images. G: What I mean is that it has to come from the storyteller. The usage of sound… Q: Okay, it has to come from the storyteller! G: Yeah, we won’t be able to use it like, “Okay! You have shot the film. Now I will put sound like this.” That’s what I meant by distraction. Then it is distracting for no reason. There should be a reason as to why it is distracting, isn’t it? There should be something else. Q: Many writers, when they are telling stories, give amazing amount of details. Like Satyajit Ray, he made films based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. 5 All the stories of Apu are based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s literary texts. And he writes in an extremely detailed fashion. Details about what we hear in that particular sequence, particular episode. Immense amount of details of everyday life that the characters live by. So, if you get a storyteller like that who gives you immense amount of details - not necessarily visual details but also aural details - do you think you will think of a parallel narrative? G: Yeah. See, then you will have to shoot the film like that. You are already expecting the sound to come like that and then you shoot it. Right? That’s what I meant. It has to come from the storyteller. You have to already be thinking of sound while shooting for that. Which doesn’t happen often. LG… I mean it can happen obviously. If you look at films like, say, action films. Sound plays a big part in making them look that way. If somebody watched those film without all those sounds, they won’t feel the same thing. Right? So, it’s something that you have to think about while shooting. That’s what I meant… You can’t do much unless the filmmaker is already thinking about it. Otherwise, if you put something, it will become a forced thing. It’ll be like you have put that sound but it is not really creating any effect. Q: So, it should come from the storyteller? G: Yeah, I mean, it should be a part of the whole thing. Sound can’t be separate, no? It’s like… For that matter everything. Visuals are also not separate from the story. So, that’s what. Q: Often, it is said that good sound in cinema should have autonomous entity when you close your eyes. One of the great examples of that kind of sound work in cinema is Apocalypse Now.6 In Apocalypse Now, if you close your eyes, you don’t need the visual narrative to tell you something
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because sounds are telling so much. It’s giving us also a parallel possibility. At the same time, through that parallel narrative you get another dimension of the story, another dimension of the whole narrative that’s been given to you. There are many other examples where you can close your eyes and you can hear the cinema and you get the idea of that film or maybe another perspective of the story. Do you think what I am telling is right or do you have something to add to this or argue or disagree with me? G: See, for example, in any commercial film, most of the times the story is told through dialogues. LG. You just listen to it and you know what is happening, right? So, for commercial films it’s dialogue and music and you get the idea. In radio, they used to play the soundtrack of films, right? At one point, maybe not now. So yeah, I mean, these are all… Even, for that matter, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was telling you… if you hear the sound… Because that one character is not even there, right? Hal, the computer, it is there only through sound. So yes, soundtrack can give you a certain part of the story. It will give you, it can. Always, in any film, soundtrack will give you an idea about the story and an idea about what is happening. See, I don’t see sound, image – all these as different things that should be fighting with each other for their space. I mean it is all part of one thing. They need to come together. Visual, sound and then how it’s used. It’s all coming from that one person’s imagination, who is the director. Q: Yes, sure. But often… G: So, when there is that one person’s imagination, the cinematographer, the sound recordist, everybody is working with that imagination. There is one track and you are adding your imagination or heart to it. That’s how it grows and becomes better or… Q: So, it is strictly or strongly a collaborative process? A: Yeah, it is. Q: But, sound theorists talk about the problems of juxtaposition of synchronization. It is a synthetic phenomenon that you impose when you mix films. You record sound and you record images and put them together. For a particular sound like a crow, you need to show on the screen that there is a crow. If you don’t show it, the crow must have some little part to do with the image. Maybe the image has some off-screen space where the crow can exist. So, there are many other sounds that we not necessarily make particular objective association with. For example, the sound of a car horn may not relate to me as a listener to a sound of a car. But it might make you a bit absent-minded or a bit contemplative.
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Often sound creates that kind of sensation. It’s not necessarily giving you just this or that. It’s not just a cup kept on a table. It could be anything. This multiplicity of meaning embedded in sound… When you work within the cinematic context, you need to make every sound meaningful since you need to add every sound to image. Without that, the film will fail. Don’t you think that is a bit problematic? Is it not limiting the scope of sound in cinema? G: I don’t think it has to make the visual meaningful. That’s wrong. It has to make the story meaningful. That is what it is. It is not connected to the visual. I mean a lot of sound that you put is not connected to the visual. It is connected to the story. Meaning, what is happening. I mean, okay, when you are looking at the film, you are seeing it visually but the story is telling you what to put. Not the visual. For example, things happening in the scene, the emotions, those tell you what sounds to put. So, it is not dependent on the image, it is dependent on the story. That’s what I feel. Q: Okay. The story. So, the synchronization that happens, what you call, lip sync... We sync the sound with the images that we see. The editing process is like that. You sync. You also make a married print where they should sync together. This synchronization between sound and image is not then problematic for you because you said that together after synchronization, they are telling a story. That is a reason you say that… G: Even otherwise... Okay, you don’t want to synchronize the sound but even then you make a track, right? But, at the end you are going to play it with the image. You want a certain sound to come at certain point, right? That’s also synchronization. Isn’t it? Q: Yeah. Not necessarily just putting them together strictly but keeping them separate but joined somehow. Their temporalities are connected together because video or image is moving in the timeline, sound is also moving in the timeline. So, their time-based character is being used in the same way, like parallely. But in that case, sound will have an autonomous entity. Isn’t it? I am just trying to understand why sound practitioners don’t revolt in cinematic context. Sound’s immense scopes are so much curtailed! G: LG. Q: Because as I work with sound art, I see in sound art there is so much scope to work with sound and you can do that independtly. G: Yes, that’s why people go and make installations when they want to revolt. LG. Q: LG.
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G: Where you can go and do whatever you want. You can create whatever you want, yeah. Q: But in cinema can you do whatever you want? G: No, you can’t. LG. Yeah, that is the set rule. Mostly you don’t get to go away from it. Go and watch a film… Maybe that’s another kind of audience then. You need an audience also to see if you are creating something. Correct, it is all a process, I know. You have to start somewhere to create that audience, but… I mean, that way we are anyway not doing anything, right? LG. To create an audience, even in the cinematic way. Lots of things are not… We are not very experimental or… And I don’t think it’s just us. All over the world I think it’s true. The mainstream is always… There are set rules for… Q: But, in European cinema we often listen to various experimentations. They all do sync sound but they also work with a lot of layers. Although European landscape is generally quieter... It is not so noisy like in India, where everybody - the cars, the people, the machineries - is screaming. But in cinema, we don’t hear those screams. Cinema is unbelievably quiet except a few things like dialogue and music. G: LG. Q: Only the songs are loud. The dialogues are loud. The music, the background scores are loud but the world that we see inside cinema, that’s quiet. Isn’t it… G: But then, we don’t see the real world even visually also. That is also some other world, no? We don’t see the real world in cinemas. Q: Why? G: Rarely we see. LG. Q: Why do we need another reality in cinema? Why do we need artistic abstraction in cinema? G: I am not saying that is art. I am saying that art is beyond reality but that doesn’t mean that if you are not showing reality, it is art. LG. That is something else. That’s a very one dimensional way of looking at the world. Q: Then why don't we see or listen to the contemporary realities of India in cinema? For example, there are so many problems, so many intricate problems around. There are so many issues to touch, so many injustices that we encounter in the Indian situations of caste, religion, fundamentalism, autocracy or various other problems. The problems with democracy. If cinema is a reflection of the society that we live in… I mean, if we consider that it ought to be a reflection of the reality, even in
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an artistic way, then also it needs to reflect the reality that we live in. Why does it not do that then? If we cut down everything, if we cut down sounds, the reality will disappear. Isn’t it? G: That’s true. Any art will have to show some reality, of course. I mean, how do you connect with it? You connect with it because it is showing something from life and it’s giving some other meaning to it. That’s how it becomes art. Otherwise, everybody is shooting with their cameras now-adays. Right? So it’s real, what you are shooting. Q: Documentary. G: Not documentaries. Like on their phones, everybody is shooting. “Okay, we are having pizzas.” Shooting, right? LG. But that’s not art. That is shooting reality, not art. So, you like some directors or singers from some other time only. Why? Why are you connecting with them, from some other country, from some other time? There is some reality which is true for them and which is true for me, although we are so much apart in time and space. So yeah, it has to come from life, reality. Q: Yes, of course. But when you don’t include that reality to vibrate… G: Yes, true! We don’t. Most of the films, they don’t really show any reality. If somebody only barely touches the reality, we are too happy. LG. We are far away from... Even now there are a very few films that are made but there is no place for independent films. I mean, where do you go and see them even if you want to? So, there is no space in this big country. There is no space really. Bombay is the city of films. Where do we go and watch them? Q: Multiplexes? Online? Netflix? G: See, only now it has started coming on Netflix and all that but otherwise… Now, some films are getting releases. Even then, when they get a release, they are released in some theatre somewhere and the timings are all crazy. It is almost like that you have to take a day off and go and watch that film. How can you? I mean, you cannot take a day off to go and watch a film, right? LG. So, these are all connected. So, if somebody wants to make a film like that, how do you get the audience to watch it? It’s a huge process. Making a film is… It takes so much of your... Not just one person’s effort and energy, but of so many people. And then there is no one to watch it. Q: So you are saying that since there is no audience for independent films, the sound practitioner needs to surrender. Oh, we cannot do anything like this. Is it true?
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G: No, that’s not true. It doesn’t mean that you can only do good sound on independent films. You can do that on other films also. That’s not connected. LG. Generally these kinds of practices, how they, I mean… Certain things... Why do they happen? That’s what I was saying. Q: In commercial cinema, there are a number of instances in India, for example, Sholay 7 , where there have been many experimentations with sound. There have been various experimentations with sound in commercial films like Lagaan.8 The revolution happened. So, it’s not true that commercial cinema doesn’t have scope for experimentation. G: No, I didn’t say that. Q: Yes, of course. But what I am trying to say is that it’s a practitioner who pushes the boundaries and limitations that are put in place by the predominant filmmaking mechanism. It is a constant struggle of the practitioner to not conform to this mechanism but make a kind of independent say, like a voice is to be heard. G: I think all of these we do, in our own way, while working in the films. I am not saying everybody is just surrendering even before they start. LG. But finally, when it comes to that final track, finally the director decides or… The director or producer is more powerful. It involves so many things. I mean, it’s not… How collectively what can you do about it I don’t know, so… LG. Like, you said Lagaan. That happened because of Aamir Khan. He was the producer of the film and he is a powerful person. So, if he wants he will do it. That’s how it happened. So, I think, people come like that, here and there to push. LG. Sync sound was there even before Lagaan, but that was a big film which did that. Q: Yeah, sync sound was always there, a bit dormant. Like all… G: When people ask me about sync sound, I say it has nothing to do with sound. Whether you want to do sync sound or you want to dub it, I will do it. LG. It is a production decision or your decision. You do sync sound for actors’ performances. You are getting that performance through voice also, right? On location. So, you are getting the best performance from that person on location, sound is a part of that. If you want that, you better get the sound. Otherwise, doing that dubbing again later... By the time that dubbing stage comes, the actor is doing some other film. He is in some other mode. To get that person back into this character takes a lot of work and by then, you don’t have the time and energy to do it. And generally, films are dubbed very badly. LG. So, I mean, it is not for sound that you use sync sound, it’s for the film or whatever, for the performance. Q: And when Dolby Atmos is given in your hand, how do you perceive your work?
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G: See, I have not done anything on Atmos yet, so… Even I am confused, what is it that I can do with Atmos. LG. So, I don’t know. Q: In Atmos your creative impulse is given a wider scope to explore. G: I am not sure about that. But since I have not done anything on that format, I don’t know if that’s true. 5.1 gives you a lot of space to work on in films. So I don’t know how far from that Atmos goes because that was revolution really. From the mono track to 5.1. Q: When you are on location, do you hear differently than other people? G: Yeah, of course. LG. Recently, we went for a recce in Jaipur. It was a house. We reached the location. The director told me, “See! It’s silent, the location.” I said, “No!” LG. So yeah, we always hear more sounds than others. Q: Does it give you some sort of a problem, when you are asked to record those sounds? Like, you need to eliminate some. Do you record everything that you hear? Or you record certain sounds, keeping in mind the story? G: Yes, obviously you record certain sounds with the story in mind. I mean, it is not possible to record everything. On location for a shoot, you try to stop a lot of stuff which are not for the scene or… So, that you do. But even after that, you record certain sounds. If you want to record everything, it is endless. Q: Because if you think of only this chair, there are so many things happening around… If our discussion is a narrative, then this discussion may not need all the sounds. We don’t need that crow outside the window. We don’t need a train passing by. May be an aeroplane passed - we don’t need them, but we may need - to make this believable - a room tone or maybe the sound of the fan. Suddenly there might be a phone call or we may need a crow, rather a couple of crows on the widow but not everything. So continuously, in our hearing we cut down so many sounds. We don’t need them. We only need those which we are navigating. Like a car, we need to navigate. If we don’t hear the car, the car will come and hit us. This process of elimination, in a cinematic way, how do you approach? Because we are not in the reality. We are thinking of a particular story, which is often removed from the reality. G: See, most of the times when we are shooting, we might not even get the sound that is needed for that scene. We may not get that sound from that particular place. Most of the times we are shooting anywhere. That sound is not good for the scene. We need some other sound. For that we have to go somewhere else and record. Q: So, sound and image are sometimes recorded separately.
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G: Not sometimes, a lot of times. For example, what is happening in camera, you record that sound there but all the other sounds are recorded somewhere else. They are not from there. Q: But if it is in a rail station? You don’t record the ambience of the rail station? G: Yeah, you do. Of course. See, for a place like railway station, you need all the sound from there. But like for a house, it depends where this house is placed in the film. I mean, we can shoot any house inside this place, right? Depends on where it is, then you choose the sound or what is happening in the story. Q: Yeah. Maybe it is an ambience for London, for example. Then you have to get ambience of London to make it feel like it is in London, or it’s in Bogota, Colombia or it’s in Nicaragua’s streets or anywhere else. G: Correct. So, as you said, there is no train passing here but maybe in the story there is somebody reacting to a train passing. That train passing has to be recorded somewhere else, right? So, it’s never connected to that space, sound in that way. Except for the room sound or what you get while you are there. Q: But maybe you can get all the sounds from that space only. G: Yes, sometimes you get. That’s rare. LG. That’s what I mean. Rarely do you get all the sounds from there only. Q: But while adding a different space to another space by adding sound, don’t you think sometimes they don’t mix or create a false sense? G: You mix it that way… You have to choose your sounds. That’s also a long process - choosing sounds. You will have so many train sounds and from that you have to choose the one that is good for you. Like rain… It is my 20th year of doing sound. LG. Q: 20th year?! G: Yes. So in these 20 years, I don’t know how many rains I have recorded. But every time I put a rain sound, I am still looking for something else or I want to add something else. So, it is not like it’s raining, and you just record it and put it. That doesn’t happen ever. So now it has started raining and if I want to record that sound, I will realize that this rain sound is not usable. I will hear all the other noises. I won’t be hearing the rain. It is a long process, the recording itself. Of getting the rain. Even if I get a clean track of rain, it is one kind of rain, right? There are thousands kinds of rain sounds. So, you are always trying to find the correct sound for that particular place.
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Q: I always think that the people who are good listeners, who are more sensitive to the sound or their surroundings, very alert and aware and having a lot of imagination about the sound, they make themselves more contemplative while listening. When they work within cinematic context, their world is squeezed. Isn’t it? Don’t you think as a lover of sound, let’s say a sound loving, sensitive person, in cinema you cut yourself down to a particular box like a bonsai? G: Yeah, that’s true. LG. But I always like to think of it as a part of the story. What you are saying is right but I don’t… I always try to look at it as how can it become a part of that whole thing for a film… Q: Cinematic device. G: Yes. Q: So you sacrifice your interests in sound… G: I am always interested in the film than the sound. That’s why it is… Q: You are what? G: I am more interested in the film. I am always thinking more about the film than the sound. Q: But cinema existed before sound came. Cinema has a long history, maybe 40 years of history without sound. Sound came and filmmakers were extremely angry and anxious. They did not know what to do with sound because cinema had already established itself without sound. So, cinema can be an artform without sound. What sound adds to the cinema… G: But, everybody started using sound immediately. Q: Not immediately. There were many resistances. G: Yeah, like Chaplin resisted. But then, he made an amazing film, Modern Times9, with sound after that. It is one of my favorite films. It is called a silent film, but he used sound. When digital came there was a big resistance to it. Right? People were used to using analog. Whenever something new comes, there is a resistance to it. Q: Yes. But do you think sound cinema and silent cinema are different? G: Yeah, they are. Q: In which way? G: Take the example of Chaplin since I mentioned him earlier. For him, he is a comedian or that’s what he is doing - trying to make people laugh, right? His whole acting technique was exaggerated action because there was no sound. The silent films didn’t have sound but they used music,
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whether live music or otherwise. Or they used titles because they didn’t have sound. That is a way of using sound. So, that was Chaplin’s problem when sound came. His whole thing was with no dialogue and with actions. He didn’t know how to use sound then. “If there is sound then what happens to my acting?” Gradually he understood sound and started using it. He changed his acting style and started behaving like a normal person. If you see his later films, you will see that he doesn’t do that exaggerated acting. So, yeah, there are many things like that. You know, before and after. Q: And you make the best use of it. G: Yes. For that matter, if you see Modern Times, there are no synced dialogues in it. So, sound doesn’t mean dialogues. He used all the other sounds. The only thing is he sings something in the end, if you remember. LG. It is not a song. He just makes up some gibberish. That is the only voice part in it actually. But, I think, the whole thing about cinema was the moving image. Because music was there even before that, right? People were used to it. That moving image thing, that’s what people got excited about. That’s why cinema is always associated with visuals. Sound came much later. Q: Sound came much later but sound is now more powerful than cinematic visual. Isn’t it? In Dolby Atmos, sound has so much power to distract. Visual doesn’t have that capacity to distract. G: Yeah, because you have seen everything. That’s what happened to visuals. So many visuals! Everybody has a phone. You are always seeing something. Moving image doesn’t have the same kind of appeal now. So then, I think… LG. Q: So, in Dolby Atmos kind of situation, you can make the sound so much powerful. Imagine, even in the Indian context, some mantras… G: Even without Atmos, with 5.1… That’s what I was saying, a lot of these action films or many films, without the sound you won’t have the same effect. I mean, just with the visual, you will never have that same effect. even without Atmos, even if it is a stereo track, even then you won’t. Q: If you say that without sound the images may not have much meaning, is the vice versa also true? Without the images… G: See, I think they both work differently. The two different senses, right? You are seeing and hearing. So, it works differently probably. I don’t know which one is better or which one is worse but… Q: They are different.
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G: They are different, yeah. We receive them differently and we feel them differently. Q: But there is an intervention of technology, like mono, stereo and surround sound, 5.1, Atmos – this progression, which fills up the space. Earlier the spaces were not filled. They were empty. Vacant. Like white walls. One had to only listen to what was happening behind the screen. Things happening on the right or the left sides were not a part of that overall experience. But now, you have all the speakers on your top and maybe 10 years later the speakers would be under your feet. G: Yeah, I know. LG. Yes! Q: So, sound is getting bigger in terms of space, all the time. But, the image is still there. So, image grew only in terms of cinemascope, maybe 3D. But space-wise image remained almost the same, like what it was in the beginning. G: 3D was a big thing. Q: 3D was a big thing, yes, depth… G: And with animation and all that it’s gone to some other level only… Image, so… No, I don’t mean complete animation but partly used animation in films. They can take you anywhere, you know, visually, even without you noticing it. So there also, a lot of things have happened that way. Q: Imagine yourself working on a project where you don’t need to work with visuals. G: Yeah, then we will be working differently when we don’t have to work with the image. Q: How will you work? G: I am sure then there will be some kind of description of what you are looking for, right? There you don’t have to connect to an image. Thus you are thinking everything sound-wise. But that’s a very different thought process. When you are doing sound for a film, you are always doing it for the film. You are not trying to create a soundtrack which is separate from all that. I don’t know whether you should try to do that. I am not sure. This is something we also discuss sometimes. What works for an image may not work for… It is always open to discussions. LG. Q: Do you hear your own work as the first audience? Like you record and then you work in the studio. Who is your first audience? You? Do you imagine yourself giving this sound work to someone, maybe an audience? Before giving that would you like to make yourself happy?
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G: Yes, yes. LG. I want to be happy with it. Q: So you are the first audience of your work? G: Yeah. But sometimes, I don’t think of myself as an audience. Sometimes I might… But mainly, yes. I think of some other audience also. “Maybe that kind of an audience will not like this sound”. I think in that way also sometimes. Q: Does this situation happen where you are not happy with the work you have created? G: Yeah. Q: It happens? G: Sometimes, yeah. Q: But you still let it go? G: You will have to. LG. If you can’t work with… If you and your director don’t agree on something, you will have to let it go sometimes. Q: Does it not make you sad? G: Yeah. I may not be happy with it… That’s life! LG. Q: LG. I was hesitant to ask you this. But since for the first time I am interviewing a woman sound designer, I was curious, generally speaking, to know whether you feel a difference in terms of working with sound in the industry? Is being a woman something special in this particular context of sound recording and design? Does it give you some advantage or disadvantage in terms of a listener? Do women sound practitioners listen differently? G: No, I don’t think there is a disadvantage or advantage. Maybe I listen differently, maybe. I don’t know. I have no idea. LG. Because men and women think about things differently. Maybe I also think about sound differently. I don’t know. I am not sure about it. LG. There are a few women recordists. I don’t know if all the women sound recordists think in a certain way. I don’t have anything to compare. Q: Yes. From my perspective, I was thinking whether it has something to do with the details. Those intricate details that come with sound. Are they underlined when a woman practitioner approaches it? Is it true? G: I don’t know, because I know male sound recordists also who are very particular about sounds and they do great work with sound. LG. Only if there are many more women we will be able to say that, I think.
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Q: Yes. The film industry is so male dominated, it must be a problem in terms of making your voices heard. Particularly the industrial setting is such that here the voices are not heard. G: No. LG. Q: So, do you have some comments to make on whatever we discussed? Any questions? Something to add on to? G: Have you worked on sound? On location or in studio? Q: Yes. I have. G: Here? Q: In India, yes. Once each in Bangalore and Kolkata. But in Kolkata, I did not continue. In Bangalore, I finished 2 films.10 G: Ok. Like, shooting? Q: Yes. Shooting and then designing, final mix and stuff like that. So, I did work and I am working for almost 12 years now with sound recording. Independent of images. When I put them together with images I try not to sync them. I try not to give them a single entity. They are kept separate so that there is a dialogue developing. A dynamics is happening. A relationship is developing between sound and image contrapuntally. It’s not a forced synchronization. They are kept separate. G: So who creates the image? You only create the images. Right? Q: Yes. But sometimes I ask for help from friends to get the images for me because when I am concentrating on sound, my hearing faculty is so overwhelmed that my visual faculty may not be so powerful. Between aural modality and visual modality, when I emphasise on one, the other is left a bit under-attended. That is the reason for me asking for help. But often, I make videos. At least I have a sense of what the image should be.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:30:27ီ Name Abbreviations: Gissy Michael – G; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami 1990) 3 La Notte (The Night, Michelangelo Antonioni 1961) 4 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick 1968) 5 The Apu Trilogy (Ray 1955 – 1959) is based on novels by Bengali-Indian writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. 6 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979) 7 Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975)
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Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin 1936) 10 Two films: Presence (2011) and In_transience (2012) in the Behind the Tin Sheets project: https://tinsheets.in/ 9
CHAPTER 26 PRAMOD THOMAS1
Q: As you work mostly in mixing and you have also worked in sync sound before… PT: I did music recording also. Q: Music recording also… So, probably you can give some inputs on mixing? PT: When I started my career, in all films, mono mix was happening. Q: Hm. PT: Also, it was not enjoyable when you went to a mono theatre. It had filters. All the frequencies above 8Khz were rolled off and all the frequencies below 80hz were rolled off. So, it never gave me any enthusiasm to join a mixing studio and there was no automation also. Q: LG. Hm. PT: It was from tapes and you had to remember the whole film and try the things, you know. Also, all the reproduction was from one speaker. So, it was basically very difficult to make a small sound audible in a mix that time. You had to plan a lot, enhance it a lot and get the best recording to enhance or make the small sounds audible in a smaller kind of situation. Because of the lack of automation, it was very difficult to mix at that time. Q: Hm. PT: The whole thing had to be played back from one speaker. As soon as multiple sources or multiple speakers come, you hear everything. Okay? So many things are happening in a real environment when you are in real situations. Your brain and ears together focus on things. Even if the source is less in volume, you just adopt it or gather the important things from that, you know, even if the level is low. You can omit the other sounds using the directionality. The whole problem in mono mixes was that you had to create everything - you had to play everything from one source. That’s why ambience was not given much importance at that time. It was difficult
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to create audible ambiences in that situation and also lots of ambiences were sounding like a tape source. Q: Hm. PT: Ambiences sound good when it comes to so many speakers. The space is always created with multiple speakers. You need at least two speakers or four at least. You get the normal kind of space if it is played from four speakers. Q: Why do you think ambience sounds better in multiple-speaker set up? PT: See, in one source - one speaker - it’s called “Masking”. Nowadays when the films get mixed, all the main ambiences come from other surround speakers. Smaller elements come from the surround speakers. So, you automatically hear that. You keep on hearing that and still you search for the main information. Q: Hm. PT: That illustrates a good sound design and good mixing. In good mixing nothing overpowers, yet you get the mood of the rest of the things. Earlier it was from one single source. You’ll come to know the difficulty to reproduce a multiple layered sound in a single speaker only if you actually mix. You’ve got to mix and see. If you try to do a mix with one speaker, you’ll realize the difficulty in that. Making the whole fifth or sixth information audible from one speaker is the most difficult thing if you have worked in the very easy-to-handle multiple speaker environments. Q: Yes. PT: Mono mix was the toughest mix for me. I just never could adopt, it still has to better, you know. “Why that is not coming or this frequency is not captured. The space is not there. Is that ambience audible enough to create the feel of the thing without the effect?” If you close your eyes also, you should feel that space, you know. That was not possible. I never used to get any satisfaction in mono mix. You know what I mean. So, it was better when the stereo came. Even now, I believe that a surround mix is comparatively easier than doing a stereo mix. Stereo mixing is a tougher job than surround mixing. Q: Why? PT: You’ve to compress and limit. See, we use the compressors and limiters in the mixing. When the compressor or limiter comes, they actually decide how disturbing or how impactful the sounds can become the transience, you know. So, if the loud sound comes, your compressor limit has to be correct so that the soft sound below should be audible. If you remove the compressor, like, if a soft sound follows a very loud sound
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close to that, you’ll not hear the soft sound. In the same way, if the soft sound is before the loud sound, you’ll not hear the soft sound because you’ll forget it - you’ll forget the soft or small ones as soon as the big sound comes. Q: Yes. PT: That’s how the brain works. That is why the compressor-limiters are the main criteria, the main thing, which we should know in mixing. Everybody always depends on compressor-limiters during the mixing process. In mono or single channel mixing, all the things are dependent on hitting those limiters more, you know. In stereo it’s little less usage of compressor-limiters; and you can have even lesser usage of compressorlimiters that way in 5.1. Right now, we are using the best of the compressor-limiters to enhance the sounds in 5.1 or even in Dolby. Speakers are getting increased more in their capacity. Yes, we are using the best of the dynamics or transience in response to the sounds. Q: What about stereo? May be you can speak a bit about stereo, because we had three speakers or four speakers in stereo in the cinema. PT: Stereo is only two speakers. Q: Two speakers, yes. But isn’t there a centre? PT: A phantom centre, isn’t it? Q: Hm. PT: Whatever sounds come, fifty-fifty percentage given to both the speakers will come in the centre. Since it becomes difficult to have only two speakers here in film, we need a centre speaker as the lip sync is very important and the character should come from the centre of the screen. So, you’re giving all the image-spreaded signal like stereo files like basic ambiences, basic frontal ambiences, staccato sounds of music from the front and the ambience sounds of the music and film are given to the surround speakers and they’re mostly depending on four speakers for reproduction, and not two speakers. Q: Yeah. PT: If you increase the number of speakers, only then you’ll get the real feel. Otherwise, when you move close to one speaker, you don’t hear the other one. You feel that all the sounds are from the speakers. You’d lose the image. Q: Hm. PT: So, image is the main thing you know. It comes from two speakers in stereo reproduction, you know, and there’s a phase between. For example,
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all the sounds we’re hearing while talking over here. It will still sound like indoor because there are certain reflections from some walls and the floor. All this information is coming to our ear and it is analyzing and giving an idea that this is a closed room, because of the frequencies in the reflection. Q: Yes. PT: A time delay of the reflection gives a space-size you know. Q: Size. But when we are recording this on stereo, for example, this microphone and this recorder and we play it back in a stereo, then that information will be compressed in a stereo image, right? PT: Yeah, because it’s using two mics to pick the thing. You can actually make use of a two mics and expand it to four mics also like earlier the Dolby pro logic. Q: Hm. Yeah. PT: They were using two channels. They were all encoding into two channels. LT-RT channels. Q: Yes. PT: So, that actually had four-channel information. Four-channel information is given and encoded into two channel using phase techniques. Here also you can decode into multiple channels with two mics actually. Even right now, there are developments in the microphone that come over stereo mics, which can decode into four channels or something. Q: So, in cinema, stereo means four speakers, isn’t it? PT: This is in 5.1 and I meant the four speakers on the corners. I used for the image of the ambience, or the music. Q: Hm. PT: The ambient resonances of the music are played from both the speakers and the main information of the dialogues and effects, which come from the centre of the screen, is given to the centre speakers. That way. Ideally you should go for a multi-channel recording. Like, you can use the microphone like that for a Quadraphonic recording, or a 5.1 recording, you know. You can also have multiple stereos to place it. You can place one stereo sound for the front, one stereo sound for the surround and there can be a 5.1 or a Quadraphonic ambient image or ambient sound, which can be filled for the whole speakers. Q: Yeah, but I’m trying to understand that in the late seventies and early eighties, when some films were using stereo. For example, Sholay2 was four-track stereo. I think not many films took up that four-track stereo but normal stereo - Disco Dancer3 was in stereo, Attenborough’s Gandhi was
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in stereo. 4 What did that stereo mean? Did that stereo mean four-track stereo or two? PT: Those were four-track stereos. Q: Four-track stereo? PT: Quadraphonic sound. Q: Okay. In how many speakers did that Quadraphonic sound used to be played back - four or two? PT: Four speakers. Q: Four speakers. Okay. How were they placed? PT: Generally, for the film productions they used to have three for the front and one for the surround. Q: In which way were the four speakers placed for the stereophonic sound? Were these two placed behind the seats? PT: Starting of Quadraphonic was like four speakers - one speaker on each corner of the room, and the centre image was virtual. Q: Of course. PT: Or the sound, which is given fifty-fifty percent to each of the front speakers were coming into the virtual. That was again difficult for the film when a person who was sitting next to the left or the right corner of the speaker would find the sound coming from that corner. So, they had to use a centre speaker for that. Nobody even bothered having a single channel for the whole surround. That’s why, in the beginning, it was mono channel surround and the three LCR’s and subwoofer was filtered. Low frequency was filtered and given to the sub woofer channel. Dolby pro logic and some other format was there - I forgot that name - ultrasound something. Q: Ultra stereo? PT: Ultra stereo something. That format was also like that. Q: Hm. PT: But Dolby succeeded because and at that time, the problem again was the noise, you know. Reproduction was mostly on tapes and optically recorded on to the film. Noise reduction was the main thing. Dolby then used a spectral noise reduction system to eliminate the noise, enhance the sound and recorded and played back with decoders. So, the noise was less in the reproduction. This became a standard. Later, when digital came, the 5.1 Dolby and 5.1 DTS became popular.
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Q: Yeah. I think Shahenshah5 was also in stereo. Was the stereo mix done in this era by putting off ambience? I don’t think that there were much ambient sounds. PT: Yeah. Most of the films were not depending on the ambiences, you know. Q: Of course not. PT: It was a very reduced kind of ambience but they were very particularly recorded - ambiences were recorded at that time. Now we use multiple layers of ambiences and balancing and getting it. Earlier, it was different. If we wanted a particular bird, that particular sound was recorded and it was played in the proper kind of an… And it was not even used that way in the mainstream commercial films in India, you know. They were just using some kind of birds or some Q: Some stock sound? PT: Yeah, some water sound, birds, rain… like that. They would patch these stock sounds and in the mixing it was barely audible to you. Our films mostly depend on the music. It’s a drama kind of thing, you know. So, we mostly depend on the dialogues and the music for the whole experience and we take our audience into a trip. That’s why the ambience also was not popular. In mono, it’s very difficult to make the ambience audible in a clean way. When our reproduction goes to theatres there are noises all around, you know. AC noises of theatres didn’t have a good standard. So, we’ve to compress everything and everything was audible. The dynamic range between the softer sounds to loud sound is very less. We were pushing everything and compressing everything and in that, the survival of a small ambient sound was very difficult. It’s okay if you could hear anything in between, like sometimes you could hear it and sometimes you couldn’t. That was the situation. But for multiple speakers and standardization of the speakers, the qualities of the theatres have increased. Right now, also we have a major problem in recreating a real situation in a film because our theatres are very noisy. The noise level of a theatre is above the actual level of an ambience that you can hear in a real situation and you’ve to again increase it. The problem is that when it’ll be played in a good theatre you’ll feel, “Why is it a loud mix?” - even a small ambience will sound very loud. Why? Because we are trying to compensate for the bad theatre halls in India. Q: How was the mix of stereophonic sound? Did you put the voice in the centre and music in the two other channels? PT: Yeah.
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Q: Okay. PT: Ambience is mostly placed in the left and right and in a little width into the mono surround. Left is for getting the space and centre mostly has the dialogues and the spot effects and the main effects - the centre effects. Q: Okay. And how was the music in stereo? PT: Music also was like little violins… like, you know, strings and all coming through the surround, and definitely surround. Q: How was it in mono? PT: Everything was in one channel, not very heavily limited compressor audio track with the frequency cut above 80hz and below 80 there were no frequencies - all are filtered out. That was the limitation of the mono tracks, mono recording had that limitation, you know. High frequency would get clashed in optical reproduction when it passed through the lab. The high frequency was not reproducible because of the lab’s limitation. It would cross over post modulation distortion and if you kept the low frequency, it’d become muffled. They all were lower frequency levels then. Q: The scope of sending different sources into different channels expanded when surround sound came in 2001-2. PT: Hm. Q: So, what kind of changes did you practice yourself – for example how did you manage to mix in surround at the early stage of surround sound mixing? PT: I was not there in surround mixing in 2000. I’ve joined after 2005, I think, and after my experience in location and music, from 2003 onwards I was working as an associate and assistant in mixing. I was generally getting music mixes and song mixes for the films. People were not aware of the possibility of surround for the music. See mainly you’re using a time delay (while mixing). In a small room where the speakers are very close, you can keep anything and do surround. But as soon as the room becomes big, because of the distance factor people who are sitting close to the surround hear more of the things, which are put into surround. That can distract a person who’s sitting on the backseat. At the same time, a person who’s sitting at the front side will lose the image and the information, which is mostly going to surround. So, you need to have multiple channels. Like it’s Atmos now. At times, everything’s coming with Atmos. When it was started, it took a little time to get maturity in the mixing for initial days and everybody was trying to place and pan something into surround. It was too much disturbing. The tonality changed
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drastically because calibration and all in the theatre from where you’re mixing were different. Because of some problem, it’d never sound the same in the theatre. Also, the pre-production theatres were much bigger than the mixing theatres. So, the delay factor - because of the delay the music, the staccato elements, the rhythmic elements, which come into surround were getting the delay effect, you know. Half the things were at the front and there was a time conflict between the front speakers and the back speakers. It was a big issue. Later they got aligned in a processor. Actually they can delay the surround speaker in the processor itself and make it a little closer. That value changes according to the size of the speakers. Still, you have to take precautions to put the music elements because you can’t keep the music element coming from the surround only and you have to keep majority of the elements from the front. Q: Hm. PT: Also, you can’t place the ambience only here when the music is playing. Suppose there’re a lot of elements there and few elements are coming from here. That is how you think of every film and decide what all things can be put into the surrounds and how much of the thing should be coming to the surround. Also, all of the small ambiences get drowned when music comes. So then, it’ll be working around that. You’re again trying to give a sort of dynamism for that and compressing the elements. By lifting them to a level, you give the information of the space through the ambiences. Q: Are the ambient sounds usually sent in the rear channels? PT: Not always. You have to send to the front channels as well. I prefer having different elements, you know. In the mono times, you needed very less number of ambience channels and half of them were rejected. We used just the main information which was audible and which did not sound like a noise. It was used like the ambience coming from a single channel. It’s very difficult for the ears too because you can maximum hear two or three sounds only from one speaker. If I had more information, it would become noise and start disturbing the first three layers - the main information. And it would distort, you know. You couldn’t make out from where this additional sound was coming. You felt that the original sound is not good - it started clashing or masking. So, it’s better to have multiple speakers in reproduction. Again, if you pan too much, the problem is that the person who’s sitting on the back side will get that sound more and even if you keep the ambience at low, it will not come properly in a bad theater because the noise level is high. It’s a very difficult process. LG.
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Q: LG. But how do you look at it? For example, the event is happening on the screen, which is a two-dimensional space in front of you. PT: Hm. Q: And sounds are coming from your behind. How do you relate to that sound? How do you think of making it a kind of coherent spatial geography? PT: You have to use it carefully because I’m not fond of using so much of surround. But you try to enhance it at places because when you are using the masking techniques, you add sounds into the front so that you don’t feel that it is expanded too much into surround. So, you’re using it like a balance between the front and the back. When you add a sound, other main elements are coming at the front. Okay? If the sounds are quite high, then you don’t feel any problem even if you pan a little extra into surround. Then only you’ll actually make that ambience audible in the whole mix. That’s how you’ve to work around. You can’t sit idle and just pan it and get a mix out of that. You’ve to work around and use limiters, compressors at the right ratio and push the levels at places to compensate for covering the thing and all. You are not supposed to enjoy. The image is in the front and you’ve to again attach to that front image only. Q: If the ambience is directly related to the screen - for example, we see some landscape and we expect some ambience to be there - will you place the ambience of that landscape behind or on your right or left side or in the front if the visual information is in front of you? PT: See, a lot of information has to be put at the front side only. Also, the supporting ambiences - feel of the ambiences - should be on the surround. For example, a space always can have an extra element from the backside, which should come at the right time. That’s also important. So you should not make the surround audible and distracting Q: Yes. PT: For example, when you’re showing water, like a lake, etc. then you can have water sound in the front, a little wind and leaves or trees sound around that – sound of leaves or something. Q: Hm. PT: Those can be on the surround. So that should be at a moderate level. Birds can be of two types - one can be a chord below beyond that space and one can be here also - so that you can get a balance of that by selecting the good sound, getting recorded and placing it. Either you use stereo recorders to record or multiple track recorders. For example, in a recent recording, I had to use the 5.1 mic, you know. I got so much of wind
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sound that was the moving wind sound from the landscape. I had to record it for quite long - four to five hours and after that I used to get ten or fifteen minutes which was actually usable. It was multiple 5.1 miking. Another place - there were sheep - I tried so hard to record in stereo, but in the post I found that stereo ones were not working much. If you placed one here and one there, it was again like it was not together. It was actually not in the correct spread and was not panning also. So, I used my actual 5.1 files, which were recorded at the location with sheep and the goats moving with sound and all. Those were working better because the image was correct and it was moving in between. You could actually feel those moving - one was coming here and one behind, one was in the front, you know. That is again straight 5.1 recording. You’re only adjusting the levels. Also, I’ve used the bus sounds, travelling sounds. My 5.1 files were sounding better. Bus travelling sounds were better than the stereo files that were placed - one for the front, one for the surround and one file kept in between. This 5.1 miking was sounding better, though it had a problem of comb filter. Do you know what comb filter is? Q: Yes. PT: When multiple frequencies come and it’s a head kind of a mic, you know. Q: Hm. PT: So, all those things have got some artifacts, but still it is sounding better than a normal stereo file manipulated one for the front or one for the surround or placed in between or whatever in a percentage. Only we’ve to trim this 5.1 actual file in the right ratio. You want to reduce the surround or increase the surround, you know, you just adjust the level of the surround. It will be sounding better than the other files. Q: As a mixing engineer, do you think of the audience? Do you think of an audience when you send your information to different channels or how they will be reacting to what you’re mixing? What is your idea or concept about that off-screen space that you are talking about? I mean, an offscreen space, which is beyond the screen visible in front of you. How do you think the audience will react to your mix so as to make that off-screen space present? And how do you mix according to this sense? PT: See, first of all I don’t get the need for an introduction - I don’t want anybody to introduce the film before the mix. Q: Okay. PT: I generally ask the designer to complete the thing and I don’t like to involve with the edit person or the design person before I’ve to mix it. I
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actually watch the film as an audience. Even without sound also, I watch the film as an audience and I don’t want to get involved at the pre-design stage of so many films. After that, I keep quiet and when the design gets completed, then again I see it and find out how much it got improved. After design we come to know how much of the music is required. Q: Hm. PT: It’s very difficult in the pre-stage. A lot of films depend on music, but that’s a different case. You’ll actually come to know how much of the music is required for the film after the design. After that, in the mix process you’ll generally get elements for the surround from the designer. These actually expand the space itself or enhance the situation. Enhancing the situation can be more surrealistic also. Q: Hm. PT: Psychologically it can affect the audience, giving extra abstract sounds also. Q: Hm. PT: So, you place it that way you know. Lots of sounds are again frequency dependent. Your front speakers decide how the surround sound is working. It is not only independent of the front speakers. If you’ve got a front sound, which got a particular character, then a certain amount of other sound that comes from the surround will only support that. You don’t feel like it’s a separate thing. You feel that it’s a single sound and it’s the same single space. Q: Hm. A singular space. Do you think that the audience is directly separate from you or you imagine yourself as a part of the audience when you do mixing? PT: You’ve to have multiple characters in the whole process. One is where you’ve to tell the story with the director or the designer. Q: Hm. PT: The second is that you be the audience and analyze whatever the director and the designer has done together, whether it’s working for you or not. Q: Yes. PT: You try to solve the problems, if there are any. You try to just solve them, you know. You suggest things in the mix process. If you want more sounds, or you want to remove something, you remove it or with the sync available things you can clean. Then you polish it and enhance the whole mood.
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Q: Yes. I’m just trying to understand the process of how that off-screen space is created in multi-channel surround, say 5.1, 7.1, Atmos and so forth. How is this off-screen space, which is created by ambience? This space was not present in mono or even in stereophonic mix. PT: Hm. Q: But it is available now for presenting in surround sound set up. PT: Hm. Q: How does a mixing engineer conceive and realize that off-screen space for the audience? How does he or she think the audience interpreting it? As a mixing engineer, what is your concept of the audience sitting in that off-screen space created by you? How do you imagine the audience in that space? Because in mono, you knew that there is no off-screen space and that everything is coming from the front and the audience doesn’t need to interpret how is it coming from behind. What do you do to create that offscreen space for the audience? Is the question clear? PT: See, you always hear a sound from all around in real situations. Ambiences. There’re a lot of elements you should make audible from the backside, and without neglecting the front, you know. Also, a lot of reflections - reverbs need to be put into surround. But it has to be in correct amount. As soon as the sound comes to the surround, it becomes very big. The space becomes big and if you add the reverb of the frontal elements, add into that, it means the space is big, that the loud sound is big. That’s why you hear it. Q: Hm. PT: Also, when there is only one sound and that sound is big, it’s okay. But when there are five sounds, that sound would become small. This is how we work. LG. Q: LG. PT: So it’s very simple for us to talk. But you’ll understand it only when you really do it. Q: Some surround sound mixes that I have experienced myself keep the elements, which are not at all related to the visual references or the visual cues. For example, wind - you cannot see wind. But you keep wind in the rear speakers... PT: Again, it’s very difficult to choose a wind sound also. Very difficult if you’ve to choose the correct kind of wind. And how much of the wind element is there, how much of the speed is there and whether anything is moving in the visual or you’re just putting it just for the sake of design or just because the director enjoys it. LG.
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Q: For example, in The Lunchbox.6 PT: Hm. I haven’t seen that film. Was it good? Q: I think the sound is very clean and… A: Too clean. Q: Too clean actually. It could be noisier. A: Because it’s happening in Bombay... PT: It’s because our noise is more, you know. We’re so used to hearing big noises than people living abroad. A: This was done by a foreigner, isn’t it? Q: I think that without imagining the audience you cannot make that surround space. PT: Hm. Q: How can you do that? If the audience is freaked out – “What is happening from my behind? What is happening on my right? What is happening on my left?” - if the audience is freaked out of the mix then it’s not going to work. A mixing engineer needs to think of the audience… PT: That depends on the situation, you know. There are situations where we have to enhance the surround. For example, if the whole thing is happening inside the stadium, you can have cheering on the backside and a lot of elements on the front side. Still, if you give too much frequency, you can feel it. But in certain situations you can’t use that much of level on the surrounds. When the music comes again there are abstract elements, which are not actually in the real. The music is not there but you’re going to work through the psychology of an audience. Q: Hm. PT: So, you can expand those elements into surround and when there are frontal elements or when you expand the music through surround, you’re actually trying to protect those frontal elements also. It’s not eating that space, you know. You’ve to design that way. That’s how mix itself is another design - you’re placing the things in the right speakers and the right elements. Q: A lot of sync sound works are happening right now. Sync sound is mostly being practiced by the new breed of directors, and I feel that more and more sync sound works will be coming. People are embracing it much more. So, when that happens, there’ll probably be more elements that you can handle. How do you treat sync sound tracks compared to the tracks that are dubbed? Your handlings of the elements are different in each of
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these cases, right? For example, when dubbed sound comes will you treat that sound differently from sync sound in your mix? PT: Actually the dialogue is more real in sync sound and there is quite a lot of information in the centre itself. It need not depend much on the Foley. A lot of elements come from the centre speaker itself, you know. Also, when you go for a sync sound, you actually record a lot of soundtrack from the location, which can be used as an ambience and effects for the film. Those elements will also come. In a dubbed film you generally don’t get this kind of very accurate stuff from the centre. Q: Hm. PT: But most of the dubbed films work with the music and all. It gets a lot of support from the music side. It’s made for the audiences. Q: LG. PT: So you don’t need accuracy in those things. You tend to be very clean and clear and at times exaggerated. Q: Hm. PT: So you support the ambience and you just change the ambiences with the space. You try to create the mood from the ambiences. I try to make the dialogues more realistic, you know, all the dialogues. I exaggerate it when it’s required. I try to make ambiences more realistic - trying to fit the whole thing edit-wise or level-wise trying to make it close to the real situation and enhance them where it’s required. Q: With sync sound you have effects, which are also recorded in sync. You have voices recorded in sync sound, and you have those ambiences, which are already recorded with the voice. Will you keep that ambience or will you prefer to add ambiences later? PT: See, you’ve to add ambiences later also because it’s in the centre. So, whenever you record something, you’re always trying to record the main part, which is the dialogue, which you don’t want to dub. If you don’t get any Foley also, it’s fine. But when there’s a situation like the vehicles are passing or something is happening in the water, you can’t eliminate those sounds. You’ve to try to record that also. That’s the main sound. They’re not trying to record the rest of the things like wind or bird or air. Those elements are actually there. A lot of mics are not very omni-directional. They have directionality. So, you try to record the main sounds and then you’re actually suppressing the ambiences from the main mono source. So, you’ve to enhance those elements later in the post. Q: If you use 5.1 microphone during the shoot -
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PT: You can’t use it when the dialogues are there. You can’t even do a MS miking when the dialogues are there. Dialogues need to be recorded in mono only. But if there’s a crowd sound, you know. Q: Why would the dialogues be recorded in mono? In normal situations when we hear somebody speaking, we not only hear their voices, but we also hear a car passing by, a train horn from a distance… PT: See, you can’t recreate or record sound exactly the way you’re hearing it. Also, it’s not possible for you to get a control over the time - when the time changes and the noise changes. In one shot there are cars and in another shot there’re less cars. All of these things will come. Again, the noise level changes when an angle changes. That’s why your boom itself is not placed like this. Your boom itself is placed from top to bottom. You only focus the sounds below it and not only the frontal or back side elements you know. So, you try to eliminate the other noisy sounds. Those are actually noises for the sync sound guy, even though later he has to create the bird. Q: Is everything recreated in that sense? PT: Everything needs to be recreated, lots of elements are there at the front. You have to prepare there also. Same kind of extra birds are created there only. Q: Hm. But when you recreate the whole situation, the complete situation of that particular geographical location, you emphasize something, you emphasize a voice, and then you give less emphasis to the other elements such as ambience and effects. Perhaps you can add music later for some emotive cues or for underlining some emotional situations. The whole process of reconstruction - how much of it would you like to become realistic situation and how much of it is more imaginary? How much you’d like to achieve in your role as a mixing engineer? To be realistic or imaginary: which one do you prefer? PT: You’ve to get a balance between these two. It has to be realistic. Only then people can relate to it. Also, you have to be imaginative to get the mood. You can enhance, you know. You have to show the things, the spaces behind you also - you have to be imaginative for that. For placing the correct sounds at the right time also you’ve to be imaginative. You are actually manipulating but you know that you’re doing this only because of your experience. You’ve already experienced the real space and the real situation and now you have a little real experience. That’s why you are recreating those things with extra care, so that within the minimum cinematic time, you can give a capsule to the audience.
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Q: Why is there a tendency in the recent films to give more real information, more real situations and to capture and frame more real locations? Why, in your opinion, is it happening? PT: Which films? Q: Like… A: He is saying that people now are using lot of ambiences than the times earlier. Why are people using more ambiences? People nowadays are very particular about ambiences - all the designers are putting a lot of ambiences. Q: Hm. A: People are putting ambiences during the songs even. LG. Q: Yeah. A: One song I was listening to that day, Bawra Mann from a Sudhir Mishra film.7 PT: See, the number of gadgets supporting your lifestyle is getting increased. Earlier, we only used a mobile, you know, like grandparents. How many things you have at home? The things are very less. So, we are increasing our facilities. Every time we have more things, more gadgets for us. Music wise also, they are increasing their tracks, you know. All the things are already created, all the instruments are being played and every tune type is already used. So, you’re trying to achieve more things with more things. So you’ve to compete with that. So, you’ve to add. A: It’s because of technological advancement. PT: There were limitations earlier. We had to use very less number of tracks then and as I told you, one speaker. So you could make only two or three sounds audible. You had only very limited number of tracks and you played around that. Q: With the advent of technology you could be more imaginative, more abstract. Let’s take animation films. In animation or games, you have technology available - you have 5.1, 7.1 stuff like that, and you go for more abstract representation of real places. Why is cinema not going in that direction? Cinema is not going in the direction of animation and video games, but taking a documentary approach. Look at the sounds for the new films. PT: Which films for example? Q: So many - Highway8, The Lunchbox, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobaara9 - so many films have a substantial amount of ambient sound use. Why is it that? It is not just a trend. I think this is the contribution of the sound
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people. Why did sound people suddenly change from giving less information about the real situations to giving more information about the real location? Has something changed in between? I don’t think this is just digital technology. Digital technology is obviously giving some advantages to do that kind of stuff. But there must be some intrinsic changes that happened in the minds of the sound designers, mixers and sync sound recordists. They suddenly started to give information. Why? A: They didn’t use this much of ambience. Highway and all are like full of ambience! Q: Yeah! PT: Is it so? I couldn’t find so much. It’s crowded and all... A: Much more than Lagaan10 and all. PT: But is it overpowering? A: No, it’s not overpowering. I felt I needed even more layers of ambience. PT: Yeah, I found it less… A: I found that I need more amount of ambience. But when I compared them to Lagaan and all, I found them to be much more. I wanted more of the ambience even in The Lunchbox. Q: More ambience, is it? That means we are becoming hungry for ambience. But why is it so? A: Kai Po Che11 has a very good amount of ambience layers, very decent. Q: Do you think that there was some sort of a filter? Is it now opened? If it is so, then why is it opened? PT: They’re always trying to compete with the music. Okay? Lot of people feel that all single elements will get disappeared when the music comes. So, they add many things. Q: That could be a reason. PT: In my recent mixes, like when you go to theaters, in Indian theater you feel half of the things are not audible because of the noises of the ambience. Hence, you add more elements so that some of the elements at least would be audible and give the identity of the space, you know. That’s the reason actually. Insecurity! LG. Q: LG. Insecurity. A: Yeah, we all do that.
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PT: It’s because there’s no accurate playback. So, there’s a sense of insecurity. Your music guy will come and kill you or the theatres are very bad. A: It’s like a cinematographer who cannot shoot at a very low exposure. He has to light it up. Otherwise it won’t be seen in most of the exhibition theatres. It’s like that. Q: Okay. But you yourself are a mixing specialist. Do you prefer more ambiences or not? PT: I want to have everything correct. LG. Q: Correct. But what is that correctness about? From where does that sense of correctness come? PT: I don’t like to have a noisy environment. For example, the best technique is like this: suppose you need an ambience and I don’t like to have it in a single track. I want half of the elements of that in another track. It’s divided into two but not giving the intensity. Suppose I want around ten close. I don’t want to have ten plus ten twenty close, you know. I want it five in one track and five in another so that I can give a spread. Or it can be a 5.1 file. Got it? It’s a wind, a simple wind. I don’t want it to be very intense or very low- loud wind, which will get noticed if I remove it. So I’d like to have two layers, which I can manipulate and you can make it smoothly go in and out and it’ll create the mood, you know. Also, that’s how the intensity of the thing, it’s not increased the crowded feeling, you know. If you add more ambiences, the noise or unwanted elements also get increased. You’ve to be very careful with that. You need to have the clean elements of the main situation. For giving the spread or if you want to have separate layers for the front and back, you should add A plus B. It’s together now - it should come to a correct value. That way. It’ll be very much under control. While eliminating the noise factor when you lay them, you’ve to select very carefully. If the noise is there, if it has started disturbing the music or if it’s started to disturb the mood, reduce it when the mixing is on. Q: Hm. PT: When you eliminate the main element, that’s also getting separate from that. Ultimately, you don’t hear it in the theatre. Q: LG. But I think at one point of time, within a couple of years - if not a couple then within five or ten years - most of the systems will change. I think you’ll have to add more speakers for Atmos. PT: Yeah. Atmos and all have come. Q: How?
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PT: This problem was there all the time, you know. With so much of difficulty we moved from mono to Dolby SR, Dolby Pro Logic and with so much of difficulty we shifted from that to 5.1 and 7.1 and now again with difficulties we are trying to move into multiple channel speaker system. Q: What are the difficulties? PT: First of all, you need to have so many layers and so many technical aspects so that you can mix easily. You’ve to pan everything and also the calibration of the mix room and calibration of the theatre like preproduction rooms and all those become very difficult when the speakers become more. Q: What in your opinion is the ideal sound for cinema? Mono or stereo? PT: We have not reached that ideal sound. LG. Q: LG. I have talked with a number of people, they prefer… PT: By the time we will be reaching the ideal speaker environment, you know, we are not going to be very ideal people. CHORUS LG. Q: That’s a different thing! But, generally, there are some fascinations. I have talked with people who are fascinated with mono sound. PT: Hm. Q: I have also met people who are fascinated with stereo but 5.1 PT: I feel ideally there should be only three channels at the front and one subwoofer channel. Okay? Q: Hm. PT: There should be three channels again on the side speakers, and two channels only in the back speakers. Q: So 7.1, isn’t it? PT: No, it’s not 7.1. Three plus three - six, nine, plus two - 11.1 is more ideal for the situation and to enhance more into on top sound, you have four of them on top. Q: Okay. So, 15.1. PT: 15.1 is more than enough. Q: Fair enough. CHORUS LG. PT: Or you add one more to the surround. 15.2. Q: Point-two is the subwoofer. Right?
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PT: Yeah. 15.2 like dual subwoofer. Q: Hm. PT: This subwoofer supporting there - subwoofer supports you. Q: Okay. PT: So 15.3 or 15.2 is more than enough. Actually if it’s more than that, it’s truly very problematic. Q: LG. PT: People are just increasing - that much of challenge should be enough. Depending on the size of the room, you can actually play it back on the playback. You should have a virtual mixer on the pre-production. That stretch will come later. But I don’t know. They’re all going in different directions. Q: Okay. Thank you.
Notes 1
Duration: 00:53:52 Name Abbreviations: Pramod Thomas – PT; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Jayadevan C – A; Other Abbreviations: Laughter- LG 2 Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) 3 Disco Dancer (Babbar Subhash, 1982) 4 Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) 5 Shahenshah (Emperor, Tinnu Anand, 1988) 6 The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra 2013) 7 From the film Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (Sudhir Mishra 2003) 8 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 9 Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Life Doesn't Come Again, Zoya Akhtar 2011) 10 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 11 Kai Po Che! (Abhishek Kapoor 2013)
CHAPTER 27 AMALA POPURI1
Q: We can start with a little insight into your background. A: I have been working on sound for about a decade now. In fact, more than that. I have gradually moved into the field of production sound, or sync sound. I got into sound design and other aspects of sound in the postproduction for very particular projects. It’s also got something to do with my not getting commercial projects but I am actually more comfortable with working on sound in the post at a gradual pace. And I don’t think the timelines of postproduction sound in the commercial film industry works for me. So, I love recording sound. I love to be in the world of sound. The engagement that I feel with sound is a variable. I like to keep it mostly clean and pure. As a result, I end up doing less work than I should be probably doing. But it still makes me feel content. In a way, sound is a thankless job, so to speak. Sync sound you know…. Because when you are doing production sound you know that it can be done again in the post so the relevance of it is something that you and the few other people on the shoot would know. And in the post you are always kind of struggling for time. So, one has to choose a project where one would be comfortable and also uncomfortable, maybe. But yeah, there’s a lot to be done. That’s what I feel. That’s my background. Q: So, you mentioned purity. You like to keep your engagement with sound, as a medium or as a material, pure. What exactly do you mean by purity? A: Yeah, I have to think about that. LG. I just used the term. Okay… See when you are doing production sound, you want to push the boundaries to a certain zone where you think it would be the best for the production of sound. So now in the present scenario where we are shooting in digital, we are slowly moving away from the discipline of films. Q: Okay. It’s a very interesting point. A: Yeah. It means basically that we can end up shooting as much as we want, which means… Essentially my idea of capturing production sound is to capture the performance. … Also how the ambience of a certain space
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or a certain realm kind of interacts with voices… It’s interesting, it’s natural and then you know performances can never be replicated in precisely the same way. They would be… you know… people would say we can always improvise in dub, during the post, but… and dubbing in studios would always make it difficult for the actors to kind of replicate the entire ambience and the entire setup that they have been through. It’s like you are living it again. So, I am trying to say that sync sound is important, production sound is important. As we have moved from the… you know… we are shooting on digital instead of film… what has happened is that we have… First of all we are taxing actors because we know we can shoot a lot. We are ready to take 30 takes because we know it’s not going to cost just that much but to get there the discipline that film gives you, the economics forces you to be disciplined. Hence, you have rehearsals, you have everything planned, you have the mise-en-scene in your head. In the present scenario you have the shots, you have multiple angles. You have minimum 2 cameras rolling at every point. So, still we are ending up struggling with an edit, which lasts about 9 months to 1 and half years. We are not even up looking at the entire footage because we don’t have the time. It will take probably a week or 15 days to watch the entire footage. So, the final nuances that you might have got at some point, you can’t even keep track of them. I just feel that we are losing track of what we are getting and we are not getting there because we are not disciplined enough. Now, how does it affect sound? Well, there is a catch to this. I come from an era where I am used to having rehearsals, knowing exactly what’s happening in a shot. Nowadays I have a struggle with not knowing what’s happening. Everything that I am hearing is new and every take is new. Every take has a different performance. It is interesting to deal with that, yet it feels sad to, you know, not know something very well, being unfamiliar with performances. You would like to be tuned into what the director is looking at, what you are looking at, what the actors want. You know, it has to. There is something called synchronicity in the whole thing. It’s there sometimes, but it’s hard to kind of going there, being there. So, filmmaking is a different experience now. I mean, you got to be ready for whatever comes your way, dealing with new things each time. It is much more alive and challenging in many ways. But, at the same time, the room to work with just what you have, in terms of actors, actors’ performances or maybe just very technical things like miking… you know, always one needs to struggle to find the room to do things… to better the sound in each take. It’s a struggle but it doesn’t feel like a struggle all the time because you know that it’s one word here, one word there. People realize the value of production sound much later, sitting in the edit or
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during sound post. I talk about film vs digital also with a sense of nostalgia because, I think, now we record 10 channels or 8 tracks, we have multiple mics. In every mic we are able to isolate and record. It’s wonderful. But, the charm of just, you know, fewer mics. I would love to have a mixed track - it means essentially the material but if you are trying to create a 2channel mix, you don’t know what’s happening on the shot. So, I essentially don’t try to concentrate on mixing. I create a 2-track mix but it’s only for my reference, just to be able to hear it later. Your idea is to get the performances and work on it later. It is a little haphazard, it’s not neat, where you kind of know what you have and you are in sync with the direction department, which says, “Oh, these are the 2 OK takes for us.” They also actually don’t know what’s OK for them. It’s as if you are in a pit and you are on your own. I don’t know if I am really making any sense… LG. So, there is a certain sense of nostalgia that I am talking about where we used to get rehearsals. You still perhaps get them in many setups, but everybody is striving towards one particular thing that was the idea of getting on a similar page. The idea was that you are getting into one zone from diverse streams, working synchronously with each other and then emerging with something. But now, “oh, okay in the first take I have that light so the director knows this first line, okay that look is fine”… Yeah, that’s great filmmaking for sure. So, there is a certain sense of nostalgia, unmistakably. Q: Are you concerned with the questions or issues of control? A: I am. Surely. I am a control freak. But, I am saying that the control over a few things is necessaey. Anyway in India we are struggling all the while with sources of noise. Signal-to-noise ratio being a very primary concern you want to keep in touch with the pitch of performance and the confusion that actors have with the pitch and levels, you know. So, of course there is a loss of control. With the new age producers, who look at things in a different way, that loss is even more apparent. But, with changing trends we also kind of use different modus operandi to get where we want to get. Q: But, there are advantages of working with digital technology… A: Yeah, of course! See, you already know the advantages. For me, the advantage is that I have so many tracks and all my mistakes can get covered up. I don’t have to struggle with mixing. Also, it’s digital, it’s lighter. I have many more mics. when you are shooting digitally, the processes are much easier and we shoot much more. I have many more takes to work with; I have more options, which is always better, one would feel. I don’t know if I am talking about the areas that you want to tread into… Okay… So, these are the advantages. Somehow, the disadvantages
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seem to be more than the advantages because also of sound recording. Sound seems to be a much more accessible area right now, which is an advantage. I mean, in many senses of the term, it is an advantage for everybody involved in filmmaking to associate with sound to know about it technically or otherwise. That’s an advantage, of course. The disadvantage has got more to do with the discipline, you know, because you have so many options, the importance of the moment is lost. Q: But, in terms of democratization, it has become democratic and it has come to a condition where a technician gets enough attention. Hierarchywise there has been a sense of a feudal chain in the analog systems - many people who were doing location recording, they were considered in the lower strata but now with digital recording this hierarchical order is changing… A: I don’t know why. I consider them to be of a higher strata, you know. Q: Okay… A: Because, I would say that, more than my contemporaries, my predecessors or whatever you might call them, would have a forte which is more technical. I probably am a little old school. The forte is not just technical, but more dispersed into the art of cinema, it’s how I look at things Q: Aesthetics. A: Aesthetics, yeah. Aesthetics of cinema, of recording life, everything comes into play as a recordist for me. So, the technical is something that I have been able to put on the side. It’s because right now it’s much, much easier for us to deal with things technically. Our equipment, the technology, everything have made things much easier. Q: Is it not an advantage? A: Of course, it is. It has become easier, lighter, and more accessible. But that has not given sound any further leeway and because it’s so easy, the value of it being done at the moment, in the right way, is lost. You have too many options, e.g. “Oh, you can do it in the post”, or “Oh, okay, we’ll do it later.” So, the importance of now… For example, when I am wild tracking something, after certain takes, if I have a few lines where there are some issues, if I want to wild track it because of some noise etc., I would like to go for the wild track immediately after the take, essentially because the actors are in the mood, in the throes of it and they would probably say it in the same way. That idea is completely lost because they know we can, you know… That’s the idea of discipline I keep talking about. Say, for pulling the focus right, you need to take measurements. For
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doing the boom right, you need to know the shot. It cannot be a very random… it could be a random thing. But if it’s random, a focus puller or a boom operator might have problems. So, there has to be a room for everybody to engage with the characters and positions. This sounds so technical, but that’s the idea of filmmaking - to give each other space, yet to keep fighting for space… Q: Interact. A: Interact, yeah… So lines are always drawn. In India always we keep saying that the DP has to run the show. If DP doesn’t run the show right then you are not setting the tone right for the film. So yeah, it’s great to work in a digital domain but there are certain things. For example, even while recording how can you ascertain really how loud the actor is going to go, how much is he going to shriek if he has to shriek. So, you are trying to engage with the actor to find out, how high or low the levels could go. That is not really needed much in the analog domain, you know. It is also kind of taxing for the actor to just tell somebody, how loud I can go. So, then I have to put my limiters and compressors on. The limiter is on always but the compressor’s not. So the idea of digital needs a certain kind of a treatment and the treatment kind of sets a tone to your interaction with the actors – which may not actually be in the zone that you want it to be. And when you engage with actors about levels, for example, I mean… when a performer performs, in different languages we speak in different zones of our diaphragm or chord or just from the mouth. Different languages are spoken differently. Maybe people speak from the gut, so we get much clearer sounds. So, a trained actor and an untrained actor… Now-a-days we make films where we work with non-actors, you know. It’s very interesting, because you are bringing naturalnes of sounds. It is like how we moved from completely studio space to exteriors. How we are moving from rigid actors to to the flexible non-actors. There was a film called, Lady of the Lake.2 Q: Hmm. Paban Kumar, he was my senior in the film school (SRFTI). A: Paban Kumar… Working with completely non-actors. You know the situation and that’s why you can say they are non-actors but then you don’t really… they are true, as much as an actor would be. That’s the interesting aspect of digital that analog could not do because there is a strict discipline to things. By breaking that discipline you are breaking into new areas where you haven’t gone into before. That’s very interesting. Q: Are you suggesting that recording sound in the digital domain has become improvisational? A: Yes.
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Q: But does it not have a kind of liveness to it? Liveness in the sense, as you said, you are recording the performances. They are live performances. So, perhaps this liveness gives a kind of realistic or authentic, believable diegetic space for construction. A: So, the liveness… Are you ascribing the liveness to performance per se or to the environment? Q: Environment. A: Yes, I think you are right. I do think that the liveness of a shooting environment as opposed to the liveness of a recording environment within a studio, definitely adds to the authenticity, to the realness of the performance. For sure, yeah. There was another word that you used before liveness. Q: Believability. Authenticity. A: No, another word before that… Q: Diegetic space. A: No. Forget it. So yes… but… no, I don’t know your question actually. Q: I go through a lot of reviews of films, for example I have read many reviews of, let’s say, Lady of the Lake, Masaan3, Court4 and even popular mainstream films like, Highway5, Slumdog Millionaire.6 And most of the reviewers are mentioning a word realistic, “It’s so realistic”, “It’s so believable”, “It’s so authentic” – so these are the words that emerge in the contemporary condition of filmmaking in the digital realm. Does it mean that digital technology and its manifestation in sound production gives a sense of realism or a sense of authenticity, believability to the films that are being produced, sound wise? A: Well, I don’t ascribe the realness of the films that you mentioned to the sound so much. Neither Masaan nor Lady of the Lake. That realness is coming from the language of the film, the making of the film, the way the film has been shot. For example, it feels like they shot Lady of the Lake like reality. Q: Yes, of course. I interviewed the sound practitioner who did the sound for Lady of the Lake. He is my senior from SRFTI, Sukanta Majumder. He told me that he recorded everything on location and it’s completely sync sound. No sound source was recreated in a studio. He recorded everything in sync on location and he used as less filters as possible. What you hear is live recording of every single performance. A: Correct. I am also saying that the mise-en-scene, of course sound contributes to it… But you know, sound is such a subliminal sensation. It affects you so subconsciously that one doesn’t even realise why one would
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find it more realistic. Like myself. I just said that I don’t think that it’s just sound, I think it also has to do with how you choose your actors, how you build the different scenarios; like for example, I think many of the scenes, because they involve villagers, all the villagers, they have been shot like documentary, like something real. I think the scene has been given to them and they did it the way they would. And definitely sync sound, production sound, gives you the real thing. If it’s true, if it’s authentic, it affects you. Lady of the Lake is almost not realistic, Masaan is realistic for me. Lady of the Lake is almost like, it moves between real and surreal. It is so real when it’s real and also it moves so much into sort of surreal. It has a beautiful interplay between the two and the way it moves from one to another, it’s beautiful. I don’t know what creates the magic in a film. It has to do with how everything plays together. I mean, what affects you in a sound or how sound has been designed for a particular shot has also got to do with how the different elements of the sound are talking to each other. I don’t know if Masaan is completely sync sound or not, but I think the realistic nature of today’s films which are… What examples can I give you? I saw this film called Anarkali of Aarah7, I mean nothing much to say about sound, but you know that’s the thing… Sound, if it doesn’t work, if it’s bad, you will talk about it. But if it’s good or playing just the role of background music or whatever, playing its own role in the background which you are not realizing, then it’s working. If a film is working then the sound is good, then the sound is working. I feel when the sound is asking for a lot of attention, more attention than anything else, then it’s popping out, it’s almost jarring. Unless it falls into the design of the film per se. There are a whole lot of films coming out which are realistic, but I don’t know how different the sound is, production sound is, for a realistic film. I think in a realistic film you get to play with the real elements much later in the post production. My idea of recording production sound, unfortunately, would be to get the dialogue right and get different layers of ambience also separately so that I can separate everything out later and have them according to my will, whatever level I want. We have quite a few realistic films coming up apart from the typical Bollywood films that we see. But I just also want to add that the role of ambience, even in a realistic film is done sometimes to overkill… Q: Done what…? A: Done to overdoing - the idea of ambience, different layers of ambience. I mean, I could put in 100 tracks, but what does that mean really? Am I putting in 100 tracks because I am hearing all of those? Or am I just making it a little thick by making some frequencies heard a little more and I don’t want it to be thin, as if it lacks a heaviness of air, I am adding more
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layers to it? Most often we don’t get to hear or perceive so much of ambience. We only hear maybe 3 or 4 elements, you know. So, if we can only hear 3-4 elements then why do we put in so many layers of sound? Is it because we are also adding many layers which we may remove later? Or is it because we are ambitious to have many elements? Contrary to the logic that human ear will not be able to perceive more than 3-4, maybe our subconscious would be able to perceive and some people will be able to perceive some, while some others will be able to perceive a different set. Sometimes I have questions about the idea of layering ambience so much, though that’s rare in Indian Cinema; because in India we are always in loggerheads with musicians and the background music. We don’t work in congruence with each other. We work separately. How can we have a design if we don’t know what are the elements in music that are going to come through? The idea of control here is very important because if somebody is designing the sound of a film, it has to include music. So, music and sound, the sound of music and the music of sound, they all come together. So… Your subject is ambience? Q: More specifically, I am looking at the status of reality. I am actually dealing with a number of concepts. One is reality, presence, embodiment… A: I like it. Reality, presence and? Q: Embodiment. A: Embodiment. What do you mean by that? Q: Perceiving recorded sounds bodily through the processes of Diegesis and Mimesis. A: Okay. Q: Diegesis is when you tell a story. You are constructing a particular way to narrate. You are recording, taking those elements into your studio. You are constructing a narration, you are telling a story. And in Mimesis, you show. You don’t tell, you show. For example, you can recount our discussion in two ways. You can tell, like Sreya is asking how is the interview going? You can describe. You can narrate that I came a bit late, then we ordered sandwiches and then we ordered Aam Panna, whether Aam Panna or not, and then Budha started recording – you can narrate like that. And instead of narrating you can show. You can just document this interview and send it to Sreya. In cinema there are elements of both diegesis and mimesis. My argument is that digital technology opens up the mimesis aspect of cinema more than diegesis because you do less inside studio and you do more on-site, on the location of shooting. You record a lot many materials, live, often in sync with the visual recording. And
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previously what you did in magnetic format was that you used to collect some materials, use mostly sound banks and put them togther in the studio… A: I think the process is the same, it hasn’t changed. Q: It hasn’t changed? A: We are still doing the same thing, just the domain is different because we still don’t believe in getting it all together at the same time in our sync track. Q: Actually when I hear Indian cinema made in the digital domain, I hear more, I get more. I am convinced of the location. The conviction that I get is that if it is shot in Manipur, I get an idea that it is Manipur. If it is shot in front of Potluck, I am convinced that it is Potluck. How is it done? A: In analog it didn’t have the spectrum to take in so many frequencies. Plus the aliveness of the whole thing that you are talking about, it comes from having a lot of elements in there, which you can connect to. If I was shooting in analog also, I would be recording the same ambience and putting it in the mix. If I am shooting in digital, I would do the same thing. The difference is the number of many tracks or sounds that I could have worked with in analog. And the processes would take too much time to put for sounds. Within that I can try putting so many sounds and the whole process is much simpler. But it would be interesting to actually have a… if I record now on Nagra, you know, on a ¼” tape and do the exact same thing… I record on analog but my processes are still the same. Maybe in the present scenario of sounds being more alive, environments being more alive, we are shooting in much more alive environments. If I do the same thing, in analog it would sound warmer. So, having an analog medium in between somewhere, it helps because it sounds more rounded. But I might end up having the same thing. It’s just that the tediousness of the process… But yeah, I think the subjects have changed since we have moved to digital and the empowerment that one would sense… One chooses subjects that would take one to maybe a forest, maybe a river or maybe in the ghats of Benaras, which one wouldn’t have thought of before, because it would take much more budget. An independent filmmaker can go anywhere now and shoot in any place and produce good sound, make good images. That is the beauty of digital, you know, the empowerment one would sense. I have a camera, I have a recorder, and I can make a film. And hence, subjects can be crazily new. But, if I add some analog thing in my whole chain, it would make the whole thing even more alive, even more interesting. I don’t think analog would miss some of the nuances that you are able to hear in digital.
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Q: In the films made in the 70s, 80s, 90s for example, there were actors, characters, who would be singing a song or spending time together in a very remote location, in mountains and forests, and we couldn’t hear any of those locations. There was a lack of awareness about the locations that the characters were traversing through. Cities didn’t sound like cities. Rooms didn’t sound like rooms. Hills for example… there are many examples… With characters in a particular place we expect or anticipate certain kinds of elements to appear but most of the times we don’t hear them in films made in the analog era. But, in the digital era many of the elements that we anticipate - even a small elevator, if it’s shot inside the elevator, we hear the tone of the elevator, the buzz, electrical hum – which was absent in the analog era. These are the differences of texture being recorded, being attended to. So, what the change actually is the recordist is actually attending to those elements and those details. A: Do you see this trend only in India? No. It’s across the world. Q: In Europe sync sound was already always practised everywhere except a few national cinemas, like in Italian cinema dubbing was mostly practised. But lately, Italian cinema has also embraced sync sound. So, Indian and Italian cinema can be compared because of the dynamics that are practised. But in most other European cinema it was sync sound almost all throughout. A: I think in India there was sync sound till about maybe the early 50s… Q: Early 50s, yeah. A: And then, since we moved more to the studios for ADR, we did not make that transition conducive to sync sound. Q: Because of cameras we couldn’t do syn sound. We had Arriflex II, which made noises and to avoid those noises we had to dub and that became a standard. A: Right. So, within the studio we had a blimp but outside the studio we couldn’t. We couldn’t blimp it because anyway it had to be agile. It continued in 70s, 80s and 90s. In the new century we started doing sync again. Q: In 2001 Lagaan8, Dil Chahta Hai9 – all of them are sync sound. A: Yeah. In 2002 there was a film called Matrubhoomi – A Nation without Women. 10 This was a small film. This was a film which was kind of independent. Q: Okay! I have heard about this film. A: But I think it kind of came at the same time as Lagaan. Lagaan was really big and you know. The sync sound became a flagship for the film.
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Q: Absolutely. A: Also, it must have been really tough to do a live sound in such locations, you know. We never had radio mics then. You are asking why do we hear much more now. Yeah, we would attribute it to digital because it would make it easier. And digital is not just about recording on digital in the filming stage. It’s also the whole post-production process and finally the mixing process. The mixing engineer would earlier only be concerned about whether we would be able to hear this or not. Thus, having minimum elements really helped. Also, there was no standardization of theatres. What we have now also is not typical standardization but we had nothing of standardization before and hence it became crucial that whatever you mixed, whatever sounds you put in, should be heard. It’s a concern even now but there are now different choices that the audience might have in terms of viewing it on different platforms. Also, technology has gotten more accessible hence you have better headphones. People watch it on their computers. Film watching now is not particularly a cinema hall experience. Yes, digital definitely means opening up of more possibilities and making it more accessible and more democratic in a certain way. It’s not just the forte of a person who has the access to these resources, who can go watch a film, who can actually make a film and I don’t necessarily need to go to a film school to be able to make a film. It is empowerment in different ways. Still, in my mind there is something in the analog world which is now not there in my world. The sheer palpability, you know… how the tape moves, the movement of the tape on the Nagra recorder, how you cue the tape. It’s so physical. The connection is so real. Earlier, if people had a problem with a machine, they would open up. Essentially it was a mechanical system and not so much of an electronic system. You would be able to see it, see the sound, rewind it, forward it, you know. The engagement with each process, the elements, the physicality of my world that I could connect with. Digital domain has the complexity of compartmentalization of various things. Sound needs to be edited. It always needed to be edited but the processes have so much disparity now and the value of everything that you will do, each sound that you put, how you put it there, selections… The whole process has actually, if you look at it very carefully and microscopically, has become very different. Earlier, I had to hear sounds, select sounds, put them on a striped tape, then hear it in the editing studio. This engagement obviously sounds completely unreal right now. One wouldn’t have the time or the bandwidth to engage with this process in that way, strangely. As a sound designer one would want to construct things in a certain way but my not being required to be there in each process is also a certain process of democratisation
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where I am involving so many other people in this work, at the same time. That way I may not make each of those people a part of the joy I have as a creator of this whole thing. Q: So, the subjective engagement with the processes of sound recording and sound producing have been dissolving in digital realm. It’s more of a dematerialized, dehumanized process that is emerging. Would you like to say it’s a more objective way of dealing with sound rather than subjective, which was previously practised? A: Yes. I would say that the success of sound design is also about being present in that realm of the film. Whether I can disengage with my real world and be present in that world, engage with the world where the film resides and construct it in a way that would be thematically in tandem with the film. That is a challenge in itself. And I don’t think that it simply used to be subjective and now has become objective. I wouldn’t think that kind of stark dichotomy is the thing. I am sure many people work objectively as well and many people work inwardly in the digital domain as well now. But the process is such that there are certain successful formats to the contents. In the context of not having too much of time assigned to the work… I would say that… Sorry. I kind of lost the track of what I was saying. Q: I am interested to know about the sense of reality that is constructed. Because cinema is not real. It’s a constructed reality all the time. But how much real it seems to the audience is something we can talk about. How much real it sounds? Because you mentioned surreal, when you talked of a 100% sync sound film called Lady of the Lake by Paban Kumar, why do you think that it is so? Why it’s not just real? Is it because of the narrative, or the sync sound texture that behaves like over the sense of reality that you expect or there is also a question of hyperreality produced by sound effects, like the hyperreal Dhishoom (typical sound effect of a punch)? That’s not surreal, that’s hyperreal. And I would like to mention another reality which I call sub-real, less than real. Most of the dubbed films are sub-real because they don’t sound authentic. We can clearly hear that it’s not the voice of the man or the woman who is speaking on screen. It’s forcefully imposed on them. That’s sub-real. So, why do you think it’s surreal in Lady of the Lake? What is your conceptualization of surreality? Why did you mention the word? I am trying to understand the status of reality in cinema. That’s one of my primary investigations. A: For me reality has little to do with production sound. In practice, production sound is essentially concerned with the recording of dialogue and some effects and separate recording of ambiences.
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Q: But those ambiences are real. They are coming from a real world. A: Yes. We record ambiences in real environments, but sometimes we might not use it as it exists. The sense of surreal is something that I felt in Lady of the Lake, which I really can’t explain. The sense of surreal doesn’t really hold for too long. It also has of course to do with Lady of the Lake emerging, you know. It has to do with conceptually more than… Q: Sonically… A: Yeah, more than sonically. Q: Narratological point of view. A: Yeah. Q: But sound-wise it’s very real. It’s a very clean and crisp recording of a particular place. It’s recorded on location. That’s reflected in the way it sounds. Isn’t it? A: Yeah. Totally. For example, you just see the lake. Anything that happens in the lake has a sense of mystery, a sense of being somewhere between real and not real. It also comes from the sense of visual, the sense of time that you are playing with, the mental framework of the character you are dealing with. So, the sense of real is not just coming from the sound. Of course, sound has a very important role to play. Even the tweaking of sound in one certain way can move it this way or the other and a common ear wouldn’t even notice what has been done. I don’t know what Sukanta had done in it, but it was like, the movements, the transitions were very smooth and not discernible, you know. It was very interesting. Sometimes the sense of the real in the film comes from how the film was shot. For example, the village meeting. So you are having a meeting. They would construct it on their own. I don’t see the director playing a big role in it. So, the real has transcended into the film in a beautiful way. Q: Let’s take an example which is very popular mainstream, like made in the heartland of Mumbai film industry. Let’s talk about Highway with sound by Resul Pookutty. The first half of Highway, every single zone through which the truck moves, gives a sense of place. Like if it’s in Rajasthan, we hear Rajasthan and if it is going towards Bengal, Kolkata and then the north, we hear those locations through which the truck passes. This we would have not heard in the previous era of sound production. This shift of awareness about the site or about the location, is it not something emergent? A: Sure. It is. Q: But why is it that way? Why are the recordists getting aware of the role of the location, the idea of site-specificity, the importance of the location?
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A: How did this happen, you are saying, the transition? Q: It’s quite clear the way recordists are dealing with location. It was not practised like this previously. It’s a new thing and it happened after sync sound. Is it a direct manifestation of sync sound practise, that sound technicians, sound designers, sound practitioners, they are giving more attention to the specificity of location? A: See, sync sound has existed before. French cinema, 70s, 80s and with the Dogme11, they always did sync sound and they accepted it as it is. Whether it be crickets in the day, the levels of the crickets would change in each shot. You could always hear it in French films. So, I do not think the trend of detailed sound, adding more nuances to sound has to do only with sync sound. Q: Okay. A: Probably it has to do with the digital domain itself and how the digital can handle so many sounds together. How it has made the process of mixing… Because earlier, I think a mixing engineer had to deal with questions of how much this may not be heard in the mix and that may not be heard. The low level sounds would not be heard easily and then there was a frequency restriction also. 80hz to 8Khz was the academy filter. I think the opening up of the kind you are talking about, of space of sound, sound spaces, that has most probably emerged with the conversion to digital. It’s interesting that the textures are becoming very important. They are important and you do see them but you don’t see them as much. I don’t see it as much. Maybe you have seen a bit in Masaan, maybe a bit in Asha Jaoar Majhe12, you know, films like those. But in a paradigm of nonindependent industry, Highway is an example that probably stands out. But we, sound practitioners often complain of only being able to hear dialogue and music and sounds which are incidental, which need to be there and not necessarily the various textures of ambience, the various textures of space that you want to kind of make a part of the film. You often don’t… I mean, for example, in Dangal13 what was very interesting was the sound of the sand they would practise on. That was the most interesting texture you could hear in the film. Each fall… That kind of detailed work would obviously not been possible in the Rock and Roll era, you know, where each time you want to do the take again, you had to roll back to that place. That was an era of precision. Here we can keep moving it, a frame, ¼ of a frame. But then, it had to be recorded in sync. The dubbing artist had to record everything in sync without having the room to shift much. Having said that, we have lost on that logistical precision of production; we often see films with dialogue actually not in sync. So, the
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idea of performance and the idea of viewing is totally different. Hindi films which have 600 crore or 200 crore budget, they don’t have sync. The importance of sync, lip sync, is that it puts you in orientation with the visual. In the absence of that you are a little disoriented. The value of that is not there. We have more and more examples of the kind that you gave, Highway. It’s not yet a norm but yes, you see so many animation films, space films, alien films, with such layering of sounds. To create 1 sound, 10 sounds are used. Such is the detailing. But somewhere the power of sound is also lost in the layering. Each time you layer a lot, it doesn’t mean that it’s getting more powerful. I mean the choice that you have to… it’s not soul touching. It is not going across the screen and making real impact. And why is that? Is it because one is not efficient, one is not precise in understanding? It is very subjective how you want to construct a particular sound. But you could also say that I am one of those who live in a nostalgic world. Q: Old school. LG. A: I am old school. LG. Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I do think that I adapted and I am adapting all the time, you know. I also feel a certain sense of loss about sound not having that much power. We go and see Hindi films with dialogues not having so much of power, in fact not even being discernible in terms of what is being said. Not comprehensible and all this in the era of sync sound to the point that people are saying, “Oh, sync sound. Is it not going to be clear in the hall?” With all these questions I just feel that, you know, for me the replication and reproduction of sound in the theatre at the absolute end level is so important, that I would rather go with lesser elements. I would go with the elements that would be heard the way they should be heard. But still retaining the flavour… The films are changing. 30 years back who would make a film like Highway? You would always make films which are family dramas, social dramas. Even now many people choose to make… they don’t want sync sound so I don’t know… it’s probably because they want to hear the actors loud and clear since that is more important for people than how real the performance is. Now we work with actors who mumble. For them dubbing is a nightmare. They are not great actors as well. For such actors it would be hellish to dub anyway. The characters have to be made more palpable, so you have something like a next door neighbour girl… You like working but it’s one thing to take time off and to find a different path takes a lot of time. Q: Do you have an idea of what is termed the “best sound”? Is there any best sound work? A: Best sound…
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Q: What is your idea of a better sound or a good sound, at least? A: Firstly, good sound is something that as a normal audience I wouldn’t notice. Something which has so much become a part of the film that I would not see it any differently than the film. But as a discerning audience I am kind of able to separate the work that goes into sound, the work that goes into creating images. I am able to separate out the different areas. But for a normal audience, sound is a part of the film which is not standing out. If I can hear the dialogues well, if I feel the film, if I feel one with the film, then the sound is good. Q: And what is the role of ambience in this scheme of good sound? A: The role of ambience depends on the particular genre of the film. It could be a film that has no ambience at all. Like maybe it is a make-belief world of a small child, for example, this film called, Khargosh, Paresh Kamdar’s film.14 There’s no ambience in the film and as a sound person I did miss it for 10 minutes or so because we work so much with ambience, it feels that something is not there. Then when you are in the space of that film, you don’t miss it any longer because it is not required. Ambience serves to bring the audience at par with the level of real things that the film is trying to create. Then the choice of ambience… Sound is so subjective that every sound would create different responses in different people. Most often the impact of sound is something that people don’t understand, except when it bangs and what you call, hyperreal. That is the kind of sound people talk about. Q: Do you think there is apathy of mimetically documenting the real in India and a preference for narrating more in dialogues because of the tradition that we live by - oral tradition, orality? Because of our deeply embedded practices of orality, we are not interested in recording the real but rather in narrating the real. A: I think you are right. I wonder why we want to tell and narrate as you are saying and not let people experience it. Often we use voiceover to tell people this is happening. It’s the easiest way out and it’s like a tale told. You know there are some phases of our so called progress, in the field of arts especially, even politically, democracy is being imposed on us. These things have come to us but we have not moved into democracy, or modernity. We have not moved into cinema just by ourselves. We have not really adapted to the cinematic language in a way that is our own because we are continuing our jatra and our old traditions by just giving it the form of cinema. There is experimental cinema. There are all kinds of cinema happening which is really in the periphery of alternative cinema, which does not get released anywhere and kind of struggles to find its
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audience. They are not really subscribing to any audience. There are all kinds of films that get made. We as a filmmaking community, we don’t give importance to looking at ourselves and sharing things amongst us. Sharing means I am passing on my trade secrets. So, we don’t share, we don’t communicate, we don’t have spaces where we express. I mean we don’t even have good screening spaces apart from the commercial spaces. We don’t have forums where people engage with what we are doing. That’s kind of sad. But, I think you have to look out for the new generations. We find those films, we have to look at films beyond what they seem in terms of cinema halls and find out the small films. I mean, why did Kamal Swaroop’s film… Q: Om-Dar-B-Dar.15 A: Om-Dar-B-Dar. Why did it become popular now? Why did it take so many years to get recognition? If it was a so-called masterpiece, why did people not realize it that time? Is our spirit kind of missing? Because cinema is a livelihood, maybe because we are not supported, we lack the support that artists in general require in the society from the government or within the society. We need to find those. We need to encourage different kind of storytelling and really break formats and patterns. Even life is all about breaking patterns, creating no traditions. Some things are very easy to connect. Sometimes it is very very esoteric. Q: LG. A: But that is your work. So, yeah. Sometimes one is not used to that expression anymore. I really like to access more stuff that you mention. Q: Sound is esoteric. Sound experience is ineffable. A: It is, it is.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:33:27 Name Abbreviations: Amala Popuri – A; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 Loktak Lairembee (Lady of the lake, Haobam Paban Kumar 2016) 3 Masaan (Neeraj Ghaywan 2015) 4 Court (Chaitanya Tamhane 2014) 5 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 6 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle 2008) 7 Anaarkali of Aarah (Avinash Das 2017) 8 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 9 Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Wants, Farhan Akhtar, 2001)
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Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women (Motherland, Manish Jha 2003) In 1995, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg initiated Dogme 95 - a filmmaking movement advocating for shooting films on site directly without the use of cinematic devices or post-production technology. 12 Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love, Aditya Vikram Sengupta 2014) 13 Dangal (Nitesh Tiwari 2016) 14 Khargosh (Paresh Kamdar 2009) 15 Om Dar-B-Dar (Kamal Swaroop 1988) 11
CHAPTER 28 DIPANKAR CHAKI1
DC: In 1998, we were using Hi-8s and ADATs. 2 We had those initial systems, which just came in at that point, which was basically the spectral. The first version of Pro Tools had just been launched - Pro Tools 3. Q: Hm. DC: It was running on audio media cards. Tape machines were still running at that time at some places, you know, twenty-four (24) tracks. Q: Hm. DC: Tape is still active. Sound Forge was one of the major mastering softwares at that time in small independent studios in India, in like the smaller studios using cards and all those things, 2-track. So that is the time I actually got into doing my sound engineering. So we were more in the analog transitional phase and then the whole birth of digital happened. I have worked on tape also. I’ve worked on 24-track, 2-inch tape. It was a completely different experience to edit and to work with those things. LG. Nagra. Q: Nagra. DC: Thereafter, slowly the whole thing moved more digital. Things simplified and became much easier to manage. Q: Do you now work with digital technology? DC: Yeah. Q: Completely? DC: (Overlap) Entirely. Yeah. Entirely digital technology in the post side of things but in the source side of things - I mean when the microphone, which we are using when we are coming to the recording platform - in that chain we have some analog equipment like pre-amplifiers or these Solid State Logic’s own pre amplifier EQs (equalizers) or some valve preamplifier. So, from the microphone to that and then from there it comes into a very good stage. From there, it goes into the software. Then it goes completely digital. LG. There’s no analog at all after that. LG.
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Q: Did you work with optical or magnetic recording before? DC: Magnetic recording actually was just out when I started. When I started, even then there was that big government studio that was located at Salt Lake. I am forgetting… what was the name? Q: Rupayan! DC: Rupayan. So, at Rupayan till then the Magnateks were working and they were doing songs and stuff on the Magnateks. I still remember that Chinmoy was there and one day I went to meet him and they were still working like that, you know! LG. Q: LG. DC: LG. So they had these very old consoles. I got very flabbergasted there. Q: LG. DC: Very old consoles which had built-in compression and EQs and they had knobs. All those knobs were being used to roll in the Magnetek, rewinding the Magnatek enacted sound-effect and playing once again and you know, Bengali songs were mixing. But I miss that whole thing. I guess it was too elaborate and the smaller studios, which were just surviving at that time, they were very happily flying with Hi8s. LG. Q: Hi8s? DC: Two Hi8s. Yeah, locked to each other and sixteen tracks of audio, and then you keep submitting and developing a recording. Q: In 1998? DC: Around that time, yeah. Q: Okay, so – DC: To answer the question once again, optical yes. Optical, because we used to convert our sounds into optical for Dolby. Q: Yes. DC: So that’s how we did a lot of optical. Q: Married print? DC: Married print. Yes. Q: Yes, optical. DC: Yeah. Q: But did you find it’s different working with optical than digital? I mean, from the point of view of quality and texture. Did you find optical
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recording limiting in some sense, even though you did in the last stage of the film? DC: Optical to some extent has certain parameters which kind of limit you with the way you mix the film, the whole EQ of your film. Q: Hm. DC: Which means even at the lower end, even at the higher end, and even levels because if these things go a little out of the necessity of the optical platform, it starts to disturb the audio, which means distortion or these things start coming. Q: Like the head-room: 800 hertz to 8000 hertz. DC: Correct. Q: Not before and not behind - that’s I find quite limiting too. DC: Yeah. Q: Do you find working with digital technology opens up more creative options? DC: Creatively, yes, I think. Sonically, may be no. Q: Why? DC: Because sonically what is happening in the digital domain is, being a domain user and working everyday on tracks and audio, you know, and like mixing film music or background score or effects or songs, what I feel is that what I really lack, because I have worked with tape. Q: Hm. DC: So what I think we are constantly trying to achieve in the digital platform is that we’re trying to emulate a sense of saturation, through compression and through other kind of products like maximizers and stuff like that. But essentially, all of this is basically falling short of that little thing which we had in analog naturally, which was saturation. That saturation which we’re missing out, that we’re constantly trying to bring in by using these things. So we’re packing it up nicely, you know, the compressors are packing it up nicely, the maximizers are packing it up nicely. They’re putting in a little head-room so the punch is active. Entertainment audio is very much related to punch. You have to feel it. LG. Q: The point is that in analog formats you had a natural kind of quality of sound, which you lack in digital technology. DC: Yeah. I feel that is a huge loss because from my experience as a user, analog means - it is completely my own theory and I don’t know if others
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will agree - when I see or listen to digital in its own way I see a brilliant kind of a transparency on the upper side. 16k right down to 2k, 2 and a ½ k, even 1k. Q: Hm. DC: Like up to 2k you have this amazing transparency in digital. Q: Hm. DC: Which is like absolutely pristine but right down from 2k like midrange and the whole behavior of mid-range is very different. The quality of mid-range information and low-range information that is there in analog is very different from the digital platform. Q: Okay. Interesting point. But another point is that in digital technology, the resolution is higher. It’s giving you more head-room - like digital technology can give you up to 120 dB, while optical recording had 78 dB. Magnetic recording had 98 dB. In terms of dB, in terms of head-room, you’re having more head-room, then why do you find digital recording limiting? DC: I think it’s also related to sourcing. Because it is not entirely - if today I record something, which has got all those qualities in it, I would probably not have so much to discuss in post. That is why I think what we’re always missing here - the point is that probably the mix starts right at the source. How the sourcing is done, the quality of the sourcing, and the entire nature, texture, the imaging of whatever you’re sourcing - if that is pristine, then even at digital post I don’t think many questions can come up. But I think that is where we kind of lack. Q: Yes. So in terms of comparison between these formats, digital and analog, you prefer analog quality-wise? Or? DC: I think if we had options, we would probably basically settle for a hybrid setup. Q: Okay. DC: LG. Well, which would have the best of both worlds. LG. Q: Going to the more specific thing. How do you define ambience in film sound? Why ambience? It is because my focus is primarily on ambience. I’m actually developing a focused research in the use of ambience in cinema and other media arts from the point of view of perception and cognition. DC: Hm. Q: How do you define ambience in film sound?
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DC: It’s a very interesting question. I think it is one of the primarily most important things in my mind. Ambience can play many roles. It’s basically - can I elaborate a little bit? Q: Of course! DC: Ambience, according to me, plays many roles. One is to use it when there is dialogue. Two, use it when there is no dialogue. When there is dialogue, the way we use it, what we use and how we use it and the level at which we use it, and when there is no dialogue, the same thing. Ambience is also married to silence. So, how do we basically understand the interplay of levels versus silence? Also, it is very important to understand the element of experience while we’re at the middle of the sound stage, you know, how we’re effectively constructing the experience of which - the master is the film. The film is the thought. Q: Hm. DC: I think the ambience is an extremely artistic aspect of the film sound, where it is probably one of the most behind-the-scenes thing that is constantly coloring up the whole aspect of the whole treatment of the film and the way, the style in which you want to tell the story, and the story itself. So, this is according to me how I see ambience, how I define ambience. It is a very integral part, as integral as music. I love both. Q: Hm. DC: And part of the whole construction of the experience. Q: But do you think that the quantity, level, and volume of ambience have changed over the years? Throughout this transition from analog to digital, do you find that in the use of digital technology - in the digital domain, the quantity of ambience is much higher than the analog era? DC: I think this a very good question. This is something we keep noticing when we’re watching the work of others. When you’re listening to your own work, especially with the creators or the directors who would generally have their comments on how they want it -“Here I want it really high,” - and you can’t hear anything! “Here I want it really low, absolutely very subtle.” Maybe what they also mean by saying these things is not only the level, but the nature of the ambience as well. The ambient track is not something, which is showing itself too much. But it does hold the image of the sound stage and it keeps that image going even in silence. Otherwise, there’s a digital silence, which takes you slightly out of the suspension of the disbelief. So, even completely dead room tones or very dead ambient tones or where we’re using things like generated stereo tones, just to keep a continuum of the sound stage, and maybe there it is
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actually silent but you won’t even realize it unless you stop and hit pause. Maybe you’ll think the theatre sounds different! LG. That way, I think that yes, there has been huge level changes because there are a lot of movies in which the ambience level in the digital platform have come really up. Also, with the formats changing now, which are 5.1, and Atmos - we can pan ambiences. Depending on which position in the theatre we are sitting, we’re experiencing the ambiences. The design of the 5.1 tracks is also very inherent to the ambient experience, versus the way you’re sitting in the theatre, because my dialogue is in the centre track essentially. I mean, not moving around too much; my music is probably between the LCR and a little bit from the surrounds. But my ambient tracks definitely have a certain spread in the surrounds, which in equation would be around sixtyforty when compared to music. So, the sixty that I’m using in the surrounds is what would be very important to think about, if I would consider a person sitting on the last row left hand most seat, for whom it’s the longest distance from the centre. For him, the picture and the sound stage is actually very far away. If he hears something from here, he would actually feel disconnected. Q: Hm. DC: To the whole action of the suspension of disbelief - to keep him conjunct to that 2D space, which he is looking at, that here is the picture and here is the sound. What is happening here? LG. Very sharp sounds can disturb him so much, you know. It is a big acoustical disturbance to have anything sharper coming from behind the head. So, we’re also trying to constantly think of modifying what we work with to ensure that we do not disturb the audience from the main objective of experiencing the film as a film and not hear sound as the sound but also always as a part of what is happening in the film. This is, I think, the space we’re all in. Hence, it is also slightly different for different people - some levels up and some levels low. LG. Q: But stereo or monaural mixes had ambience. However, ambience was not spread out, it was in the centre, I mean the centrally positioned speaker. That could make a lot of difference, right? DC: Yeah. Q: What according to you is the difference - if the ambience is in the centre and if it is in the surrounds or rear speaker? DC: It’s a phenomenally important question. It goes back even to the point of the design of the format. Q: Hm.
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DC: I personally think that the movie is in front. It’s on the screen and the sound is coming from the screen. Stereo fails to some extent because the pseudo-centre drops because we have done stereo mixes on theatres and it sounds good. But you know, it’s nice to have that centre which drops because the two speakers are a hundred feet apart. So, LCR is something that really works for me. I am a very LCR person.3 I believe that LCR is something, which will essentially be the perfect mid-point of old school and new school. It also gives you that conservative freedom to throw things out where you need it. I mean, the way I look at it is that instead of using surround for the whole film, or using sub, it’s better to use these aspects as projections for moments or for particular situations when you want to project it. Then you use that whole aspect of surround and sub just to go bigger with the sound, you know, like for a flash like (sound effect) “whoosh!” There’s a big sound, which takes you off from all sides and goes down the sub. That’s a big thing, you know. Whereas when the film is going on, when the whole thing is happening, it is pretty LCR. I mean just maybe a little thing on the side, just to kind of extend the left and right a little more, so that there’s a slight sense of enveloping. But the information essentially is all in stereo. Q: Within LCR? DC: Yeah. Q: But when surround comes, when there is kind of compulsion to mix for surround because nowadays everybody wants to have it in surround, because multiplex, theatres are also full of surround, even some with Atmos, 7.1 of course... So when you do that mix, do you find it’s opening up more creative options or throwing more options to actually make you a little bit…? DC: Absolutely! It’s another brilliant question. It is absolutely a creative call. Q: Creative call. DC: We have nothing to do with this on the format side of things. It is a creative call. Now, you’re working with a director who understands space and the construction of the space in the image and the space of the sound and how these two designs fit in together. This whole development is happening, by the way, at mix stage because when we’re doing the first draft of the mix, that is when our film’s real evolution is starting. From there, we’re correcting a lot of things, packing things up, opening things out, and so you try to work on certain situations in the film, which need to be a certain way. “Maybe it’s working, no it’s not working, let’s try this or try that out.” So those things are going on. But it depends on the content. I
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honestly think it depends on the content. A guy who’s making a Bollywood movie would want the whole mix to be in a certain way. If that guy is making something very artistic and he doesn’t really care about the people who are going to watch it, he will do it his way. If there’s a person who really wants to construct some kind of a sensation or experience through or in his film in certain parts, or if he wants to string it up in a certain way, he wants to keep that as a treatment of his film, then he will do it like that. For example, let me tell you, in a standard Bollywood movie the sub-woofer EQ is going to have a boost on hundred. Like what we usually would have for base management, we’ll have the sub-woofer carrying a roll-off. So we’ll have a roll off from a hundred twenty and here under we’ll have a roll-off from about twenty-five hertz or thirty hertz. So, we know that we have a decent sub-pack situation. But for a Bollywood mix, after this EQ there’s going to be a small- little rocket over here. That rocket is going to be a boost at hundred, which is very strange! I mean why would you want to do that? But they want to create that forced impact on people with, you know, additional hundred and loudness and if you’re not hearing, if you’re not listening, I will shout so loudly that you will not hear anything else but me. That is one theory. The other one is, “Okay, let’s not do that. That is a little extreme. But let us do something where…” - Because that’ll be for money, you know. “We’re spending money on surround sound. If you don’t hear surrounds, why should we spend on it?” Q: Hm. DC: So let us hear some surrounds. “So what are we gonna hear?” If you tell the director, “Look sir, your movie doesn’t have much surround activity scope because there are two people talking in the room, he’ll be like, “Yeah, they’re talking in the room. But you can make it feel like that the audience is inside that room!” So we’re like, “Okay! Let us try and do that.” Thus, we are basically extending the space of the room. For these movies, we are probably not working with ambient tracks so to say, but we’re working with reverbs. Q: Reverbs. DC: We’re emulating reverbs, which are basically working as reflections for surrounds, which are basically creating a sense of extended space for the LCR. So, we’re not sending ambiences to the reverb. Instead, I’m taking the room tone and I’m sending the “send” of my room reverb up. It is kind of packing up from the sides a little bit. Hence, there’re no spikes, no drops and no peaks. So, people do not really understand that they’re really listening to reverbs, but there’s a sense. That is one thing. The second thing is dialogue. Even for dialogues, you know, - “Oh! This guy is
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in the car” - so like “inside the car” - you like that feel. LG. He’s in the hall, like stairway. So, it’s all like a huge amount of reverb programming, just to keep that thing going. This is the reverb, which we’re working with spaces. Then we have the reverbs that we use for, say, the music or EFX and SFX. Then we have the sub-activity. So we have to keep all the reverbs in the sub-activity, you know. If the sub gets eliminated, we also have to see from where at the crossover point the low end of the reverb is getting cut and where the sub is meeting. That has to be believable, because the sub is dry. And you know, the other guys are - so to EQ the reverbs. If you see Shabdo 4 in the theatre, you’ll understand what I’m saying. Q: Okay. DC: It’s a lot of thinking, you know. It’s a total one-on-one case. So, the director says something, but we essentially don’t listen to all of what the director says. We do our thing and present it back to him. Then he might have one or two suggestions, or he might agree with what we’re doing. And, you know, hence the whole thing of - the Bollywood, the midsection and the other section, which is LCR. Q: LCR. DC: Movie on the screen, sound on the screen. Q: Do you use ambience yourself? DC: Yes. I actually go and sample ambiences myself. Then I bring them back and I have softwares to basically tag them for metadata. When we use it in Pro Tools, at times we use a software called Sound Minor. It helps us choose the section of the ambience. Then we can also pitch the ambience. After that we can import it again to Pro Tools. Q: What purpose in your opinion does ambience serve? DC: The ambience actually-Q: If it is not there? DC: I can give you an example. Q: Hm. DC: It is very hard for me to elaborate on this because I think it is a huge thing to explain in a few words. It’s so big that it’s absolutely inexplicable in words. It is very simple. Let us just put on the dialogues of a film, shut off the visuals and watch the film, and you hear the film. So, we essentially are watching or hearing a film where we are not seeing the picture and we’re hearing the dialogues versus, we have the same thing and we open up the ambience tracks.
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Q: Hm. DC: It immediately gives us a reference of where we are, what is the mood of the situation, what is the magnification in which we are, like the sonic zoom, such as Q: Perspective? DC: Yeah, perspective. It is also giving also a certain sense of the details of the space and the movement of the spaces from one to another to another, in storytelling. Q: In storytelling? DC: Yes, in storytelling. Q: So, you want to say that the narrative space, which is represented in the film, might be a developing set. But it’s talking about, let’s say a bedroom, but it is actually a set. But it’s the narrative location, right? DC: Yeah. Q: So you need to emulate the ambience of the bedroom. DC: Yeah. Q: Including maybe the neighborhood sounds– DC: Absolutely. There’s a film I might have a copy of, it’s banned. It’s a film, which was made in Bangladesh, and was banned. This film is actually very important for me because this is the film in which I went completely off the traditional norm of ambiences. Q: How? DC: So, this basically is the story of a locality. Q: Story of a locality? DC: Yes. There are two women in this locality who are political leaders. Basically it completely emulated the Bangladesh mood. The locality’s favourite sport is Kabbadi, which is the national sport. There is one policeman in that locality. The children who live there are going to a school to study and there’s an issue with the school’s existence, meaning that the future of the country, the kids, their future and everything is in jeopardy because the school’s ownership is the issue. Hence, this issue was like the talk of the town! Eventually what happens in the film is that while the usual fights and brawls are happening, suddenly one morning something magical happens, when all the evil is gone. Everyone becomes good and they embrace their fellow ones. There’s no unhappiness left in the world. The policeman lost his job since all criminal activity is over; the lawyers lost their jobs as well. The policeman and lawyers from then
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onwards started thinking skeptically about their survival, and even a change of profession. That was the situation. The entire film has an extreme dark sarcasm. It was banned because there was one actor who did both the women in different make-up. LG. And actually both of them looked like the two ladies of Bangladesh, Q: Okay, okay. DC: LG. They are Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia. The film is called Nomuna made by this guy called Enamul Karim Nirjhar.5 For this film, we had complete freedom to play around and experiment with ambient tracks. For instance, in a situation two men are conversing in a room painted blue inside a house in Bangladesh. They’re wearing cotton kurtas and talking about locality politics in Bangladeshi language. But there we have used spaceship sounds as the ambience tracks. Q: Okay. DC: Like (sound effects enacted) all these sounds are heard. Q: LG. DC: So that is the whole fun. The minute we are getting out of what really happens, we’re getting into another space which we’re creating, which is film sound, which helps us tell the story, which is the bonding between imagination and reality and surrealism. That is the power of ambience, you know, that you can keep creating in situations where it cannot be that sound, but you can still forget. LG. Q: I want to mention of an example that I just remembered, where there is no ambience at all! DC: Hm. Q: There’s a film called Chowringhee.6 DC: Okay. Q: It is based on a story by Shankar. I don’t remember whose direction, featuring Uttam Kumar and Subhendu Chatterjee. In the opening sequence of the film, two characters are speaking at Maidan. But there’s no ambience of Maidan. Lots of cars are passing by, but we can’t hear any of them. DC: Hm. Q: In that situation, we’re still following the narrative. Do you find it problematic if there is no ambience in a sequence like this? Is it any hindrance to follow the narrative? DC: No, I don’t.
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Q: Then? DC: See, because we have to understand that - we have to also look at folk theater forms like “Jatra”. You know, in Jatra, we have a set. You can see a ship at a distance. Here, on this side the captain of the ship and the cabin crew are conversing. You can’t hear sea sounds mostly, but at times they’re added. But such a situation you see in theater right? Where the theatrical representation is like that. Q: Hm. DC: I think, in the kinds of cinema that we see or do, there’re a lot of cinema, especially Indian cinema, which has a lot of take on theater and theatrical treatment, you know, because it has essentially evolved mainly out of that space. So, ambience in that context is very different. Q: Yes, it’s a very valid point. Yes, of course. It’s kind of a line of thinking that audience will understand through imagination, or they will mentally put sound there. DC: Yeah. Q: From their own imagination, they’ll contribute some sort of ambience. DC: Yeah. Q: So the directors or the sound designers or the sound recordists didn’t think of putting ambience there. But then, why do you, as a sound designer from a primarily digital domain, think of putting ambience? You also may come from that theatrical background, as you said. DC: No, we do, actually. There’s a lot of cinema that we do where we have to understand the temperament of the movie. There’re a lot of movies, which are coming straight out of the theater. It is still basically a Jatra, which is digitally recorded. Q: Okay. DC: For that, your entire perspective was different about designing the whole thing. There’s a very interesting story that I must tell you. This is one of the most interesting stories from my sound designing career. So, during a time of working in commercial movie, a gentleman, a producer came to me and said, “How much time do you need to do the effects?” I said, “I need some time, like twenty or twenty-five days to set the effects.” So he said, “Don’t bother. Why do you want to spend so much time, you know? I don’t need so much of effects.” So I said that, “I am doing it for you, for whatever you’re paying me. Why do you want me to not do it? It’s also my work.” He said, “Look I have a theory.” I said, “What’?” He said, “Look, the kind of movies that we make, they are played in very small theatres in suburban areas. In small theaters, people who are very
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poor, who pay ten or fifteen rupees to go and see these movies. They’re working class people. They are basically hands on laborers or skilled people who are doing labour level work. So, they essentially live a whole day in sounds, you know, like hammering, pulling some rickshaw, ringing the bell in the street. They are coming to the theater not to hear what they hear the whole day. They come to the theater to hear music, and to see the movie. I don’t want to give them what they hear the whole day. They would not like it.” That is another cultural take, a completely psychoacoustical cultural situation where, you know, the effects is not required because the people who want to see the movie, they’re people who are not excited about effects, they don’t want to see the effects. They want to hear some music, and they want to see some people dance and, you know, dialogues and stuff. Q: Yeah, the Vaudeville culture of European cinema. DC: Yeah. Q: It’s a huge hundred years of Vaudeville culture, Vaudeville Cinema same kind of production like Jatra. DC: Yeah. Q: If we don’t speak of or take into account different genres, but generally speaking of films, how much ambience in terms of volume or depth do you think is appropriate? DC: I honestly think that we should do sync sound in the beginning. Q: Okay. DC: Right at the beginning, there should be sync sound because that’s an option, which should be there while constructing the film. This is what I also do many a times. I don’t tell people. I use camera sounds, like even as bad as shot on a 5D, you know, 5D microphone. But using that sound, you know, hiding that sound by merging with other tracks using that sound. But using that sound because what I find is the way the locational spaces; and so there are so many aspects about that sound. One is you know the sweetness, the image, the depth and all that. But essentially, there’s some very central information in that sound. If we can divide the two, I can take the central information from my – even if it’s bad pilot sound or camera, if I can take it from there – and I can mask it by using a lot of other tracks, and hide it. The entire film is made with two lapels and one boom. There have been many situations where we had four characters, but we were one mic short, but we had to work around. LG. The situation to work with only two lapels and one boom! In the post we didn’t change anything. Of course, I had to EQ the tracks a little bit and level them a little bit and I use
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a little bit of imaging, but that was it. It was a stereo film, we did stereo, because 5.1 is something that again will go out of control. But with stereo at least we know that, you know, one can see it. Essentially most people will see it in computers or in smaller formats. So it was very important to get a bang on stereo mix. This is a film called Gandu.7 Q: Oh! Gandu! DC: Yeah Q: Okay. Yes, I know that film. It made history in perceiving Indian cinema in Denmark. DC: Yeah! Q: Anurag Kashyap curated the show. DC: Yeah. Q: I met him there. He was promoting Gandu as a film which, in his understanding, was an epoch making film in Indian cinema. DC: Uh-huh. Q: The Danish audience liked it very much. DC: Uh-huh. Q: They couldn’t relate to the very core cultural aspects, but somehow they got into that kind of mood. DC: Yeah. So that was sync sound. Q: That was sync sound? DC: That was sync sound and not in the same way as we understand sync sound in Hollywood or even big Bollywood movies like Lagaan8, the way they do sync sound. This was extremely guerilla, extremely unconventional sync sound. Q: But even inside the indoor sequences, like inside the bedrooms and inside flats? DC: We modified a lot. We set up, we made our own rigs. If I wasn’t there, I made a rig where, you know. If it was a fake rig then with the camera we had a special microphone rig, which fitted with the field rig, and all the cables were going into the recorder there. If you see the trailer, even in the trailer we’ve done a lot of live emulations. So there’s this wine glass sequence in the Japanese section where the boy goes to a prostitute. There’s this sound of a wine glass, which is live. It could have been done later but in the dialogue, and in the middle of everything like that is innovation of ambience I was talking about. That you’re creating, you’re imposing ambience that’s not there. But you’re creating something in the
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real situation, which you don’t know, maybe it’s a sound, maybe it’s music, maybe it’s something disturbing but it’s there in that space. But somehow because spatially when you’re recording in that room, the dialogue, that sound and everything has its kind of commonality. It’s a strange experience. So, these are the kinds of experiments that I did for this film. After that, I did sync experiments with - we did an unreleased film, which was basically about a woman and a detective. Q: Okay. DC: And the director is following this woman through a flight, which they’re taking from Calcutta (Kolkata) to Bombay (Mumbai) and then in Bombay, they’re chasing around. From Bombay, they take another flight to Goa and in Goa they go to this music festival and a lot of things happened. It was absolutely insane because we were shooting inside the airport with no permits. I couldn’t carry my equipment, or my booms, nothing. Q: So…? DC: We were working with extremely modified ways so that we don’t get caught. Yet, we had to do sync sound. It was very funny. There was a situation - I made a micro-boom. I had this small Schoeps microphone and boom 48 or something like that. A small microphone, which I used as a micro-boom - it looks nothing like an actual microphone. Then we had these really thin wires that we custom made which went into a very small recorder, like yours. But it has microphone inputs. So this guy, you know, I’m constantly using this in ways where this is mapping the stereo space. And that is basically constantly mapping the elemental characters and their dialogues. So if I use it in post, I can always use my stereo space and my boom in a way and the placement of this will be always kept in mind that it’s LR. So, keeping it LR frontal or LR rear. LG. Q: Is this a stereo film? DC: This is probably going to be 5.1. Q: 5.1! How will you expand the stereo space into surround? DC: See, that’s what I’m saying. I will not expand it. Q: Okay. DC: It will be on a 5.1 platform. Q: But? DC: But I will only use it when there’s situation to extend it. Q: Hm.
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DC: Like we are in the beach in Goa, and there’s a Djembe9 like thing happening, 50 Djembes playing together. It’s very difficult to record that. People are talking, it’s such a powerful sound. How do you? Even if you want to record it, you’ll find people will be talking about it in recording and all that. So, once we recorded it, the way to fix it probably would be to have one or two real Djembe players play on top of that and layer it, which I can merge with the actual track to get more perspective on the Djembe when required. Then you have the sea and the wind and people and all those factors, which are separately sampled. You can bring them in as and when you need it. Of course your arrangement is important. There’s no overlapping on the spectrum. Maybe the winds can stay on top, and this track is in the bottom and right at the bottom we can have the sea waves. So you have the whole range, spin it a little bit. Q: But everything I’m hearing is primarily in digital domain, using digital technology. But if you use digital technology in that particular pervasive way, then why do you find analog still more qualitatively better? DC: Sounds better. Q: Sounds better? DC: Yeah. Q: But everything you’re using technology-wise is digital. Like recording equipment… DC: (Overlap) See, we don’t have options. Q: Oh, you don’t have options. DC: I mean if I want to buy a 24-track recorder, I will have to look for the two-inch tape, which will be so difficult to procure. We’re commercially operating and so we have to be compatible with other platforms of other studios where we’re sending our materials to or we’re taking materials from. We’re also looking at the factor of where is the world going in the common in the technology platform and not be left out. Q: These two films you spoke about, Burn and Gandu – have you done sync sound for both? DC: Yes, it’s sync sound. Q: Sync sound. But why haven’t you applied sync sound in any of your other films? DC: Because they didn’t let me! CHORUS LG. DC: I did another film, which was a film by Q, called Tasher Desh.10 For Tasher Desh he wanted a certain quality of sound for the winds. When
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they were shooting in Sri Lanka it was extremely windy and the flags were fluttering immensely, violently (sound effect enacted). All these effects are happening, there’s a certain sensation in what’s happening, I can hear in the pilot track. But the minute you want to recreate that, I’m sure that we’ll not be able to recreate that. Q: Why? DC: Because those winds don’t blow through our country, from where will I get those winds? Q: Okay. But if everything is recorded in sync, if the wind sound is filtered with a low cut filter and captured, then? DC: The tone gets destroyed. Q: Okay. DC: Yes. But the minute we try to EQ out materials, it loses on its harmonic ends, and the tone goes for a toss. Q: Okay! That’s the reason! DC: Yeah. So I suggested, “Why don’t we go there and sample these winds?” So, we went, we sampled (recorded on the field) most of the locations over there, we sampled winds and other stuff. We even sampled the flags and we did Foley. Q: Separately? DC: Separately we did Foley over there. I mean, marching on sand, okay? Movement on sand; characters falling down, with all the ambient sounds. And then we did this thing, which Walter Murch does, called Worldizing. So, there were a lot of dialogues. What we did was we actually played them in spaces and re-recorded them back. Q: Okay. DC: So it sounds like, it basically captures - so I’m not adding reverb. Q: Hm. DC: Say I’m playing the dialogue from here, and I put a microphone here and I record it back. Basically I’m Worldizing my content. My content is probably not real, but in this space it is getting that sense of ambient space and tone in it. That tone is what we understand, that tone is our reference. Immediately we know whether it’s outdoors, indoors, room or corridor. Q: Yeah. DC: That is the tone. To achieve that tone, I use this process and I get the centre by simply using a mono microphone. When I got the centre, I did
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some diversification on the left and right, a light spill. You get to move where you are. Q: But in an ideal situation, it should be completely sync, without adding anything, right? DC: Absolutely. LG. Absolutely. There’s no question about that. It should be absolutely sync sound. Then you can decide in post where you don’t want to keep it and remove parts of it, which should be the ideal way of working. Q: Absolutely. But you said you don’t get that generally because of the situation of the location. DC: See, most people will say, “Sync sound is not possible in Kolkata!” Gandu was sync sound in Howrah! Q: LG. DC: Okay, Baaje Shibpur! Sync sound was done in Howrah and Shibpur. You don’t care! The guy’s talking, there was a car passing, it was loud. That’s how it is! Q: Yeah, of course! DC: How does it matter? The thing is that the film has subtitles. But besides that if you see the film, there are certain dialogues in certain situations, which are very soft. But they are meant to be soft! Why will you dub those dialogues to make it audible? Then that emotional dynamics will be lost! There are some things, which you don’t need to know! This, I think, is one of the most important things. What directors here are scared of (is voice’s illegibility), of course this is out of the question, but I think it’s also very important to note that people still do not understand the power of sound design. They completely rely on the power of the image. It’s 80-20. If they really understood how they could manipulate this - they probably do, some of them probably do understand but they don’t know how to go about it - this is also something that I feel. Some of them naturally work with it because they work with documentaries. Why they work with sound so well is because they come from the documentary background. I worship people who are basically filmmakers who have some kind of documentary lineage. They understand even if it’s something which other people will say, “That sound is too loud, don’t use that.” So what? That sound must be having the potential of carrying a different sense or adding a different thought! The thought is more important than the sound, right? These understandings are so esoteric and so fine! Q: Hm.
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DC: There are two ways about it. If you discuss it, you’re just going to get screwed. You just do what you have to. That’s what I’ve kind of realized in the long run, after having many battles. LG. But sync sound, yes. After that, I convinced another guy for sync sound for this movie called Shyamal kaku turns Off the Lights (Shyamal Uncle Turns off the Lights).11 Q: Which one? DC: Shyamal Kaku turns Off the Lights, Suman Ghosh’s film. Q: Okay. DC: Which – Q: New one? DC: New one which went to a couple of festivals and was reasonably appreciated. This film was entirely shot like that. It was shot by Ranjan Palit. There was one guy who was helping him with the camera and there were two guys on the sound. So, the whole unit was (consisting of) four guys. We shot for eight days and that was it. Q: So, sync sound is happening in Bengali Cinema? DC: Sync sound is setting in as a trend. Q: Okay. And you are one of the primary protagonists amongst them? DC: Yeah, I’m trying my level best to use it. LG. But one thing is that only our contemporary recordists are using sync sound. We can fight with them and tell them where they are going wrong, where they’re making a mistake! They’ll probably do it. Then they will probably say that “Okay, we’ll do it. But you don’t say that you need extra money for that, you have to do it in the existing budget.” So, I said, “Okay, we’ll do it that way, we’ll figure it out.” So that is one section we’re working with. Then there are so many other sections - the old filmmakers who’ve done it the old way and then there are these other filmmakers who are coming from the Jatra space – the more theatrical space. Their understanding and perception of sound is very different. So, all of these are like completely based on references. Q: If I ask very theoretically, what do you think sync sound does to the ambience or the sound environment of the film? How does it add, what does it add? If it’s not made in the studio and it’s directly recorded on location, you play it back in theater. What sort of difference does it make? DC: I think it eliminates the whole aspect of suspension of disbelief. Q: Okay. DC: It brings to the foreground, belief. This is it.
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Q: Believability. DC: Yes. Q: That’s what from the point of view of cognition, we call it spatial cognition. DC: Yes. Q: Believability, absolutely. DC: Yes. By no chance I will put any other ambient sound there. I will not add reverb to the dialogues there to match it and construct. It’s totally out of question! I am standing there and you hear that sound only. Q: Yes. DC: “Oh! I couldn’t imagine there will be this kind of sound here!” Q: LG. DC: Such situations have such sounds only! Q: LG. DC: (Hesitation) See, the fun is that’s another power. If you’re working on a film where, you know one of your important tracks of working with the audiences’ believability, then sync sound is so important. Say, you’re doing a horror movie where you bring the usage of sync sound in such a way that you’re always thinking that you’re in a real space seeing a real incident happen! Q: Yes. DC: When something crucial happens there, that impact is much more than constructing the whole sound design. So, that is the game, which we have to understand and play. Q: Hm. But the early films were all sync sound, right? For instance, Devdas (1935)12 and Satyajit Ray’s early films also were sync sound. But between 1960s and 2000, let’s say, there is a strange sort of studio centrism in cinema! DC: Money. Q: Money? Why? DC: It’s called money. Q: Okay. DC: When money came in, there were some people who realized that, “Oh! This could be a good opportunity to make money.” That is when the studios came in. Even if you go down to very small markets - I shouldn’t say markets, very small countries where films are getting made - they
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don’t have studios, they don’t have sets. They have the real localities they have the streets, and something happening through that only. Q: European Cinema, let’s say. DC: Yes. Say Middle Eastern or European. Q: Iranian cinema? DC: Iranian cinema. White Balloon13 is running on a VHS, where one girl is passing through the road with a balloon in hand. LG. What I mean is there’s no construction in that! There’s no set. So that came in also because the nature of cinema shifted. We started having Godzilla.14 We started having King Kong.15 Q: To RA-one.16 LG. DC: Yes, RA-one. So immediately, we were talking about a completely different path. Q: The whole Amitabh Bachchan genre of films such as the angry young men and action films, they are based on the sense of studio centrism. A boxing punch sounds like it’s a big thing - it’s a big deal. DC: Yeah. Yeah. Q: Just a punch. DC: Power, yes. (Sound effect enacted) Out of the blue! Q: A gunshot like—it’s absolutely synthetic – DC: No, you’re right! You’re so right. Even now we did a film, called The Last Lear.17 Q: Last Lear? DC: Okay? Q: By Rituparno Ghosh? DC: By Rituparno Ghosh. For this film, except Amitabh Bachchan’s dubbing, we did the rest of the work here in Kolkata. After adding effects and everything, we sent it to a studio in Bombay. They were doing the final mix. There was this gentleman in Bombay, I forget his name, Bishwadeep or something. He was doing the final mix. Amitabh Bachchan came to see the film. And he said, “Why have you changed my voice? Who gives you the authority to change my voice?” to that gentleman, who was the sound person there. Q: Changed voice means from sync to dub? DC: No! The tonality of the voice. “There’s a bass in my voice, which doesn’t work for the character I’m playing”. In Last Lear, Amitabh Bachchan is not himself! He is not throwing punches. He is a failed actor
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who’s being tortured by our director, and he’s trying to recoup himself out of that. But still he wants his voice. For a sound person who’s listening to this, it’s such an important lesson. To know how stars work! No matter where you put them into the character or scene or whatever, he is maintaining the same voice throughout. That’s him! That is Amitabh Bachchan! Q: Hm. I can-DC: And Amitabh Bachchan is going through this thing, you know. So it’s taking the film to a completely different plain! It’s not about that character of that film anymore. You know what I’m saying! Q: Hm. DC: It’s Amitabh Bachchan who’s the character of that film! Q: Okay. It’s a completely different ballgame. DC: Completely different ballgame! Hence these are the things, you know. Q: I have something to ask here: Rituparno Ghosh as a director never worked with sync sound. His films, all of his sounds are like dubbed and synthetic. Why is that? DC: Yeah. That is because he is obsessed with dialogue delivery. He used to personally sit and break every single dialogue delivery by people, every single line to the dialogue delivery that he wanted. I think that gave him more sense of satisfaction in the kind of stylization, in the overall scene of things, rather than on a sonic side of things. Q: You were going to show something. DC: Yeah. I was going to show you the hundred people. Q: Hm. DC: I mean they work with a lot of people, the manager. Like the actor needs a manager, the manager needs another manager. LG. There are many people. So many people in a set and untrained people to sync sound environment and sound security, doesn’t work out for them. Honestly, it’s the showbiz thing, you know. If you really worked with four people and created the same thing, your producers will be like, “Why am I going to pay you so much?” So there’s a whole element of scale also. At that element of scale, sync sound is very difficult to happen. So it is very important to understand that there are reasons for cinema, you know. Is it a commercial blockbuster moneymaking film or is it like more of a festival, you know, more of a personal film, art-house, or docu-feature. Q: Even though it’s blockbuster, for example, if you have a production team – a sound production team, there should be a production mixer, a
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recordist. Even then at that particular setting, you cannot do sync sound, is it not strange? DC: You can do sync sound, you can of course do sync sound! There are so many Foreign productions which are coming, working right here, with the same people and doing sync sound. But the thing is that they have their workflows in place. Not for the sound people, but for the management side. Q: Hm. DC: They have their workflows in place for how to regulate an environment where they’re going to work like this, which is not in the control of the sound team, you know. The sound team is just responsible for recording. But somebody has to regulate the entire space. In terms of this, that, you know, you cannot carry mobile phones, you cannot wear these kind of clothes, you cannot wear these kind of shoes, or you will just wear socks, or you will have to tie up everything of this nature, no lose ends, or only this many people will be allowed in this ring circle and the other people will have to vacate. These are the things you have to do when you’re shooting. You cannot do when we’re shooting, okay? Kind of equipments, which we use for lights, this that, electrical - so detailed the whole thing, to do a sync sound scenario. I think that is yet to develop. Q: Hm. DC: Unless I produce a film, then I can regulate that, you know. I mean if I produce a film there’ll be four people because I have no money! LG. So that is basically on the sound effects side, and then we have VFX/EFX. Then we’re also designing a lot of sounds which – Q: But you also use sounds from sound bank or the use of sound bank is decreasing? DC: No, we use. Why we use from sound bank is because some sounds are very well recorded. Like, if you wish to use a sound of an aircraft taking off left to right or going overhead, it’s another kind of art to do that kind of recording. Q: Yes. But if you have the option of the digital recorder, which can record in four channels, you can go to the location and if you see the plane is taking off, you can go to the location and record the plane that is taking off! DC: I agree. But in Dumdum airport, where I’ll be recording, there will be noises from the passing-by rocket buses like (sound effects enacted). LG. Q: LG. Okay. DC: Challenges, I mean.
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Q: Yes, challenges. That’s why. But do you believe, yourself as a sound designer that the sound of plane from the sound bank and the sound of British Airways flight taking off from Dumdum airport will match? DC: Your take depends on the story. The only way to look at it is, for the story you’re telling, and the game of belief and non-belief that you’re playing. How the sounds fall in place within your scheme of things. Q: Absolutely. Also genre-specificity. DC: Yes, genre-specific. Q: If you, for example, make a film on the tradition of Gandu, then probably you’ll not. DC: Yeah, then the plane will take off from Dumdum! People will talk in the background, and even the rocket buses will honk! Q: Yes, absolutely. DC: You know what I’m saying. But in another case, where we are trying to construct a classical situation, where lovers are going apart and the plane is taking off, there at the background if you hear (rocket bus sound enacted). LG CHORUS! Q: Absolutely, right. LG. DC: That can be quite terrible! LG. Q: Yes. LG. Absolutely. I had more questions, but that can happen later another day…
Notes 1
Duration: 01:09:54 Name Abbreviations: Dipankar Chaki – DC; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay– Q; {…} Other Abbreviations: Laughter - LG 2 ADAT is an eight-track digital tape recorder from the Alesis company; it revolutionized recording industry in early 1990s, paving the way for a digital era. Hi8 was a tape format just before digital video emerged. Hi8 could host a digital audio track. 3 LCR is Left, Center and Right as in a basic stereo system. 4 Shabdo (Sound, Kaushik Ganguly, 2013) 5 Nomuna (Enamul Karim Nirjhar 2009) 6 Chowringhee (Pinaki Bhushan Mukherji 1968) 7 Gandu (Qaushiq Mukherjee 2010) 8 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 9 Drum or percussion instrument played with bare hands. 10 Tasher Desh (Qaushiq Mukherjee 2012) 11 Shyamal Uncle Turns off the Lights (Suman Ghosh 2012)
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Devdas (Pramathesh Barua 1935) The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi 1995) 14 Godzilla (Ishirǀ Honda 1954) 15 King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933) 16 Ra.One (Anubhav Sinha 2011) 17 The Last Lear (Rituparno Ghosh 2007) 13
CHAPTER 29 PRITAM DAS1
Q: Digital technology was already in use by the time you started work. Isn’t it? P: Correct. Q: Did you do any project, like an independent project or anything, on optical medium or analog medium or magnetic medium? P: I have never worked with the optical medium. Professionally, no. Optical medium means there will be optical print at the end; while recording, while doing work, in the last stages there will be re-recording happening on optical. Q: And, in magnetic medium? P: I last used magnetic medium at the institute. We had a Magnatek Rock and Roll machine, a historic one. LG. We did some projects, like in that our “dialogue project”. First we used it for our “continuity project”. We used stripe tape for that. The final print was on stripe tape. We used to record on Nagra. In the dialogue project also we used to record on Nagra, magnetic and then optical re-recording; optical re-recording happened at the final stage of a film. So, magnetic recording I did last at the institute only, many years back. Q: When you used to work with magnetic recording, for example recording on Nagra, you would transfer it from Nagra and mix in analog. Once you started working with digital technology, what was the primary difference that you noticed between these two mediums? P: Primarily, I mean, there is the factor of convenience for sure. For instance, in magnetic recording I am not able to see what is happening or how is it coming out. Okay? Q: Hm. P: I have to judge the take while recording on location and stop and retake, if required. But in digital, I know that the sound starts from here. When I cut at this point, I don’t need the rest of the sound on the track. So,
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time is a factor and it is clearly very convenient. Now, with the digital technology you can do whatever you feel like. You can do any possible thing with a sound by moulding it in any way that suits you. Earlier it wasn’t like that. You’d have to record it that way. There were no possibilities of moulding. If you want to record ten sounds on magnetic, you’d need ten players as well so that you can play all those different sounds. Q: Is this moulding of sound that you are talking about, in anyway advantageous for your work? How exactly does it facilitate your work? P: It’s advantageous in terms of time. Big advantage. Q: You mean time management? P: Yes, time management. Q: Okay. Anything other than that? P: Other than that, I think, if anyone is interested to do anything in magnetic, they should go forward provided he or she has access to all the equipment and time too. I think nowadays no one has these two things. Almost nobody has time these days. Q: Okay, if we consider a situation where we have time in hand… let’s say it’s an independent project and it’s not commercially driven. It’s not under major pressure and let’s say that time management is not a factor here, what other factors do you think will be challenging in that situation? P: There is a difference between when I am completely aware of digital technology and when I am not, even if I have time in hand. If I want to execute something in magnetic, it takes a long time, if you are considering time. Then I have to think more than working in real time. What I was telling you is that, as times are changing, it’s like we are almost acknowledging that we are much more complex now or maybe we can handle a lot more complexity. So, trying to give real meaning – earlier you would give one sound and you will focus on that only. Now you are trying to give an impression that it’s a real thing. So, you hear everything and then choose your element to hear. I mean it’s not spoon-fed. Q: Hm. P: It’s more psychological. If I am making you listen to one sound you have to listen to that. That is one, okay? Whether you like it or not, that is the one you have to hear. Correct? Q: Hm. P: It’s presented in a way in which it sounds natural and not designed or formed. That is a psychological sound that happens inside the head. So,
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your effort to be with that sound will be less. What I am trying to say is that you are not being forced to hear only one sound. I think forcing someone to hear only one sound was a way. Q: Yeah. P: Now it is not. Q: Yeah, you are given more chance to select. Yeah, it is a very important point. Right. What is ambience according to you? How do you define ambience? What are the elements that you think altogether envelope the concept of ambience? P: Generally it depends on where you are shooting. Q: Hm. P: If it’s a historical space that you are shooting in, you cannot put an airplane or phone ring or this and that: you cannot put together all those sounds. Basically, ambience is determined by the location, where you are, but primarily by the story. Suppose the story demands that this guy, or some guy who was at the seashore with his girlfriend, has come back to his office. He went to meet her there and then he has come back to the office. But the communication that he had with her - it’s so powerful, the idea of the story that he has to carry forward the emotion inside the office. You can put the seashore sound inside the office. So, it’s unreal. It’s not realistic. But, again, you are playing for the emotion of the character. You think it helps if you put the seashore sound inside the office too. Q: Okay. P: Definitely, first of all it will be determined by the story or the script. Where you would want to put the characters in, where you want the audience, is it the real location or it is some imaginary location - you fix all that. Once you get to know that, it’s easier for you. If it’s a real location, which is mostly the case, then you know that this kind of place will have this kind of ambience and within the scope of that, there can be different layers of ambiences. Something to suggest that this is a bus stand and this is a train station. Something to suggest the time. Something to suggest the psychological state the character is in. So, the ambience could be of varied levels, you know. Q: Okay. But the ambience that was present during monaural era – for example, let’s say the character would go to meet his girlfriend at the seashore. But other than just a little sound of sea waves, no other ambiences were used in the monaural era. Standing in the present time, if I ask you – if you are told now that at the seashore that boy and that girl are
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talking, then the ambient sounds that you will think of putting there will surely be more rich, more layered and multi-dimensional, isn’t it? P: At this present time? Q: Yes. P: Correct. Q: Then you will surely think of adding more elements to it, not only the sounds of the seashore. P: Yes. If there are people around the seashore, then those sounds need to be added. Also, how much silence is required… Q: Maybe a ship’s horn can be heard… P: Yeah, I can use these. But, you have to cater to the story first. There is nothing called “you have to”, that you have to naturally establish this. It’s up to you and your director to decide whether you need to depict the reality as it is. Then you take out elements so that you can concentrate more on the dialogues. Is it like that treatment, which is needed in the film? So, it all comes from the story point of view, I think. Q: But there is a reality inside the story also. You mentioned a few times, “real.” P: Yes. Q: So, that reality is the story’s reality. Isn’t it? P: Correct. Q: To achieve that reality to be convincing, there isn’t any way other than ambient sound. P: Of course not. The moment you put background music, it means that you are trying to tell the audience that they have to feel something like this now. They are not exercising their choice. You are not letting them. But having said that, there are certain situations where there is no option other than using background music. Such restrictions can appear. It is again wrong to say that you cannot do because it’s not allowed. I think it’s quite natural. Q: Now tell me something about yourself. When you started doing sync sound, how come did you think of using ambient sounds? I mean, what was your approach in recording ambience and using it? P: I think it’s natural in the true sense. I record according to my understanding from the location. For example, using small sound effects like sound of walking on dried leaves. Those small elements are really very important to me. So, I scan every track and keep extra effects for use
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so that when there is no dialogue, say there is a movement of a character or the thought process of a character or during some action there is no dialogue, some sound effects at that moment should enhance or reveal the emotion in every way. It’s not only the expression on the face, but also how he is putting his foot down on the ground, the sound of it. Is he tired or is he exhausted? Is he upset or is he feeling very happy? Is there energy in his step? How do you convey that? Not only by how he is walking, but also by the kinds of sounds that are coming. When it’s sync sound and the actor is performing and the director is looking at the monitor and hearing what the actor is saying, if you are looking at that sound and the pictured voice, it means he has gotten that emotion captured. Correct? For me, dubbing can make it either worse or better. It’s never the same. With the dialogues there’ll be certain effects, which I think comes naturally. That is the word. So, naturally the sync sound, or the location sound, that should be the choice? Q: How do you use ambience in your own work? P: The first film for which I worked as a sound designer was LSD.2 In LSD, the use of natural sounds at some places is ample. The reactions of our friends and colleagues who are also working as sound designers and even others, was that they mentioned that the sound design was “strange”. Q: LG. P: They meant it in a good sense. They felt that every space was depicted perfectly. It’s like I am not distracted by the sounds coming from behind me. It’s present in such a way that I am always glued to the screen, but still I am with them. Q: Absolutely. Q: How was it achieved, this “glued with the screen, I am with them?” How did you achieve this? P: I think everyone has his or her own emotional baggage and emotional story. Like actors also bank on their own stories when they have to cry or laugh and everything. They will naturally bank on their own experiences. Correct? Now, suppose you were in some mood at one point of time. If you can concentrate on what are the sounds happening around you, those sounds are in no way related to an emotion, but still they are happening. So, I mean, few sounds can be enhanced in a way that they are so connected to your emotion and something so banal that you disregard, and the fact that while disregarding, you are more with the character.
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Q: If you are capturing and representing an actor’s realistic situation, say the character is at a bus stand, is it not true that the sound will emote more? P: Yes. That’s what happens generally. For instance, someone is overgrieved and sitting at the bus stop. There will be noises from the bus stop like bus horns, conductors screaming the names of destinations, and there might be some passenger sitting next to you who will play music from the mobile phone. You can disregard the mobile sound. I mean you can design it in a way so that it sounds like that. Mobile sound is such that it penetrates. You can select a song, or select a tone, which can in anyway disturb. Q: Okay, I understood. P: Whether you want to put that ringtone on that passing character or not, that’s a creative choice. Or say the horn. In Bengali, we say “bhopu.” You want to make it very near or very far depending on what the visuals are and it’s constantly honking, constantly raving. Something going on constantly affects after a point of time. The moment you’re holding the shot for too long, it starts affecting you. So, I think, the capability of understanding is something that we possess individually. Every person has their own understanding sound-wise, picture-wise, cinema-wise. So, first of all, one should clearly recognize one’s own self to understand what affects them. If you really can disintegrate that and understand how it is affecting you, then you can make it happen for others. But you have to know that basic degradation process. Q: Okay. What’s your personal suggestion regarding the use of sound and especially ambience - your personal dhyaan (focus or meditation)? How will you suggest to the assistants working under you to use sounds creatively? I mean apart from framing the emotions - like you said about attempts to capture a realistic situation - how will you do that with ambience? Will it be more intricate miking or more depth or perspective or what? P: Perspective is very important. It really gives you the feeling of the real. If the perspective is not there, then there is nothing to relate to. So, two kinds of ambiences are generally recorded. One is for using in dialogue clean-up which is recorded only for ten or fifteen seconds. Suppose some noise that you don’t require during the dialogue part is going on. Say, there’s an unnecessary horn. You have to cut that horn out and put the ambience. For that the ten to fifteen seconds sounds from that location only which is there above the character’s head, does fine - so that they sound similar.
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Q: And room tone? P: Yes. The other one is other kind of ambience - in the sense that this should be recorded from the camera angle. In postproduction, it is possible to manipulate the positioning of the sound, like making it distant if it’s near. But if you have recorded from far, then it’s difficult to bring it closer. Q: Correct. P: That is one point. If some elements need to be recorded cleanly in the ambience, they should be recorded as close as possible. Then you can make it far anyway. But something what’s recorded is coming delayed to you and with reverb, cannot be controlled at that time. Q: Those are the spatial information - say the reflections inside a room. P: Yeah, the reflections you cannot cut in postproduction…. Q: So, you’re suggesting that all the ambiences should be recorded from the camera angle? P: Yes. It should be recorded that way. But, at the same time, you know that some effects should be recorded because you are not sure of the angle because the camera will be shooting from multiple angles. In such cases, the flow will be maintained. So you can always make it far depending on what is coming along in the edit. But if you don’t have that option, you have to use the far sound. Q: Okay. Now I’d like to ask – how much ambience? I think that the way some designers use location sync sound - like the way you record sync sound, or the way someone else does - how much ambience would you prefer using? How much should be the amount and layers of ambience? P: I think the whole thing should be done with ambience and effects only very little exceptions. The filmmakers I have worked with - Dibakar Banerjee, Kanu Behl - their approach is such that it is only naturalistic. Like the way the films Shanghai3 or LSD are. They are wholly naturalistic. The whole film probably has a four to five minute background score in total, not more than that. Q: Shanghai? P: Yes, Shanghai. The whole film is based on natutal effects and ambience. Q: Spatial sound effects and ambience? P: Yes. So, I think, it’s the approach of the director, the demand of the script, and the sound designer’s work experience. Mostly it’s the director’s choice.
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Q: Just because you have digital technology in your hands, you are able to record an ample amount of ambience. P: Correct. Q: If this would have been the Nagra on tapes, or say the optical direct recording, which used to happen in the 1930’s or 40’s films, would you have been able to record ambience that way? P: Yes, I would’ve. But I am not sure if I could use that. Q: How could you record so much depth, such multi-layered, huge volume? Do you think the Mumbai street sound could be recorded on Magnetek? P: Yes, of course. Q: Would they be clear? P: Yes, clear. Q: But multichannel sound and multi-miking were not possible, right? P: Yes, not multi-track recording. So, it used to be that you could not do much loud recording. Q: What extra facility has then digital technology provided for in the process of sync sound recording? What is the advantage of using digital technology? P: What you have recorded on a platform and whether you want to clean one frame of it or ten frames of it, it’s so easy. I want it to start with the thirteenth frame, or I want to fade for one minute twenty frames. How would you do that in magnetic technology? Q: But another factor is miking, and the tracks. P: There is multi-track in magnetic also. But why go into the complexities? You can go into complexity only if it’s so superior in quality that you know when it has to be there. But it’s not like that. Q: Okay. Do you prefer sync sound over the dubbed sound? P: I think sync sound all the time. Q: LG. Why? P: I think when the actors are performing they are with the characters. Why should that sound be replaced with something else? That has to be performed again and he might not be in the same mood. So, it’s never the same. Dubbed sound can be better or worse but it will never be the same. Q: Of course, what can be the betterment through using dubbing?
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P: Betterment is very subjective, right? It’s better for you, it’s not better for me and if it’s better for me, it’s not better for you. So, again, it’s like someone’s vision. Q: But technically speaking, it is the clarity and the crispness of the voice right? P: Crispness in voice is there after dubbing. It’s crisper in the location sound. Q: Earlier you mentioned a particular ambience - the one, which is giving the room tone from above the actor’s head. That you wouldn’t get naturally, if you dub. P: Say even if it’s a dubbed film, I’ll record that at the location and later I will put it here. Q: But that manipulated ambience and dubbed voice, and ambience directly recorded with sync voice - the live voice – which one would you prefer out of these two? And why? P: See, if I am recording location sound, I don’t have to work too much to make it sound natural. Q: Okay. P: And if I have to record dubbed voice, there will be a lot of processing needed on the voice to make it sound natural. Q: But then why did people get into this wholly difficult affair till this time? P: People never processed the dubbed voices earlier. Did they? The reflection that happens if anyone is speaking loudly in between two large walls, in dubbed voice, you will find they were applied. But when you record it here live, it will be recorded. Q: Do you use stock sounds? P: Yes, I do. Again, if I am using stock sound, I have to take it through processing to make it sound like it’s coming from the screen. But I definitely use it. The thing is that now digitally it is possible to bend, change any sound and make it sound like anything. Q: Of course. P: It can come in from anywhere. That’s not a problem at all. Like some psychological effect sounds that you want to put, which obviously is not there, or may or may not be there at the location. Maybe you are thinking later that, “I’ll introduce this sound.” For instance, suppose there is no sign of construction where the shoot is happening but you can still put a distant
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tile cutter sound. Now, I have not recorded a tile cutter while shooting. You can process it and make it sound like coming from a distance. Q: If you are recording ambience then why would you need to use stock sound? P: Because some elements will not be there at the location. Q: Why? P: Like if you want to put that tile cutter sound. You can’t call a tile cutter person and ask him to cut a tile so that you can record the sound. You will not. That’s not feasible. Q: Okay, I understand - sound which is beyond that diegetic space, which is not happening within that reality. Those sounds. We spoke about dubbed sound. Now surround sound. P: Hm. Q: Now you are mostly mixing on surround sound? P: Yes. Q: How do you use ambience, effects and voice in surround sound? P: Actually, I did this first for LSD. It is not possible to do that in every film. When my character goes out of the screen, I want to make the voice coming out of the screen and be with the audience. Wherever the character goes, the voice should go there. That’s how I feel. It should not be distracting but at the same time it should be my way too. I have to make sure that it should not distract you away from the screen so that you have to look around to find who is talking. It shouldn’t be that way. You should still be glued to the screen and it sounds like okay. Q: That goes to voice. And effects? P: Similar for effects also. Q: And ambience? P: Ambience is generally engulfing. You keep that “space” feeling, the spatial feeling. How far you are in a space and what kind of a space it is, you know. Suppose if it’s a longer scene, like a one-minute or two minutes scene, for a point of time you psychologically disregard ambient sounds. Then you go on to the dialogues and effects, which are happening - that is more dramatic. Effects, ambience and dialogues – depending on the scene or the story, someone has to choose something which could be more dramatic. Does it at that point of time need drama? Or it should be all benign and banal? I mean there’s nothing to it. It should be like that.
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Q: The sound design that you did for LSD or Shanghai sounds banal but at the same time, it sounds extremely engaging. How is this happening - this “banality” that you are talking about? Naturalistic sounds like dogs barking, a train passing in the distance. Whatever is there at the location everything is present in the soundscape. P: Hm. Q: So how did that “banal” design become so engaging? Why did your friends feel that it was strange? The strangeness not necessarily means sounds only capture a location to truthfulness. P: In a way it’s hard to explain. Sometimes that banality works in a way that all the unimportant sounds make you pointed to the story. I think that might be one of the reasons in some places. In some places, sound should be really, really pointed. Not disregarding the sound, it should be directly pointing towards the emotion of the character. I don’t think most of the sounds are important for disregarding solely. Also, it’s a balance basically. You have to keep the balance. You might like hearing a sound but you might not put it because it’s not important. You have to concentrate on what the character is saying. There are some sounds, which are individually very interesting for me. Like the car backing sound is very interesting. Different cars have different sounds. Then, all human brains behave strangely to siren sounds. It’s like a fear and it readily grabs our attention. If at all that attention grabbing is required somewhere we can choose the elements that way - what according to you will be the attention grabbing sounds. You may have a list of sounds like that. And at one point of time, you’ll start thinking “Is that out of my list at this location?” What could be the element, which could be a grabbing attention kind? So, you can put that and make it sound like it’s from that space. You are making use of being attentive to that. If you are getting, say, amused by the sound, I hope the audience would also be amused by the sound. Q: But this distraction that you are talking about… P: The creative distraction. Q: How will that distraction happen in surround sound? You said that you don’t want to make it distracting. P: Yes, I don’t want it to be distracting because when the sound source is located in a 5.1 theater, a surround sound theater where it is placed, where the coming of it and the loudness of it asks me to turn my head, then I am out of the story. If it does not, then it’s ok for me. Q: That’s a very important point, a very interesting perception or perspective. Yeah. So, you are trying to say that whenever the audience
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will turn their heads looking for something, which should not be there, at that time only they are getting distracted. P: Hm. Q: So, how do you achieve this? How do you try to attain this? P: I never put anything in the farthest corner. Q: What do you mean by a farthest corner? P: It means sending sound sources to the corners of the surround. Q: Not even the ambience, right? P: Ambience is not a very pointed sound. There won’t be any element in the ambience, which will be pointed. If you have to keep some effects, it should always be in ratio with how big the place is. There will be stereo sounds, which I’ll keep in the surround. So, I will not put that in the spread in the last speakers. I will put 25% in the rear and 25% in the front. Q: This is a really important point. Then, what is the use of surround? Stereophonic was enough isn’t it? P: But it will not become engulfing. How shall it? You are saying that you never had to look back outside but the expanse will still not be there, isn’t it? See, my point is that if a bullet is passing by the side of my head, I do not turn my head to see the going of the bullet. It should give me the feeling that the bullet has passed. And if it’s hitting something behind, it should sound like…. what I am trying to say is something more dramatic should be there at the front so that you don’t have to turn your head. How much drama is there at the front and how much drama can be behind, that’s your judgment. The moment you put more drama behind, you are distracting your audience. Q: Okay. P: You can put an atom bomb blast behind. But there should be a nuclear bomb blast in front. So that you are not distracted; but you can hear that. Ten blasts in the front and one blast behind so that you are not distracted. LG. You have to create more drama in front. Q: What happens in Atmos or Auro 3-D environments? P: It gives much more option to me to localize sound. It also makes me more responsible. Just because I have a fun tool, I cannot fool around with it. Q: How will you then use ambience? P: The use of ambience will be the same. But the use of effects will become more localized. Again, I have to be very particular that it should
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not be more dramatic than the elements on the screen. It should only give you the feel of that space. And the effects too, what is happening behind. Somebody is killing someone behind but something more dramatic is happening in front. But you should never turn your head back. Q: But, for instance in Dharmatma4, or say in any other films from the dubbing era of sound. These films would be carrying sound effects creating major drama. “Dhishum Dhishum Dhichkao” - these kinds of dramatic sounds are not used any longer. Why? P: That is because with time we have come to know that this cannot be real. Q: Okay. Real. Did we have a different perception about reality then, and for this long period of time? P: Cinema has always portrayed larger than life to us and probably because of that what we could not see happening in our own lives, we would see that happening in front of us and be happy about it. One guy beating up a hundred people - how is that possible? But still we laugh at it or believe in it. Q: But do you think that kind of – P: Again, do you think that Dharmatma, Q: Yes Dharmatma kind of dubbing era films. P: Will those films work right now? Q: No. P: Why not? Q: LG. People will laugh about them. P: Why would they laugh? Q: LG. P: Because we know that they will not believe any of it. The dialogues, the throw, nothing will be believable or real; it will all be very theatrical. People are all going for reality now. Q: All the people are going for reality! P: Yeah. Q: But why? This is a basic question. Why do people want reality? P: Because I think reality is much more appealing and more cool. That’s what everybody has come to know. If you see Hollywood films also, the way they show they make it believable, isn’t it? If it’s merely theatrical, no film will sell! You have to make it believable. And what are the elements
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to make it believable? You put that person in that space first. How do you do that? You do it through sound. Q: Now the last question. I know that it’s a little naive of me to ask this question, but I am really keen on it. Imagine you could not use ambience, you are forced not to use it. But you feel you should be doing that. How would you think then about your film’s sound design without using any ambience? P: Is that dubbed sound or sync sound? Q: Sync sound. P: If it is sync sound then the dialogue track will have ambience. Q: Yes. It will be in the dialogue track. P: If you are not shooting inside a room, or say the room is not properly acoustically treated, there will be ambient sound, there will be traffic sounds. They will be minimal but they will be there. It will not be dry. Q: Okay. P: If you are talking about a dubbed film where there is no sound at all… Q: Like Rituparno Ghosh5? P: Yeah, only dubbed. If you are talking about them then yes, they will be like that. In case of sync sound, there will be incidental noises in the track you will be using, if it’s not being shot in a studio. Q: In your mix do you retain the voice, which you are recording on sync sound, and the effects as well? P: Mostly. I also put extra layers on those existing ones. A space has a particular psychological effect, something will be there for the story - there will be a few elements like that. Q: If the ambience was not there you could not have related to the space, isn’t it? P: It can be done through the voice. But after a point it will be boring. Because we can handle so much complexity nowadays we don’t want it to be simple so much. How strong is the story? Q: Why are you giving so much importance to the story? P: Because what are you working for? Q: You are working for a particular situation, maybe. P: No. If you are working for a film, it’s the story. That priority should be clear to you. It is not the honesty or the sincerity of the sound or technology of the sound. It has to serve the story of the film. That is the prime, the most top-level priority. Anything else comes after that.
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Q: Why are people demanding Atmos, if that’s the case? If you only want to follow the story in Atmos, then the visual screen, mono- or stereophonic sound was enough for that. Or maximum 5.1 was enough. Then, why are the 128 channels required? Is it only for the story? Definitely there are some more things that people demand. P: Hm. What you are trying to say is Atmos is not helping to build the story? Q: No. It is helping the story but it is doing a lot more, not only enhancing the story. It is going more than the story, beyond the story. P: What is beyond the story? Reality. We are being more real. You are putting the character really inside that space; you are putting the audience really inside a place. With the Atmos it’s happening much more appropriately, correctly. You are really putting it. Imagine, two guys are working inside an iron furnace but we filmmakers cannot give the audience the heat. We can only make them feel. Q: LG. P: Correct? But this guy is sweating, you know, and hitting the iron rods and everything or doing something around. All these very loud noises are happening and they are screaming their dialogues and all that at the top of their voices too. There is one liquid metal pouring from here, another pouring from there; they are engulfed by that sound. It’s only coming from the front and you are watching. So basically, if the story is at such a point that whether the same story is treated in stereophonic sound or 5.1 sound mix - if you do that kind of an exercise, then you’ll know how it is helping. Logically, obviously, it will help because you are putting the audience in this space. Q: What is the advantage of the audience getting situated? P: If everything is the same then why are you putting an effort of building a set worth 1 crore? What is the need of making the set look the same look real? Q: Believability? P: Yes. Q: So, you are trying to make the audience believe in the space. P: Yes. Q: So much of expense is only to make the audience believe! P: Correct. Q: What a situation!!
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P: It is to fool the audience. Q: So much of labor just to make a fool out of the audience? P: How will you make a fool of the audience? You have to make them believe first and then you can fool them. If they don’t believe then how can they be fooled?
Notes 1 Name Abbreviations: Pritam Das –P; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Other Abbreviations: Laughter - LG 2 Love Sex Aur Dhokha (Dibakar Banerjee 2010) 3 Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee 2012) 4 Dharmatma (Feroz Khan 1975) 5 Indian filmmaker, primarily making Bengali-language film using traditional dubbing as a tool.
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Q: Are you focussing on dialogue and music in commercial films? A: See, I will tell you typically what happens on the films that are commercially produced. There are different selling points of a film. Mostly people go to watch the stars. In that case, the story or the direction or the camera work, nothing actually matters. Occasionally, the songs matter, they give it a slight push. You know the audience wants to… I have been working on a lot of independent films. So, I have found that independent films are not very appealing to the general public in India because that’s not what they are looking for. Like, when a film of mine releases… a film of mine came out on the last week of March. When I was telling my friends to go and watch this film, they were telling me, “Listen, it’s March-end, there’s a lot of stress at work. We don’t want to go and witness somebody on screen who is also going through a tough time. We want to just have a good time, you know, like, going to the amusement park. So we want to go have fun, listen to some songs, eat some popcorn.” Their priority is entertainment. So 90% of the time in India, in Indian movies, entertainment comes through watching the stars, not even the character he’s playing, or the storyline he’s supposedly involved in. They just want to go and see Salman Khan2 and that gives them a lot of joy. Like, for example, I have friends who want to go and watch a cricket match just because they want to see Virat Kohli.3 Not because they want to watch the game or what is happening on the field, but because they just want to see this guy. So, we have this fascination for personalities in India. That is one big chunk. That aside there’s a very vibrant, independent community also and I feel in the last 5 years it has grown massively. People want to watch different kinds of films. They want to see things that they are not normally used to seeing and they want to get away from this entertainment-specific zone. So, we are not talking about money-making anymore. We are talking only about film as an art-form. People want to see experimentation. They want to see boundaries being pushed, the envelope being pushed. They want to see what else can be done. Especially people who work in films, people like me, get bored of doing
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the same thing again and again. Then, we want to do something different. I also try to take up films where I can contribute rather than just go and push some buttons. So, that is one big divide within our industry. Now, in a commercial kind of space, where the focus is on the star, if you are trying to sell good sound design in that kind of a scenario, you’re not talking to the right audience. That’s not what they want. If you are trying to sell it to them, it doesn’t make sense. So, it’s a choice. You can choose the kind of projects you want to work on. I mean all of us need to make money to survive. Bombay is an expensive city and the budget comes with these stars. If the star is involved, you have more money and independent films would not have more money even though they might be more interesting. It will not have people backing them with money because obviously it’s not a money-making exercise and I don’t think our industry is at that stage where we promote films and art-forms that receive funding or we have a lot of government help. There is NFDC and things like that but I don’t think it’s as much as we would like. So, obviously there are these constrains that you have to work with in commercial cinema and at the same time you have a lot of interesting work happening on the side and thankfully I am in a space where I get to do both. I like to balance it out because of the obvious reasons for doing commercial work and then there is creative satisfaction. You want to try and contribute to the project. You want to not just be executing. You want to be collaborating, rather. Now, in case of commercial cinema, there are many elements that the market determines. The market needs you to deliver certain things. They want songs, loud background scores and a lot of things. So, within that space you have to deliver what is expected from you. But, in a different scenario where there is more scope for experimentation, we can try out different things. That’s why I was saying that in a commercial space, sound design is often clouded by background score and dialogue and because human beings have selective hearing, we tend to focus on one particular thing. Our attention automatically goes to one thing that we hear and we automatically cut everything else out. Like, if someone is talking to us, we cut out all the background noise, we just focus on the thing that’s being said to us. That’s what happens in the case of dialogues. When there are dialogues, more often than not, we are listening to what’s being said and that leaves very little scope for the audience to register, you know, sound design or listening to the ambiences, however detailed that might be. I don’t think it gets noticed in a film that is, you know, overloaded with background score and dialogue. And most commercial films use dialogue as a technique to take the story forward. But, because I worked on Asha Jaoar Majhe4, which had no background score and no dialogue, it was a
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great opportunity for me to get people to listen to the surroundings of Calcutta. I have grown up in Calcutta and I have a lot of these deep rooted memories of what Calcutta used to sound like, and still sounds like. There are very, very typical sounds that I personally associate with my childhood, my school, college, you know. So, I got to explore all those things. The neighbourhood that I grew up in and my neighbours. There are typical sounds that you hear in a neighbourhood, like, you go to Ballygunge and there’s a certain kind of sound there, you go to Jodhpur Park, there’s another kind of sound, you go to Gariahat and you hear all these screaming – this is what I grew up with. If it is Durga Puja time then there are obvious sounds that you associate with the Durga Puja. So these kind of things you get to explore when dialogue and background score are out of the way for a bit. You can register these things. I have had the opportunity of working on couple of films, one is Asha Jaoar Majhe and the other is this film, which recently came out, called Trapped. 5 It’s directed by Vikramaditya Motwane. Again, we used background score only where it was required and it’s very effective. Every time the background score kicks in… It was composed by Alokananda Dasgupta. She’s a very talented composer. Vikram, Alokananda and I had discussions and we thought that we should use it whenever it’s required, so that it actually creates an impact. Every time we hear the background score it has an impact. Unlike most films it’s not dictating the audience what to feel. They are not telling the audience, “ok, now you are supposed to feel sad or you are supposed to feel happy”. We tried to avoid all that and just wanted to use it as a tool to accentuate certain emotions. That’s how it becomes effective. Largely there was very minimal use of background score, there were very few dialogues in the film. That gives a lot of scope for the sound design to be brought forward and to be noticed. So, that is one aspect of sound design in films that I feel filmmakers can use as a tool. You don’t have to say everything through dialogues. There are many ways of saying, conveying a certain message. The story can be taken forward through multiple ways. It can be visually, it can be aurally also, it can be through dialogue. You are basically conveying ideas to the audience. One of the tools you have at your disposal is sound and it’s up to the filmmakers to be able to recognize that possibility and to be able to explore that. As a sound designer it’s my responsibility to let the filmmaker know that you have these many options. And thankfully, I have been able to work with some very good directors who are already very sound conscious and sound aware. They are very good sound designers in their own right. They think about the sound design even before I start collaborating on the project. So, it’s that I get to work with these kinds of
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people and I think things are definitely getting better. People are focussing more on sound design. It’s great actually. Like, of these couple of films that I mentioned just now, I even read some reviews which spoke about the sound design. I haven't really read too many other reviews mentioning sound design. So, it’s a great thing. People usually talk about editing or the camera-work, but nobody ever discusses sound design because most people don’t relate to it. But yeah, I am glad that people are discussing it and they are noticing that this is something that can be explored. Q: I have a question here. You said that when dialogue comes, all the attention is on the dialogue recording: to make it intelligible so that people can follow the information behind the dialogue. But, we can also see situations where the dialogue cannot be heard. Let’s say, the character is talking inside a big space like this or maybe at a distance or someone is talking inside a huge traffic. Imagine this sequence from Close up by Kiarostami6 or that sequence from La Notte, where this woman and the guy she met at the party, are talking inside a closed car.7 We see them talking, their lips are moving, but we can’t hear anything. There are many situations in great cinema where dialogue cannot be heard but it’s visible that there is a dialogue. So, did you face any such situations as these, where dialogue can be not intelligible but ambience is taking over, atmosphere is taking over? A: Yes, definitely. I think it’s a cultural issue. The reason I say that is because in many situations, if you go to a club, you can’t hear what the other person is saying. But, in a film if the character is in a club, everything should be audible and clear. The reason for that is, I think, we come from a cultural situation where for the last 30-40 years we have been doing ADR. Because of ADR what has happened is that every syllable, every letter of every word needs to be heard clearly. So, because of that now the audiences have gotten used to that tone, where everything is on mic, upfront and very, very sharp. It is still better in a place like Bombay, in Hindi films. If you go down south and watch Tamil films, you’ll find that there is no dynamic range in dialogues. Everything is extremely loud, there are no soft dialogues. Of course, there are loud dialogues but there is very little dynamic range that they explore, making the audiences become used to that. Now, if suddenly they go and watch a film where they can’t follow the dialogues, they’ll start abusing the theatre owners and breaking the speakers. They say that “we are not getting our money’s worth”. They don’t look at it… Like I said, it’s again two spaces. You can do all these experimentations in the independent spaces. People will be more welcoming towards that. But, if you do that on a Shahrukh Khan 8 or Salman Khan film, people are not going to accept that as they are not
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going to watch the story. They are just going there to see this guy and if they can see him and not hear him clearly, they feel, “We have not been given our money’s worth.” Q: Yes, but Lagaan happened.9 A: Even Dangal. 10 Dangal has very good sound; it’s got a very good dynamic range. That’s what I said: in Bombay things are changing. There are people like Aamir Khan who are slowly trying to change things, especially with regards to sound. Like, he will ensure that there is 100% sync sound. Because he will say that, “I am not going to ADR.” That makes everyone on set more disciplined. They are more careful and they take it as a priority. Otherwise, everyone feels, “Oh, we can do ADR later. So let’s not waste time on this.” I have worked on films with people from Hollywood and have seen the difference in attitude. For example, in India if you are shooting a film and there’s a problem with the camera, everybody is willing to wait. And it’s fine. The entire crew, including the actors and the director, waits patiently when the camera battery is being changed or there’s a technical issue with the camera. But, the moment there is a slight issue with sound, everyone gets very impatient. They feel like, you know, we are wasting time. I don’t mean to sound like I am cribbing but this is what a lot of sound people end up doing. We end up cribbing a lot. These are problems we face daily. When there is a problem with sound equipment or something goes wrong with regards to sound, it’s treated as my problem. It’s not a problem for the unit, you know. It’s like, “You guys fix it quickly.” Of course there are exceptions and we get to work with different kind of people. So, it’s not always like that but more often than not you feel like you know it’s my problem. Like, “We’ll do it later, we’ll fix it later.” It’s not that I am recording for my personal library, you know, it’s for the film. It’s for making the actor sound better, for the betterment of the film. At the same time when you work with a Hollywood crew, they treat it as a problem that affects everybody. So, if there is an issue with the sound equipment, the producer will come into picture. They will try and sort out the problem as opposed to in India, where if there is a problem, I am the only one along with my crew. The sound crew is trying to figure out what the issue is and everyone is just standing around, cursing us for wasting time. That’s a big difference in mindset. So, because we are so used to ADR and we feel like this… a lot of people, even now, feel like on-location sound in unnecessary, it’s just a waste of money and time. They don’t feel that it adds any value to the film. There are a lot of people who feel like that. There are also people who feel otherwise and they are pushing sync sound, on-location sound on a very big scale. They are spending the money and providing the time. That’s
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also happening. There is this huge cultural difference where a large chunk of the industry thinks that “ADR is fine”, you know, as opposed to “ADR should be just a corrective measure”. It should be a thing that we use to salvage certain issues, like the way we talk about post-production in video. You use it as a tool to enhance things or to, kind of, correct the mistakes. You don’t say that, “Oh, we’ll do everything in post.” When it comes to camera, you are focussed on getting as much as you can on location. It should be the same approach to sound. I know I am digressing far, far away from your point but the thing is: because people are used to listening to studio recorded crystal clear sound, they want to hear everything that way. They are used to that. Even if you are in a bar… Like, right now I am projecting my voice so much more so that you can hear me. But, in a film, the big star will be sitting and nearly mumbling but the audience still needs to hear what he is saying. I remember the opening scene of The Social Network 11 where the two characters are sitting in a bar and you cannot hear anything. But, when it was screened in Bombay, people were going crazy. They were like, “What the hell is going on, can’t hear what’s happening.” And they start abusing the theatre owners. Forget about Bombay, even in Hollywood, Christopher Nolan had a big problem on Inception. Was it inception or was it… What were his last films? Q: Interstellar.12 A: In the first mix of Interstellar that they put out for the public, he said, “I am fine with this. This is what I want. I don’t want you to hear things when somebody is standing next to a rocket engine and talking.” It’s fine because in reality you can’t hear it. But, people complained so much… and this is happening in LA and in Hollywood, in America. People complained and then they had to go back and remix the film so that the audience can hear what is going on. Because for an audience dialogue can be seen as so important, since they are waiting for information to be thrown at. So, dialogue is important that way, but I am all for… There are certain things that I want to do for feel and not give you any information there. It’s just two people sitting and having a chat and I don’t want the audience to know what they are talking about. As far as I am concerned, these are the things that I am trying to push through my films and I have situations where people are supportive and sometimes people are like “No, let’s make it audible. Let’s make it clearer.” But, for me, it’s not a big priority. Q: My question is this: is it not the responsibility of the sound people, who are involved with sound production in cinema, to change the perspective or to try and help in shifting the perspective through the way sound is being produced? One simple example is Lagaan. Lagaan turned sound
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texture upside down by introducing sync sound again. Sync sound was used in Indian cinema a long time ago. But they revived sync sound in a mainstream commercial format. For example, if you hear Lagaan, you hear where the character is standing. You get the perspective, each person’s perspective. Like if the mother is standing close to the camera and Aamir Khan, the son, is standing a bit far away, we can exactly get the sound perspective, which in ADR, you lose. So, that perspective was introduced by a revolution called sync sound, digital sync sound. Somehow Nakul Kamte contributed in this… A: I completely agree with you. I think it is the sound person’s responsibility to push the boundaries. But, like I said, we have a lot of commercial implications to these things, and hence, there is a limit to which you can push. If we push too much, they will be like, “Oh, you are too difficult to work with, we’ll get somebody else.” It depends on the budget, on your equation with the filmmakers and the actors. It depends on many things. As a sound designer I can go and push. But if my actors tells that “I hate wearing lavs”, you know, I can go and talk to the director about this. The director will have to go and tell the actor. But if he says ‘No,’ that is it. Beyond that we can’t keep arguing about it. Either I quit the film or, you know, there’s a big fight. Those kinds of things keep happening. I have had so many actors telling me, “I don’t want to wear a lavalier mic.” Q: Often we face problems in our own lives, all the time. There are confrontations. If you want your voice to be heard, confrontation is a must. A: I agree. And I have had many situations in my career where I have had massive fights on set and I push as much as possible. But, the moment I realize that it’s not a priority for anybody else on the set other than me and when I am made to feel like I am doing this for my personal gain, I feel like it’s time to back off because it is not. It’s for the film. If that point is lost… That idea doesn’t get translated to everybody. People think, “God knows why he’s being such a pain.” Then I feel it’s a bit pointless doing that. I have brought it to the notice of the director and I have said, “This is a point where we are compromising on quality. Let’s not do this.” The director is ultimately the captain of the ship. He has to take the call. You know, so many times we have the director pushing for sync sound. I am on board as sound designer and I am saying that, “Let’s do this film sync sound,” and the producer says, “No. We can't do this. We don’t have the money”. In that sort of a situation I see them spending ridiculous amount of money on other things, which I personally might feel aren't as important as having production sound on the film. But they feel that’s a bigger priority. So, I feel, at the end of the day it is all about prioritizing things. If
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they don’t think it’s a priority, there is a limit till which I can push and at the end of that limit I have to exit the project. That is the only option I have and that has also happened. Several times I have had to quit projects because I feel like I am not contributing and they don’t want my contribution. In that sort of a situation I only have the option of exiting the project. Q: But, maybe there are ways. Two ways: Let’s say, your vision is not being accepted. Right? Production mixing or the amount of sync sound that you would like to incorporate. But exiting is one option… A: It’s the extreme. Q: Yes. Another option is to convince them by dialogue and pitching. Convince them somehow. We always like getting a funding for a project. You need to convince people. You need to make people accept your vision as the indispensable one. So, this is a process. A: Yes, absolutely. Q: Process of convincing people. That is one option. Another option is, if it doesn’t work, to exit. But, make sure the person who will replace you will have the same vision so that there is a kind of revolution, a kind of movement to make the voice of a sound person heard. A: See unfortunately again… Q: This collective push… A: That’s a very good point you raised there. Unfortunately we have different kinds of people working in the industry. There are some people who will take a hard stance and then there are lot of people who will go with the flow because everybody needs work. Let’s face it! Everybody needs work. So, there will be people who will be like, “Okay, fine, we’ll manage.” And the situation is a bit tricky because… Of course when I say exit, it is after a lot of discussion, a lot of convincing has been tried and only then we talk about exiting. You made a very good point when you said that it is our responsibility. It’s absolutely correct. But then my whole take on this is, you know, while you are shooting, the director has several things that he needs to manage. So, in his mind he has a set of priorities and that changes based on the film that he is trying to make. I find that on big commercial films the topmost priority is to keep the star happy, regardless of everything else. Q: You can say, fuck off! A: LG. Exactly! You can’t. On that sort of a situation, the star’s happiness is the most important thing. Everything else revolves around that. “Oh, he doesn’t feel like doing this shot now so we won’t do it.” So, you know, in
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that sort of a situation… I have had many instances where actors refuse to wear lavalier mics. I am like, “how do you expect me to record sound on a wide shot? You are taking an extreme wide shot, where my boom can’t go in. You won’t wear a lavalier. So what do you expect me to do?” They will tell me “let’s handle it in ADR”. That creates conflict because I don’t want to ADR that scene and there is no real reason for me to ADR that scene as there’s a very simple solution: you just wear a lavalier. There are several of these instances, because of the fact that there is a list of priorities the director has to deal with on a commercial set. On the contrary, I have also been on films where sound takes the topmost priority for some people. I have a director fight with my DoP, saying that, “No! You have to remove that gateway paper because it’s making noise and it’s ruining my sound.” That has also happened. I have had situations where both things happened. So, it depends on the kind of films that we make, the kind of people who are involved in it. My endeavour is also to try and work with people who are interested in sound. I don’t just want to be a part of a film because it is big. I want to work with people who are interested in sound, who are interested in experimenting, pushing the envelope, trying out different things. That’s what I have been trying to do. Of course, you get to work on many different kinds of films in your career. But, I have been very lucky. I have managed to work with some very good directors who are extremely supportive and encouraging about sound. Yet, there is a very thin line. You have to play it very tactfully. Sometimes you have to let go so that you can push harder later. For example, if everyone on the set are going crazy because the sun is setting and we have like 5 minutes to take a shot, I can’t stop everybody and say, “I have to do a wild take”. It’s a give and take. I feel like, filmmaking is so collaborative, that the moment any one department is headstrong, it ruins everybody else’s work. And that’s bad for the film. Whether you realize or not, it’s bad for the film. It will hamper the film, some way or the other. So, if I am ruining somebody else’s work, I am eventually spoiling the impact of the film. I have to be as collaborative as I expect everybody else to be. I can't be headstrong in certain situations. In, certain situations I expect everybody to help me. Sound, more than any other department, is so… it lies on everybody’s contribution…. Even if the spot boy is standing in one corner and talking, it ruins my shot. Unless everybody helps me, I cannot do a good job. So, I keep saying this very often that 50% of my job on set is to manage people. I have to have a good relationship with everyone. I have to make sure that they are helpful. When I want to do wild takes, I try and maintain a good rapport with my actors so that they are co-operative. And of course, the directors I have worked with, I have been very lucky. They
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have always been very very supportive of sound. I know others may not have been as lucky. You know, all kinds of people make up this industry, so it’s very difficult to generalize. But largely these are the issues you face. I understand what you are saying. We should push and we must make people aware. What I am trying and in fact there have been situations where, you know, a particular director goes through this process on set, he says, “We will fix it in ADR, we will do it later, blah blah blah” and then you come to post-production and they are like, “Dammit, I wish we had taken it properly on shoot. I wish we had been more careful on shoot.” But the same person on the next film will do the same thing because, you know they, forget all these things. When you are on the heat of the moment, when you are on shoot, you have to get that shot. You have limited period of time. You have the producer breathing down your neck. There are a lot of factors that go into this. But I feel like it’s not so complicated. We must ask for more budgets, we must ask for more time and these are not things that are unachievable. It’s very easily doable. So, if you sit down with your sound person and you have a discussion, you space it out, don’t do 5 scenes a day. Right? Do 2 scenes in a day. Give time and space to everybody to explore their work. That will impact the film. It will make the film better. Q: Before sync sound came, Indian cinema was notorious for bad sound design. I mean worst sound design. A: Yes, that’s why we never used to do well internationally. None of the films used to travel. But now you see how much has changed in the last 510 years. So many of our films are traveling to international festivals, they are winning awards. I think sound has a major role to play in that. I must say that when I was growing up, we used to watch films like Independence Day13 and the entire audience would come out saying, “Wow! The sound was so good.” And nobody would say that about a Hindi film or another Indian film. But, things have changed. I feel visually as well as soundwise, Indian films have really, really improved. I think we are pretty close to what world standards are right now. Q: Yeah, but what is the reason? Do you think only sync sound is… A: Not just sync sound. I feel it is awareness. The Internet has exploded and the people watch all kinds of films now-a-days. Thus, their idea of what is good and bad has also changed. Now, people know that, “Oh, this is not sounding good” or “This sounds like, this is from a film 30 years back. So it can’t afford to sound the same even now.” People’s perception has changed, a lot of things have changed. I feel that it is getting better because of that.
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Q: This awareness is primarily in the audience or… A: Filmmakers. I think they are the ones pushing it because if different kinds of films are not made, people will not watch the same stuff. So, a film like Asha Jaoar Majhe with no dialogues, not one dialogue, was running in Bombay for 2-3 weeks and people were sitting and watching the film quietly in the theatre. And even there, the audiences were not used to watching a film without dialogue, so they were fighting amongst each other. Like someone would get impatient, take out their phone, talk on the phone, that would disturb somebody else and they would fight in the theatre and I have seen it happening so many times, because I used to go watch this film. Someone is eating popcorn very loudly, so it disturbs the… it’s a very, very quiet film. You have seen the film, so you know… Q: Yeah, twice. A: It’s so quiet, the film… We don’t want any additional sounds from the audience. At a film festival it is easier because people are used to being quiet. But, a commercial audience is not like that. They are coming there to enjoy themselves, eat the popcorn, you know. Theatres are selling popcorns so that they can run the business. Q: But their idea of entertainment can be redefined. In Europe I have seen people get entertained by watching documentaries. A: Yes. I feel that is the next step that we need to move towards. We should have independent art-house movies, movie theatres. Like, you know, in New York they have independent film theatres where people throng to. It’s not an exceptional thing. People go and watch indie films all the time and it generates enough business as well. At an Indian film festival like IFFI or MAMI, you will see there are so many people. So, it’s not like people don’t want to watch different kinds of films. There is an audience for it. But when these same films release in the mainstream, we are not able to generate that much business. It might be good for 2-3 shows but it might not be good for an entire week of business. So, it might not make great business sense yet but I feel like it is changing. Earlier, film festivals were meant for a handful of people, it was not as packed as it becomes now. Every festival you go to now, you have to stand in the queue for at least 2-3 hours. So, things have definitely changed and it will get bigger and bigger. Today, we have films like The Salesman14 being released because so many people want to watch it. I mean an Iranian film getting a mainstream release in India is amazing, right? Otherwise, who would have thought that this could happen? So I feel things are changing and people are getting to watch different kinds of films. That is changing their sensibility, their expectations. Not everybody wants to watch the
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same thing again and again. I feel it will take time but it will change. And, we are moving in the right direction. Q: Yeah, because if sound people are convinced of their craft, they would like to create something original, something innovative, something close to their vision. Then their conviction could be transmitted to the other crew members. Isn’t it? A: Exactly. Q: If they behave like just the nuts and bolts of the system then that would not be possible. A: I have a theory where I feel that the sound recordist is the most hated person on set. If you are not hated, then you are probably not doing your job correctly because my job is to interfere with everybody else and make sure they are not ruining my job. If people are making noise, they are not disciplined, I am almost like a teacher on set. I am saying, don’t talk, don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t do this, you know, shut the windows, shut the AC. I am doing all these kinds of things and it’s difficult for people who are not used to it. An actor is used to being in the AC all the time and I suddenly go and switch off the AC, he starts feeling hot. He has to wear a microphone, he has to wear a transmitter. It’s difficult. But, they need to understand that it is for the betterment of the film. So many times I have had actors on set throwing a tantrum because of all these things but at the same time when they come and watch the film and they see how good it sounds, they feel their hard work has been rewarded. So, that will change their mindset the next time someone goes and tries to mic them. That’s what we are trying to do. Q: Is it because that sound is more social? Is it because sound overflows or spills between people? Is that the reason why you are hated? A: I feel the one thing I have noticed in all these years is that on set, sound department is probably the only department that is not working only for the frame. Every other department is working for the frame - the costume, the makeup, the production design - everybody else is working for the frame. But, the sound department is working outside the frame and this sometimes interferes with the frame also. We might say that this is problematic for me. But no other department is doing that. Every other department is trying to help the DoP to get the best possible frame. Sound department is the only department which is not doing that. Hence, sometimes there’s a clash, conflict of interest. That is fine. Majority of the DoPs I have worked with are very, very conscious of sound. They know that bad sound can even ruin their best frame. They can put a really beautiful frame and if you have a bad sound there, people get disturbed.
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They don’t know what exactly is disturbing them but they will not notice the beauty in that frame. Most DoPs today are very cinema literate, they are very educated. They understand the importance of sound. So, they are careful now-a-days. All the DoPs I have worked with are so co-operative. They push the crew to help me. Q: So here comes another question and I am dealing with in my project: the relationship between the cinematic frame and the sound environment. Do you think they are sometimes not juxtaposed enough? Is the sound environment in cinema independent of the visual frame, often or sometimes? A: I feel that it can be. It completely depends on what you are trying to convey. If you are trying to convey, some sort of independence between the frame and the soundscape, you can do that. If you want to be in conjunction with each other, if you want it to convey something together, you can do that as well. This is exactly what I mean when I say that it’s a tool in the hand of the filmmaker, to be able to use it in whichever way he wants to. For example, I can shoot you sitting on this chair and through sound I can make it seem like you are sitting in London. But, everybody who is trying to shoot this frame will be obsessed with this chair, with the shirt you are wearing, the way you look, the background, that’s what they will be obsessed with. My concern is that I know this is not Bombay. So, I have to make sure that none of the typical Bombay sounds creep into your dialogue. All that work is happening outside of this frame. I cannot have a gateway paper fluttering here, as it will distract the audience. The moment everybody in the crew understands this, it becomes collaborative. It doesn’t remain only my problem. Everybody can hear this gateway paper fluttering but how come it bothers only me? Why is it not bothering everybody else? If it was in the final film it would bother everybody. So why are they not aware of it? A: Yeah, absolutely. So this framing, the visual framing is more or less unchanged, although the aspect ratio has changed; but sound has drastically changed over the years. Let’s say from mono to a bit of stereophonic in the late 90s and then the surround sound, and now Atmos. The visual framing enlarged a little bit maybe but the sound environment has drastically changed. Do you think this is a dichotomy, this conflict? A: No. I don’t think that there is no progress visually. Within their constraints they are also doing a lot. There’s 3D, there’s a higher clarity now. 4K, 8K we have so much definitions in visuals… Q: But space-wise?
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A: Space-wise, in the sense, you have depth now. With 3D there is depth. So, it’s a challenge for a sound designer to deal with a situation like that. I feel that it is very collaborative. Cinema is extremely collaborative. It is a collaborative medium. I don’t think anybody is independently achieving things. If the camera department is pushing technology, so are the sound people. Immersive sound is happening. VR is happening visually. There is a lot going on. Today, the things have changed so much, like people are not just watching films in theatres. They are watching films on their phones, on their watches sometimes. I don’t know where all they are watching stuff. So you have to cater to all this. We can’t say that, “Oh, that’s not the right way of watching films.” We can’t be so patronizing. It’s your choice. If you want to watch it on your phone, we have to be able to provide you the content in the best possible manner within that space. We can’t be judgemental and say that, “Nothing is happening there.” I feel that all of us have to work together and make it happen because things will change very rapidly. If we just sit back and say, “Oh, now we have Atmos, let them catch up.” You know, we will be left behind. So we have to keep updating ourselves and we have to see what else is happening around us. For example, gaming has become so big already. Sound in video games has become so big. Very, very impressive stuff is happening there. And visually they do so much. Q: Will your work cater to these different platforms? A: It should. I mean that’s the direction in which I want to move eventually. Q: For example, your work is being watched and listened to in a phone. How will you design your work accordingly? A: See, my whole idea is, when I mix a film, I will mix it with the intention that this will be heard in the best possible environment. I am not going to mix it for, you know, the worst possible speaker. I will mix it for the best possible speaker so that it sounds decent even on a bad quality speaker. If I mix it for a bad quality speaker and someone happens to listen to it on a good music system or a good theatre, then it will sound like shit. I don’t want that to happen. But, if the speaker itself is not able to reproduce the quality that I would like to achieve, that’s not my fault. It’s not something that I have control over. I would always go for the best possible scenario. That’s what we mix for. Then, everybody is free to listen to whatever devices that they want to. This is the thing that I have started doing recently, that I try and cross-check. After I have mixed for the theatre, I will play it on my laptop and I will check it on my phone, just to see that it sounds okay. At least the basic information that I am trying to
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convey is being conveyed on all these different platforms. If that requires some special EQing or something like that, I might do that as well. So, I try and maintain some sort of consistency but I am not going to specifically mix for bad monitoring. You know what I mean. I will go for the best possible scenario. I will try and do that. But again, it’s something I can’t control. I can’t tell people that you have to watch this film in a theatre. It’s a problem that everybody’s is facing. Q: I have two questions related to my project directly. One is, how do you as a sound practitioner in Indian cinema, perceive this technological transition? From mono to stereo to surround sound, and from optical recording to magnetic recording to digital - how do you see this, from your own perspective as a practitioner? Your impressions on these transitions… A: In the early days, we were limited to the medium. Every medium has its own limitations, because of which, people push themselves to think out of the box and come up with alternatives. That’s how this progression has happened, from optical to magnetic to digital. We felt like we needed more tracks. Like, when I am recording, I want more channels, I want more tracks, I want more control. For that you have technicians like yourself, who will go back to think about this issue and come up with a solution for that. So, I think it’s an evolution. Necessity creates and different mediums progress. It happens because of that. I remember we used to use a Nagra. You could record just in mono. Then you thought “Let’s do stereo, we have more control when I am mixing, if I have two separate tracks.” So, then you record two different voices on two different channels and then I have independent control on each of the two voices. Then you move to multi-track recording. Then we move to the exhibition side where first you have mono, where you had one speaker, then you have stereophonic where you have more control over where you want to pan your sound. You give directionality to your sound. Is it coming from the left or the right? Then you got surround sound. You have so much more control. You can create an immersive environment. Like you said, ambiences become so much more immersive. You feel like sitting in a forest when you have sound enveloping you from all sides. And now you have Atmos, which has great capabilities. Atmos gives you pinpoint precision. You can literally pan your sound to any place in the theatre. You can make it a point source. You know that sound is coming from this specific direction. So, it just gives you more control, I feel. And technology is not just a fad. It is a tool. You have these tools in your hand and the best way you can use it… I mean a lot of people, even now, don’t even use surround sound properly. A lot of films that we do, romantic films, dialogue-based films, there isn't much scope for surround sound, to explore its full capability. You can put
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your background score blasting at you from the surround speakers but there are more creative ways of using it. But again, your script, your project demands what you do with it. It ultimately depends on the kind of film you are working on. You have the option of working on Atmos but the film might not need Atmos. Some films might be absolutely okay with mono or stereo. But, it’s a fad and some people do it. People who have no budget issues go for it even if there’s no need for it. But again, it is an opportunity. You have to get more detailing in your work and you get your audience more involved in the film. Q: Ambience is a particular layer. We have been using it for years. We have been cutting it down in mono era because ambience could not be included where there was music. Many filmmakers tried to include ambience like Satyajit Ray or… A: Ritwik Ghatak. Q: Adoor Gopalakrishnan or Shyam Benegal and… A: Even Ghatak used to use a lot of ambiences. Q: Ritwik Ghatak. There are ambiences but it’s a different kind of ambience: Dramatic. Site-specific ambience was more in Ray than Ghatak. A: I mean you don’t even have to go so far back. Just watch television today. Right now, if you put on a daily soap, they don’t have any ambience. It’s just music. It’s just background score and dialogue. They feel ambience is unnecessary. It’s frivolous. It’s not necessary at all. Q: Why do they think it is not necessary? A: Because people, who are watching TV, are fine with it. Firstly, we are watching TV on such tiny speakers that cannot reproduce the frequencies that you might need for certain kind of ambiences. Q: Yes, absolutely. But don’t you think that people will eat what you feed? A: Yes. I have had situations where certain TV producers have come to me and they have told me, “Listen, our shows are getting rejected abroad because the sound is so bad. So, we want to change that.” But, there is a work culture in place in the TV industry and it’s extremely difficult for them to break out of that. We tried to do a show, where we went on location and tried to record proper sound and do post-production. But, they just don’t have the kind of time and patience that’s required because they have crazy deadlines. They are shooting something right now and they have to deliver that episode tonight. They have not budgeted time for sound or post-production. So, that’s the work culture that they are used to. Unless the producers and the directors push for that change, I cannot be suddenly brought into the project, given the same amount of time and be
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expected to do better work. Maybe I can make a tiny bit of difference within that space, but I won’t be able to make a drastic change. It takes time, patience and awareness from everybody. If 90% of the crew thinks, “Oh, it’s unnecessary” and it’s some fad and people are doing it just because they want to be like, “That’s not going to help”. They will eventually realize. Like if you see, even within Indian television, when they made series like 24 or Yuddh15 or even Prisoners of War16, they are trying to do these things. These are series that they have taken time in making. It’s not like the other daily soaps that they have to deliver within 4 hours. So, I guess it depends on the kind of project you are working on. Because I have worked on a lot of diverse kind of things, I know that it varies from project to project. It’s very wrong for me to generalize and say that this is what always happens. I don’t think it is always going to happen because I have had films where I go and we get to do wild takes after every scene and there are films where we go and we don’t have time for anything. Sometimes you don’t even have the time to take the shot. So, we are like, “Oh, forget that scene.” It’s edited out right there. So it varies. You should realize that these are the kind of projects that you want to do and hopefully the others will watch those projects and realize, “Oh, even we want sound like that.” Then they will change their mindset slowly. All the work that comes to me comes through people having heard my work before. They come to me and say, “Oh we watched this film, so we want you to do…” For the lack of better word they say that they want you to do same kind of work. I usually say that, “It is not possible to do the same kind of work but I realize what you are saying. And we will try and do a good job.” So the moment people want me to contribute and they want me to make a difference it becomes a happy space for me. That’s what I am looking out to do. I don’t want to just tick off a number of films. “I have done 200 films.” I don’t want to do that. I want to do films where my work helps the film in becoming a better experience. So, I think it depends on everybody and of course, like you said earlier, it is my responsibility to push. It is my responsibility to make people aware, which I keep doing. I am usually the loudest guy on the set because I am always screaming but hopefully it has helped the films. Q: Yeah, maybe. But, always screaming… Maybe not screaming can also work? Nobody can question your vision. Nobody can question your presence, your position. You create an indispensible space. A: I think someone like Resul17 has already done that. When he goes on set, sound does become an extremely important part of the shoot. But, that also comes from many things. In the sense that everybody realizes that we are getting Resul on set, we are spending a lot of money, so let’s take this
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seriously. Same thing happens on an Aamir Khan film because he prioritizes it. He says, “No, I am not going to come for dubbing.” So everybody’s aware, “Oh, he won’t come for dubbing, so we have to make sure that the sound is correct.” But, if you are on a set where the general attitude is, “Okay, we will fix it in post during the dubbing”, no amount of screaming will help. You can scream all your guts out but it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but as I keep saying, it varies from situation to situation. Q: But, I have heard that they recorded even Befikre in sync. A: Yeah. Q: You can hear the perspective. The clarity and the perspective that you hear... A: That’s what I am saying. Things have really changed. I think maybe 70% of the films made in Bombay today have sync sound. Since Lagaan made in 2001, right? Q: 2000. A: Yeah. So in the last 15-18 years things have changed so much that 70% of films are being recorded on location, which is great, right? Q: It is great! A: So, it is no longer ridiculous if a director goes and asks his producer, “Hey listen, I want sync sound.” It is not like saying, “I want 50 elephants”. “I want to shoot a war sequence with 100 elephants.” It is not as ridiculous as that. LG. You can ask for sync sound. It’s within the accepted norms today. All these guys Nakul, Resul have fought really really hard to make this situation happen. It has become so much easier for people like me today because I can go on set and I can say “silence” and people understand what that is. Imagine working in a scenario where you land up on the set where nobody even understands what silence means. People like Resul and Nakul had to go and explain to each and every person: “When I say silence, you are supposed to keep quiet. Don’t make noise.” They have done the basic hard work and made it very simple for us. I am very thankful to them for that, for having created this environment where we can work so confidently today and focus on our jobs. Otherwise, you know, I would be going to each person and telling them, “Listen, can you please keep quiet?” Because of the seniors we have, the environment has already been created already for us. That’s why today films are being shot in sync sound. Almost every big budget film is in sync sound. I can't think of any actor who has a massive problem with that. It’s profitable for everybody. Actors don’t have to come in again for ADR. Their time is
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saved. Of course, it takes a little more time while you are shooting, a little more patience, and a little more money. But, I feel it is worth it. Today, when I watch a film and if it is ADR, it completely destroys my viewing experience. I cannot watch an ADR film anymore. It sounds too fake and superficial for me to connect with the film. I don’t get involved in the film if it is ADR because I can hear the studio. For me it’s very distracting. Hopefully, it will be like that for everybody soon. Sadly, the sense of sound is generally not a very developed sense in most people. They just think it’s there. Visually people are very, very oriented. But, people don’t tend to notice sound so much until there’s something wrong, like, if you hear a crash, you will notice. Or if you hear some really good music, you will notice. But, on a daily basis you don’t notice sound so much. So, there are people like you and me who will notice sound because we have trained our ears to do that. We have put in an effort to try and notice sound and to be conscious. But, the attention of normal people will not be drawn unless there’s a problem. Q: What do you think ambience does to cinema and is it related to good sound? A: I think ambiences are immensely important. Personally, as a sound designer, I think my ambiences are the most important part of my sound design. It is one of the most important design elements of my films because the ambience directly relates to the space that we are trying to create. Cinema is make-belief. We are trying to convince the audience that this character is in a particular space, even though we might not be shooting it in that space. In reality, it might not be that space. Your ambiences thus go a long way subconsciously making your audience feel that it is actually that very space. Secondly, it makes your audience feel emotions. Ambiences do that very subconsciously, without drawing too much attention to it, and this, I feel is extremely important as a sound design element. When I am on a shoot, I will focus on dialogue while recording but I will make sure I collect as much ambiences as possible from location. I will have my stereo microphone and surround microphone and I will go out there and collect ambiences because for me ambiences are extremely, extremely important. Even if I have non-lip sync songs, I always try and push the directors, “Can we have a little bit of ambience?” It creates a feeling and emotion, more than what’s just there. It’s very subtle. People don’t even realize it many times. You know, there’s a background score, a montage happening at the seaside. If you put in a little bit of the sea shore ambience, it makes it feel so much more real and emotionally the audience connects with that place. They are not aware of this. Most of them don’t realize why that scene works but it does. They
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might not be able to pinpoint, “Oh, it’s the background score that got me emotional” or “It’s the acting that got me emotional.” The scene has to work as a whole. And I feel ambiences are extremely important in doing that. You have to have ambiences. If you strip the ambiences off, it sounds dead. It sounds lifeless. It’s just bombarding your audience with information. There is no emotional connect. So, ambiences are extremely important as far as I am concerned. Like, one of the biggest indications that we are sitting in a mall right now is this entire ambience around us. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know. After I talk to you for 5 minutes it doesn’t matter if you are sitting in a mall or in my drawing room or in my studio, wherever. I know I am still sitting in this mall because of the ambience because I am looking at you and not at the shops or the people or anything else. But, the sound is constantly reminding me, “Yeah, I am still at the mall.” You know, this mall music, the lift, people talking, that’s what reminds me that I am in this location. That’s what ambiences do in films as well. Q: But in most cases ambience is replaced by music to have this emotional connect that you mentioned. A: Like I said, it differs from project to project. LG. In a film like Asha Jaoar Majhe, we had no background score but people felt extremely emotionally connected. I was at this screening in LA with the film and after the screening an old gentleman, 75-80 years old, came up to me and said “I have not been to Calcutta in more than 50 years but I had tears in my eyes while watching the film because I felt like I was in Calcutta.” If I had plastered the film with background score, you know, he wouldn’t have had that experience. But, if you are going to watch a commercial film and eat popcorn, none of these things matter. Your priorities are different on different projects. On an Asha Jaoar Majhe, ambiences were everything. I went and recorded so much ambience in Calcutta and for me it was an extremely enjoyable experience because I grew up in those lanes, I know what the honking of the cycle-wallah sounds like, the rickshaw-wallah (cart puller), the buses, the tram, those kind of sounds. That’s what I grew up on and it’s all there in my memory. I got to explore all that and that translated to the audience. They don’t know what makes them watching that film, feeling like Calcutta. They don’t know why but it feels like that because it’s a coming together of many things. The food in the film, the visuals, the lanes, the sounds - all transports them to that space. So, maybe they are not able to pinpoint what makes that happen, but we as filmmakers, because we are trying to manipulate the emotion of the audience, we should know what manages to achieve that and I feel that ambiences are one of the biggest tools in your hands to do that. That film
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did not have any dialogue, any background score and it still manages to convey so much. So for the advocates of background score: you should tell them to go and watch the film. LG. You can tell them that emotions can be conveyed even without these things. So much information is conveyed in that film. There’s not a single spoken word. Q: Did you record ambiences separately, outside of the shooting? A: Yes. Q: How much time did you spend recording on the lanes? A: I was in Calcutta for about a week, collecting ambiences, while we were doing post-production. I went to all these different places. In fact, I even recorded sound in my neighbour’s house, like, I recorded their old fridge, their old fan, because since you are from Calcutta, you know, the DC fan has such a typical sound which you will not find anywhere in Bombay. Very sadly, things in Calcutta are also changing. The old buildings are being reconstructed. I found it difficult because within the course of shooting and post-production, things changed so much that the house we shot in was renovated and the collapsible windows you had, the wooden windows, they got rid of all that. Then I had to go looking for these specific things. Calcutta is changing very rapidly. Even aurally it’s changing. But, of course, it is one of those cities that are changing the slowest. We still have a lot of old school charm in Calcutta. So, I was able to find a lot of the things but we had to look everywhere. We traveled all over. It was a hugely funful experience. Q: And you also recorded in sync? A: Some of it is in sync. The house was next to a very busy road and because it is such a soft, subtle film, we couldn’t retain a lot of that. We had to recreate a lot of those things. But yeah, some of the things are in sync. It’s a mixture of both. I mean eventually it has to all come together. Even if I am recording a thing separately, I am always trying to match the tones that were collected while it was being shot. Even when I am doing a commercial film, when we do patch dubs…. sometimes you have to do patch dubs, right? We try and always match the tones of what was recorded on location in that space. Sometimes you might have a loud truck passing by over a couple of lines so then you have to patch just that bit. Then you just match the tones and get it to match that space that was there on location because you don’t want it to be distracting. As I said earlier, mostly people won't be able to pinpoint what is throwing them off but something is off. I, as a technician, know that this problem is because of ADR but some people might just lose that emotional connect for a bit because suddenly there’s a lot of ADR coming. They might not be able to
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tell you why. But, it happens. Most people are not aware of that. Sound is a very very subconscious game. You are playing with people’s subconscious expectations or emotions. You have to be careful about what you are doing. Q: Yes. A: Be systematic. Q: One thing I noticed that many of the songs that were played in Asha Jaoar Majhe, were coming not as songs, but they were treated as ambience. For example, the old film songs were coming as if from radio. Or that Pankaj Mullick18 song, it was coming from many different delays, like, after being reflected from several walls it came to the ear of the audience. So did you pre-plan those kinds of… A: Yes, absolutely. Q: Treating non-diegetic music as diegetic. A: The reason we did that is because, if you have been to Calcutta, you would have noticed that it’s a very musical city. I mean, apart from the non-diegetic music I have used, there are couple of sequences where a girl is learning singing. These are things that we planted in the film to be able to generate that emotion. This used to happen in my neighbourhood when I was growing up. Every family, they send their kids to learn music or to learn how to draw or to learn dancing. It’s a very, very cultural situation. Calcutta is a very cultural city and everybody has a cultural bent of mind. If you walk through the lanes in Calcutta, you will see that every house has a harmonium or a tabla, everybody is musically inclined. Or you will hear a radio playing. You will hear the television being on. So, music is a very integral part of the city. We wanted to capture that essence and make it feel like there is music in the air. That was the whole idea. That’s why it’s integrated so much into the scenes. Also, it subconsciously creates a mood. You know, he’s going to work, saying something. That happens because of that. Q: Yes. Like music was carrying many of the site-specificities. What is so loud here (directing the attention to a sound in situ)? A: It’s a wind chime. LG. See, that sound gets our attention because it is troubling us. So, mixing is again a very important… LG. If we had kept that subtle then it would not be bothering us and we wouldn’t be noticing it so much. Q: Yeah, it’s clashing with the voice. A: Yes.
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Q: The question of reality… because whatever you do as a sound producer within the cinematic context, the reality that you create inside, do you think, that reality is lived experience or is it something that is in a way unreal? A: I think both. Because, again coming back to Asha Jaoar Majhe, it was very real for me. I have lived many of those experiences. I have heard many of those sounds in my childhood. I was able to explore all that on this film. But, I have done other films, like I have done a horror film, where I have not heard any of those sounds before. Yet, I had to create it, you know, based on non-real experiences. Maybe based on other films I might have watched or based on, you know, just trying to create a situation. It is not real at all. Or, if I am doing a sci-fi film, or if I am doing a film that is based in outer space, I have never been to the outer space. I can only imagine what it might be like. So, I try to insinuate this as what it might be like and if it goes with the vision of the director and the vision of the film… I mean, it’s a collaborative process. I will give suggestions. If it works for everybody, we go through with them. Sometimes it does not. We come back and revise that, we change the approach. No, I won’t say it’s always real. Sometimes it’s fantasy. When you have a scene where a boy meets a girl, it might be anything. It could be romantic, it could be anger, it could be neutral. It could be anything. So, it might not be what I feel personally. I have to go with the situation that has been tried to be conveyed in that scene. It might be different for me and it might be different for you. You might feel something completely different. Q: Absolutely. A: So, sometimes it is real. Sometimes you try to stick to reality but a lot more times you have to deviate from reality. You have to see what the scene demands, what is the idea that is trying to be communicated. Q: That should be extremely creative because reality is often not objective, it is subjective. Like our personal contexts, they help us to construct a particular reality or our interaction with a particular reality. There is a synthesis happening. So, through the sounds you create a reality, right? And that reality you offer to the audience. But where are you in that relationship? What you create and… A: I feel, you know, from the audience’s perspective, while watching a film, they are trying to connect to an alternative reality. They are trying to see the journey of another person. Sometimes there might be identifications. They might feel like, “Oh, my life is playing out.”. But, on several occasions, that might be another person’s reality. Right? Like, we are seeing the journey of another human being and that is what is
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attractive. We, as human beings, are all very inquisitive by nature. We are very inquisitive about what’s happening there, what’s happening to that person’s life? So sometimes, sound-wise also, you have to try and present an alternative reality which people might connect with. You don’t always have to stick to reality 100% of the times because cinema is make-belief. You are trying to create a fake world that doesn’t actually exist. You are trying to convey to the audience, “Yeah, it’s real. It’s happening, it’s happening right in front of you.” In reality it is nothing. It is just one actor standing there for like 2 minutes, performing that scene and then he goes home. He has nothing to do with the next scene. So, we are trying to construct that world. At times, an alternative reality helps the audience get away from their own reality also. But, sometimes, you watch films that you put yourself in. In horror films, for example, people are always imagining, “Oh my God! What if I was in that situation?” They are like, “Oh my God! That will be very scary” or “This is very scary” or “That doesn’t work for me. That’s not scary at all.” That kind of an alternative reality is a very interesting tool to explore life. Sometimes you can present things as they are and that itself might be interesting. But sometimes, no, you don’t. And I feel like sound is something you can do that with, since sound is beyond the scope of the frame, like we were discussing earlier. You can construct reality with sound. The visual frame, I feel, is so much more limiting as compared to sound. With the visual frame you have to construct each little thing, like, what is there you shoot it. You have to build things for the frame. But, with sound, you can add so many more things and create an impression in the audience’s mind. Q: Yes, but this is happening only when you have a capacity to construct in an immersive situation. When it was only mono how would you create that reality? How do you go beyond a frame? A: See, the only constraint with mono was that we only had one speaker. What happens there is that if you try and put in too many layers, it will all clash with each other. That was one major problem with mono, which is why eventually they came up with other formats. But, even within mono, people used to do a lot of interesting work, right? You selectively mix your background score soft and the ambiences would creep up. You could do those things even in mono. So, I don’t agree with the fact that “we could do that only because we have surround sound today.” It’s not just that. I feel it’s all in your mind. Everything can be done with your mind. If you can think of it, you can do it. If you don’t think of it, you can’t. I mean, while watching a scene if I can’t think of anything apart from the fact that two people are sitting in an office and chatting, then that’s it. But, if my mind allows me to think outside of that space, for example, two
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people are sitting and chatting in an office. Maybe it’s just that. I am unable to think outside that and I just keep these two voices but at the same time I want it to be more interesting. So, I plant a dance studio, which is very loud, on top of them. The music is so loud that it’s disturbing these two people. That is the way we construct reality. We might be shooting in a studio, where there is nothing on top of them. But, you know, it adds a layer. It adds another angle to things and that’s what makes things interesting. We know they will be sitting and chatting. But, what makes it more interesting? In our daily lives we are dealing with these kinds of situations and hence people connect better with that scene, with those characters when you plant those kinds of things into the scene. For me, the most interesting thing in a film are the fringe characters. They bring in so much layering into the film. Obviously you have your leads and all that. But, if your fringe characters are interesting, your film becomes so much more interesting. These alternate deviating plot points, those kinds of things make films very, very interesting. So, that can be done with sound also. You don’t always have to focus on the frame. The more you think outside of the box, the more you can expand your horizon. Q: Exactly! That’s what Satyajit Ray did with off screen sounds. His off screen sounds were expanding the sensation of the space you belong to. Like in Mahanagar19, most of the ambient sounds are off screen. What is happening inside the room is the multiplication of the outside space, like the neighbourhood sounds. A: But, they could have been sitting in one studio. Q: Yes. A: Yet, it gives you this sort of a feeling that they are sitting in a big house or in an open field, whatever. You know, you can do that purely through sound. You don’t need to spend massive budgets or show a wide shot. As I said in the beginning, it is a tool that you have as a filmmaker. If you choose to explore it, your film will become much more dynamic. It is completely up to the filmmakers to be able to use sounds creatively and of course the sound technician in your team is there to help you with that. Come up with suggestions, execute it. I like to get involved on a film right from the scripting stage because if I know what the script is, I can give them some suggestions. “Listen, we can add something like this, if we shoot this like this, or if we can create a situation…” In fact, I am going to start working on a film where we are shooting a scene at the airport. I sat with the director and we are discussing that we can shoot certain things that captures the main lead’s attention by sound. Because we spoke about it already before shoot, now when we go to shoot, we can take those shots.
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Otherwise it was one scene at the airport. If I just add it in the sound, it might just seem a bit forced, a bit more superficial. But, if it is done at the scripting stage, it seems more organic. It seems like it is part of the film. It seems like it belongs in that space. So, everything is very collaborative. It is up to the filmmakers how they want to use it. Q: I talked with a number of sound practitioners because I am very much interested to know about this framing. You put it nicely that there is a visual framing and sound is often beyond it. It is off screen. So many of the sound designers I talked to, are very concerned about distraction. A: Extraction? Q: Distraction. So that the audience don’t get distracted from the story, what is happening in the film, within the visual frame? But, often there are elements that are beyond the frame, like non-diegetic, off screen sounds. A: It’s a cultural thing. This distraction that you are speaking about, how come it exists only in Indian movies? How come distraction in other films is fine? It’s like what we discussed about dialogue. If it’s not crystal clear, the audience gets distracted. It’s because they are used to it. I feel we can slowly condition the audiences into being okay with distracting elements because in reality we are surrounded by distractions. Right? We get distracted all the time. But, despite that we are able to focus on what we need to, and I can’t see why it cannot happen in a cinematic viewing experience. Q: Exactly. A: So, I am trying to push for it but there are certain situations where you can't do that because of the conditioning that people are used to. People still want, you know, crystal clear dialogue. They want the crisp clear dialogue recorded on the U87. It has to be close-miking - very, very sharp and every syllable has to be clear. They are used to that. But, slowly it’s changing. In festivals, I see films made by new directors who don’t follow these rules and people are watching that and they are okay with it. When that group expands, we will be able to break away from these norms and these conditionings that we have. I know this is what exists today but that doesn’t mean that it has to continue forever. It will change because there are rules and styles that people have been following for very long but increasingly... the more interesting work is when you deviate from that, when you change that pattern. That’s when it becomes interesting. When people are interested in seeing something new, they want these rules to be broken. Q: Absolutely. So, the question is that in the Indian condition, the reality is loud amount of ambience everywhere. As you said, there are elements that
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are distracting. But in cinema we want something opposite. Why do we want it that way? Why do we like to transcend the lived experience? A: Like I said, it’s conditioning. Of late, I have been meeting so many filmmakers who don’t want to do that. I was working on a film made by a student in New York. He wrote to me very specifically about a scene saying, “It’s in a club, I don’t want to hear the dialogues.” Even though they have recorded the dialogues absolutely clearly, while mixing it we have ensured that the dialogues are not crystal clear. And it’s an Indian boy. So, that mindset is changing. We want to bring the audience out of this comfort zone but, for now, we can do that on a film that is not mainstream. If you do that in a mainstream film, maybe the theatre owners will get beaten up because they are not ready for it yet. But it’s happening. When the festival-going audience sits along with the mainstream audience and watch a slightly off-beat film, these things are okay. It’s a transition phase. I think we are going through a transition phase where we are trying to bring in all these elements into the mainstream too. I know the way things exist right now. We are trying to be crystal clear. We are trying to deviate from reality and make everything absolutely clean and squeaky, you know. Everything should be perfect sounding. But, I feel that textures are going to come. It is the way forward. There is no way we keep doing what we were doing 20-30 years ago. Films today sound so different from what they sounded 20 years back. So, I don’t think distractions are a problem. I think it needs to be incorporated well. Of course, there are certain situations in a film, cinematic situations, for example, when a boy is telling a girl that he loves her. You don’t want that to happen right next to a highway. LG. Q: Why not? A: I am saying that because you are trying to focus on a certain emotion, you are trying to deviate from the crude reality where there is one loud truck honking right there. LG. We don’t want the audience to focus on that. You want the audience to focus on that emotion the boy is trying to convey to the girl. Q: Yeah, but maybe the boy is proposing to a girl in a situation like that… A: It’s fine if the situation is that. It could be funny also. It depends on what you are trying to convey to the audience. If you are trying to make it a funny situation where he goes “I love you” and the girl is not listening to what he’s saying because of this honking from a truck, it becomes a different thing that you are trying to convey to the audience. But, if you are trying to make it a romantic moment, which is poetic and where nothing else matters except the words that are coming out of his mouth,
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there you try and tone down everything else and you focus on the background score playing some violins. You are trying to make it seem like it’s happening in the clouds even though it might be happening on a highway or in a crowded grocery store. Q: Yes, you kind of create a subjective reality. A: Yes, absolutely. The one thing that determines everything is the script and the script and the situation that the script demands. So, if that’s what the situation demands, then why not? For me that is it. That is the reality. We are trying to construct a reality. What are we trying to convey? If we are trying to convey a certain emotion then whatever is required for that… I am not a big fan of this whole thing of “this entire film has to have a zone.” I am saying that even within that one film there are multiple instances, multiple situations, and multiple locations. We have to keep adapting to that. We have to keep changing. I am not a big fan of this whole idea of “it needs to be seamless and there needs to be no distractions.” I am willing to ruin my soundtrack if that makes it more… Q: Organic. A: Organic, yeah. Like, if it conveys the confusion of the character, why not? I am saying that’s a good thing. It completely depends on what you are trying to convey to the audience. That’s the only thing that should determine your approach. Q: Are you the first audience of your own film soundworks? A: I try to be. When I am doing sound design of the film, I am always trying to imagine what I would like to hear in that scene as an audience. If I try and play to the gallery or do what people expect of me, it will sound like every other film. What used to bother me a lot in Indian films was Foley. It was a big problem for me because everything used to sound louder than necessary. And it was the same thing, you know. People used to say, “If there’s Foley, it needs to be heard.” But, my whole approach to Foley is that I should not hear the Foley, I should feel it. Very often, while walking down the road, I do not hear my footsteps. So, every step that I take doesn’t need to be heard. It depends on the situation. If I am walking alone at night on an empty street, I want my footsteps to be heard. If I am walking in a mall, I can’t hear my footsteps since there’s so much happening around me. So, the tones that we achieve in Foley are very very important. The way you record it in a studio, the way you mix it, the way you EQ it - everything makes a big difference and that’s something that I am personally trying to work on. Even in Asha Jaoar Majhe, I was extremely specific about Foley. I tried to make it sound the way it would sound if you were shooting on location. But, a lot of times in big budget
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Hindi films, they want dramatic Foley. Like, when the car door opens and the hero puts his foot down, it needs to be a bang. Unless I am doing a film like that, where it’s dramatic and it need to be made to seem larger than life, you will not see that happening in my films. I try to keep it as real as possible. If it’s needed for a particular situation, I might do that. Otherwise, I try and stick to what I hear around me in life. I am not going to push things and put it there unnecessarily because that’s been the norm or the standard that has been followed. Q: So, even footsteps can be so creatively done, like, we hear various characters through their footsteps. Like the maasi (maid), who comes to clean the house, has a plastic chappal (slippers) and maybe someone is wearing a sandal or someone is in sneakers, or maybe the guy who brings… A: Yeah. That itself gives you so much information about the character. This is exactly what I mean when I say that a filmmaker has to think about sound as a tool to convey his information. If he thinks that, “okay, this person walks a certain way, that can convey so many things?” Let’s think of a flashy girl who wears high heels. You don’t have to have a dialogue saying that, “Oh, she’s so fancy.” You can do it through this technique. Q: Absolutely. A: It conveys so much subconsciously in the audience’s mind. these are the tools that are available to the filmmaker. They need to be able to incorporate that into the script and as a sound technician I am there to provide that information to the director saying, “Listen, we can do it this way as well.” But, they need to be open-minded enough to be able to take suggestions. They should be able to be collaborative in nature. Only then it will work. That’s why I keep saying that I can’t stress enough as filmmaking is such a team effort, such a collaborative effort. Everyone can be individually brilliant. But, if they don’t get together and if they don’t get along well, I don’t see a great film being made. It has to be everyone’s talent being used properly. Otherwise, it will just be individual brilliance the way the Indian cricket team used to be in the 90s. We had great individual players but we weren’t a great team. Today, we don’t have as many stars but we are a much better team. We play well together. That’s what happens in films as well, you know. If the team gels together, you sometimes make an extraordinary product. Sometimes big personalities and their egos can ruin a film as well. They will come and not get along with everybody else. Yeah, that’s what happens.
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Notes 1
Duration: 01:40:38 Name Abbreviations: Anish John – A; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q, Other Abbreviations: Laughter – LG 2 A very popular Indian film star. 3 A very popular Indian cricketer, the current captain of Indian cricket team. 4 Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love, Aditya Vikram Sengupta 2014) 5 Trapped (Vikramaditya Motwane 2016) 6 Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami 1990) 7 La Notte (The Night, Michelangelo Antonioni 1961) 8 Indian film star 9 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 10 Dangal (Wrestling competition, Nitesh Tiwari 2016) 11 The Social Network (David Fincher 2010) 12 Interstellar (Christopher Nolan 2014) 13 Independence Day (Roland Emmerich 1996) 14 The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi 2016) 15 Yudh (War, Ribhu Dasgupta and Dipti Kalwani 2014) 16 Prisoners of War (Gideon Raff 2010) 17 Resul Pookutty, Indian sound designer, a part of this book. 18 Indian singer of the bygone era 19 Mahanagar (The Big City, Satyajit Ray, 1963)
CHAPTER 31 SUKANTA MAJUMDAR1
Q: What is your preferred mode of listening, mono, stereo or surround? S: The pleasure that I have while listening in stereo is based on the kind of depth or clarity that one can achieve on stereophonic listening. When we work on a film for instance, we don’t get the chance or luxury of using 5.1 recording for ambience. So far we have not been able to do 5.1 recording for ambience for a film here. We always record on stereo. Since I record on stereo, I believe I should listen more in stereo. When I am working on track-laying in this house inside this room, my home studio - all my films so far I have done in this room, on this computer. For instance, say when I am track-laying for a film like Kangal Malsat2, where I exhaustively have sounds of Kolkata, not much was used later because the design worked out in a different way. Ambient sound was used but they were mostly tweaked and much worked upon before getting used. Not much of ambience was used directly. Anyway, the thing is that I always prefer listening to ambience in stereo because of the depth in stereo and the memory of the recording. What I have seen generally in recording ambience, even when I am using it, the memory of the recording works beautifully for me in the film. It’s not that I haven’t recorded ambience for a specific film. I have surely done that. But a lot of situations come when I have seen that I remember something I recorded earlier. “Let me use that here and see what is happening.” I do this quite often. It’s a kind of an instinct. This happens because of the stereophonic memory. I would never think of putting it onto the surround to see what happens all of a sudden. After that, when four or five layers have been added, I go through the layers carefully and know which layer has got what. I generally have four to five layers of ambience in a film. After those four or five layers of ambience are ready, I make a note next to them stating which I will put in which track or channel. Say, I keep one for LR or LCR, the other ambience I might feed a little more in the centre. Another one, I keep for LRS and RRS. So I note certain things like this next to the tracks of ambience. The use actually depends on the quality of the ambience. In case of the ambiences with a lot of incidental noises, noises of objects being placed or something else -
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those I cannot feed much into the surround. That’s because people might get distracted. So, an ambience which is not much independent, which does not have much complication, an ambience which is calm, an ambience which gives a general picture of the place - that kind of ambience I generally prefer to keep in the surround. Only in case that I am doing something intentionally, then that is different. I think LCR is a zone where you can play around the most. I still feel that watching a film – I can’t comment about a 3D film since I haven’t designed one as yet – viewing is still two dimensional. The dimension has not changed visually. So, even the hearing part for me, my design is denser in the LCR. I generally don’t play around in the other zones because I personally think it doesn’t help much. It mostly generates distractions. People go to watch a film and not hear it only. Nothing should be done to hamper that experience. As far as the characteristic of ambience is concerned, for my personal work, I don’t believe in film music. I personally don’t like adding music suddenly in the background. We, who are thinking a lot about the sound of a specific area, basically the way we think, like kind of building an imagery in our minds with the sound, what I have observed is that the music might spoil this thing. This works more for sound, of course. What is being shown visually can have any sound. It cannot be specified that it had to have this sound only. Any sound that will go along with the visual can be used, and that can be of course musical. But at the same time, I don’t think what the image is speaking of or the location it is speaking about, or the moment it is speaking about, as a whole what the film is saying. A parallel story can be narrated by the sound also. This scope is especially there for feature films in the true sense. You can narrate a parallel story through the sound constantly. If you want to hold it through the overall structure, then what happens is that the elements of sound with the help of which you are weaving your story, becomes crucial to maintain a character for those elements. A parallel story can be narrated by the sound too. This scope is especially there for feature films in the true sense. You can narrate a parallel story through the sound constantly. If you want to hold it through the overall structure, then what happens is that the elements of sound with the help of which you are weaving your story, becomes crucial to maintain a character for those elements. It is very similar to weaving a sari. If you are weaving a Dhanekhali sari you can’t suddenly change the weave to the Kaantha style. You can’t use different kind of threads as well. Surely that’ll come out as some mixed style, but it wouldn’t look as good. When you are weaving something, the elements that you will use are very crucial. In every film I try to find those elements in the ambience, the overall surrounding that I am creating through the
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ambience. I will mark out the important elements, which I will play around with later in the film. These will be the elements with which I will relate to the characters. When a film comes to me, it’s completely silent and there is a plus point of this. I don’t know what would happen in case of sync sound since I have not yet worked with sync sound. When the film comes, almost like the skeleton of a sculpture. Slowly we start filling it with sound. This process has almost become like a habit for us now since we mostly work this way. I really enjoy building up a relationship between a character and a specific sound. I was working on a film, it was just completed sometime back and will probably release in the coming March. It is called Pendulum.3 It is a commercial film. By that what I mean nowadays a commercial Bengali film means many things - there’s something known as semi-commercial or low-budget film. One kind has films like Kangal Malsat, or the art house films. The other kinds are the semi-commercial or low-budget films. This is not entirely commercial. Probably there might be one song and you’ll feel like it is required. In such semi-commercial films, there will be a certain lack of depth in the story and everything else, wherein the film will not probe into a certain issue deeply but will not ignore it either. These kinds of films are quite frequently made in the Bengali industry these days. These semicommercial films are the trend now. The other kind is the age-old fully commercial film. So, this film Pendulum, which I did some days back, is such kind of a half commercial film. What I observed was that when the film came to me, I found out it had songs. The hero and the heroine are romancing and there’s a song around them - showing a love story through the song. The film is woven with three to four different stories, and in one of them the hero is a young man. This man is someone who belongs to the middle class society - he is coming from a middle class home. He stays with his mother. Their house looks a bit shabby. They don’t have much wealth and have a small ground floor house like that. This is located in some interior area of Kolkata, like Behala. They have water logging near their house – such is the locality. He falls in love with a woman from upper middle class society. This is basically the story. So, where should I place this fellow? What sounds should I use to describe this person? What sounds should I use to describe his house? These things are primary. I have seen while working that it’s quite helpful if I add a few elements to the characters from the beginning - for instance, the sound of a motorbike. Since he is a young chap, he would like to have a motorbike. He is studying in college. So he observes how young students in Kolkata roam about on bikes with a backpack. The color of the bike is either red or yellow - one will have a different sound, one will have its own horn, etc.
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Probably this isn’t present visually in the film, or maybe there is a slight reference somewhere. Maybe that reference isn’t intentional. Probably, it has just happened in due course. So I can weave this sound in different ways with respect to the guy’s different dreams. I can even weave it when the song is playing. Maybe I can add the sound of a bike in between two interludes. I can make a bike pass in this scope. Then, maybe, different app sounds from an android phone - these apps have quite interesting sounds. So, maybe those sounds - maybe the sound of TV serials that are coming from the neighboring places of his house, or the blowing horn of a rickshaw etc. So, you can actually describe or build up a character with these kinds of sounds. Even if anyone is watching the film with the eyes closed, still the atmosphere of the story will be felt and where the story has gone can be understood. So, for me, ambience is this. This association is important for me. How you can associate the character and the place, we all are actually associated somehow. We almost identify a place, a space, or a character with the ambient sounds. Since we are sound guys, we are more into this identification with sounds. It helps quite a lot actually while making a film. Q: It will be troublesome to build up this association if you have limitations from technology. For instance, what will happen if you are asked to achieve this with monaural technology? S: Yes, it is very difficult then. If I am asked to do this in mono, it will, in fact, be quite challenging. I will tell you from my mono experience only. Do you know this person called Bikramjit Gupta? He made this film called Laden is not my Friend.4 Q: Yes, I know. He was in Jadavpur University. S: Yes, in the film studies department. He is senior to all of us. So one of his films called Achal 5 - it is quite an interesting film - two or three characters are primary in that film. Out of them, one character is a person who becomes human statues, like he will dress up as Lord Shiva and exhibit himself. You can see such people in Europe where they paint themselves silver or golden. So they dress up as different gods or goddesses like Kali, Krishna, Lokenath, etc, and onlookers will give money - that’s their daily bread earning process. The person who played the character has this profession in actuality. The director chose him only to play the role. So, the film almost belongs to the genre where drama and documentary are intermingled. The drama part is that he has kept the film under his control and the rest is documented. That is the way this guy does his work. So, this film went for mono mix, the only reason for that being lack of money. They were extremely keen on getting a print on 35mm,
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whatever be the cost - that romanticism was working for them. So, if it is 35mm and you have to choose Dolby, then 5.1 is only possible with Dolby and they charge around 1.5 lakh for regional films. That’s the license fee. Now, that wasn’t possible to give. These were the reasons why we zeroed in on mono. Then I realized that it is not possible to bring in this separation in mono. These days we can use amazing minute sounds like complex ambient sounds and we can make them audible in the theater. For instance, something as simple as leaves of a tree rustling in the wind can be done so beautifully these days. Say, the amazing rustling sound that you may hear inside a bamboo forest, or the sound of the bamboo bending, a squeak these things can be done amazingly in surround - unbelievable. If you have a good recording and if you happen to know how it actually sounds, then what you can make can be unbelievable. But for sound, the separation of one element from another element is extremely crucial. Whether you can separate is one of the problems of sound because one sound at times masks another one and a loud sound will cover up a low sound. If two sounds are of the same frequency then you wouldn’t hear the low sound - these are the issues. That way, a surround mix is much easier actually than a mono mix because in mono at the same time you are playing dialogues, ambience, music, effects, Foley etc. So it is very complicated to place all these from a single speaker. If you don’t keep it decided in your mind since your tracklaying time what sounds you are going to use in which places, you will be in a soup. I’ll give a basic example. Nowadays I use single tones in ambiences. I quite prefer that. Say, just a hum. So, it is not even a real ambient sound and at the same time, our contemporary age also has an ambience of its own - an urban ambience - it’s like a hum. You’ll hear an AC and other things. Q: Yes, like room tone. S: Yes. But outside the room also, it’s not always room tone. I’ll say from my experience - if you visit the office areas of Dharmatola area during the afternoon, in summer, you’ll get to hear this hum. I am saying that when the traffic is low in the afternoon and people are dozing off; then you will hear that hum even higher than the traffic. So, I consider this within ambience now, since it is an urban sound. Q: Of course. S: It is an ambience, right? Of course, it is not created by nature, but actually, it is also created by nature in a broad sense. Q: Urban nature. S: Yes, exactly. I use this kind of single mono tone in sound quite a few times for layering. Now, there are certain things. Say, you are doing 5.1. It
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is simple - say, you have a sub-woofer. Then you can just do it like magic. You put that sound in the sub-woofer and that will fill the whole hall nicely. Now you can play at ease with your traffic sounds in other zones. If you have to create the same thing in mono, you won’t be able to because you will not get the sub-woofer. If you do not have the sub you can’t use the very low tones. Now, if you layer this and you layer traffic along with this, like a fool, what will happen? You will get a noise and nothing else. This low tone will muffle your traffic sound and not let it out fully and if you have dialogues on top of this, then it is a catastrophe. So that’s what I mean - if you keep these minute technical nuances in your mind since track laying, then I am sure disaster can be avoided quite a bit. You should be careful from the start. Then, while mixing you have to be really careful about the dynamics. You really have to be careful about the dynamic range that you are playing with. One of the primary reasons for it being that it will go through an optical transfer after that, since you can’t use mono in any other way. It is different if you are going for a digital release. I am talking about film. Optical transfer has its own limitations. You cannot keep the levels beyond 10 kHz - it will sound weird. You wouldn’t get anything below 60 Hz, whereas now we can hear up to 40 Hz without any trouble inside a hall. But, definitely, it is more challenging. You need to have proper control over this whole spectrum, which you are creating. You need to have a proper grip over it and you have to be aware of what exactly you are doing. Otherwise, I have seen that it is difficult to achieve this. Here, till now if you ask me to put the elements in a mix in order of priority, the dialogues will come first. You cannot suppress the dialogues. Second comes all the important sound effects - say, a bus passes from nearby or a footstep. These are the ones, which you cannot suppress. You cannot hide them with the ambience. The third is still music, I would say. Even after so much of critical consideration about ambience, music is still crucial in the normative structure of popular film sound mixing. I mean if music is there at any place, then you have to put down the ambience. Okay, you won’t be given another choice. Mix is still done with this priority. It’s not that we don’t do otherwise. If you see Kangal Malshat intently, you will notice that at a lot of places I have put ambience over music and suppressed the music. I have also put loud effects on the music at places these kinds of things have been done. But still, our mix till now is a dialogue-dependent one. If the dialogues are there, every other thing will get less priority there. If you notice, a Hollywood mix is not like that. In Hollywood, they give priority to the modulation of dialogues. When someone is speaking low or high, or speaking from a distance or nearby, whispering or angry or whatever, they bring all these moods in the
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dialogue itself. But it’s not the same for us here. Our mix will generally be very loud. It will not matter whether it’s a love story or it is someone scolding in anger. Say, when a father is scolding a son, the level of the dialogue will be the same as when two people in love are having an intimate conversation. We still have not been able to come out of this dilemma of the mix. It’s not that we don’t try to come out, we do try. But you know what? This is not possible in dubbing. Q: Hm. S: You cannot do this if you are dubbing. If you place a mic in a 10 feet by 10 feet room right in front of the mouth - mic as in you are using TLM you are giving the mic right in front of the mouth, U87. Then you are using a pop filter and asking the actor to deliver the dialogue. You will have to do this; you don’t have any other choice. What can you do? Everything will appear to be playing from very close. There is no distance, no depth at all in the dialogue. On the contrary, there’s more than enough depth in the shot. Now, this problem exists in our mixing style. We can’t do anything about it. What can you do? It is not possible for us to cover this with technology, if you are talking about that. Q: We can see this happening in Rituparno Ghosh’s films a lot. S: Very frankly speaking, this is a general case for Bengali films. Creative use of sound is generally missing in most Bengali films. Very few bother about sound. That is kind of the overall vibe, not only Bengali films. But since Bengali film industry is at a worse condition than any other, the sound scene is even worser. But what I was saying about technology - you have to be careful if you are doing mono mix. If you get a technological help, then you can say it’s an advantage. The dynamics or separation that you can create in 5.1, the way you can make softest to loudest sound audible - that is not possible in mono. You can just imagine the impact of a blast that you can create in 5.1, just a single blast. That won’t be possible in mono. Even bullet sounds or any other sudden noise - we had to suppress them with compressors. The sound used to be very light. Now you hear bullet sounds like in actuality. Q: But another factor is there. Would your strategy have changed if they were a stereo mix or a surround mix? For example, you mentioned that you like to play more densely in LR. S: If I know that a film is going to be mixed in surround, I’ll naturally keep that in mind from the time of track-laying. I’ll strategize according to that. I’ll know which sound will go where - I’ll put this in the centre, I’ll use a certain kind of tone, like I mentioned earlier. I would be able to use that in the sub-woofer if I know that I have to do stereo mix for this. But then
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stereo mix doesn’t play in the theater - there’s no such format as such as stereo. That will be either for DVD or for CD. So, naturally, then I’ll change my strategy even more. I might probably still use sub because these days everyone has home theater with sub. But it is not that sub, which will play 40 Hz at full clarity. So I’ll surely play with it, but I’ll play with 80 or something. I’ll not get it towards 40. But if it would be in mono, I wouldn’t even do this - not even 80. I’ll start everything from 100-120. This kind of strategy you’ll have to do from the time of track-laying. You should definitely know what the final format is going to be, that’s what I think. According to that I will be designing my track. It is definitely very important to realize how it will be to hear. Q: In terms of putting sound in different channels, I was wondering if you are sending all information through one channel or if you are sending through two channels or if it is via five channels. What is the difference that you, as a sound designer and recordist, think happens in these different approaches? S: What happens primarily is a difference in experience for the one who is listening. If the sound is coming from a single source then it’s not that it’s a single kind of sound that is coming. Since we are discussing about film when in a film, sound is coming from a single source, then everything is playing from there. Then it is not possible to give the audience that experience which they will have listening from six channels (5.1). When sound is coming from five channels, then the audience can be immersed in that soundscape. You can almost drown the audience in that soundscape and make them feel that they are almost there. That they are almost inside that space that they are seeing in the theater - it is possible to create this kind of an illusion. It’s not that it is not possible in mono, but then you have to depend on the mind of the audience basically. It also depends on how they are receiving this. While munching on popcorn, maybe they are not thinking much, not involving the head much in the film and watching the film lightly. But still they will feel certain sounds passing by next to their ear or something. So this experience, this illusion that they will have, it is possible to create that illusion. I don’t think something more is possible to do. I will say that it goes to a much more intellectual level in mono. It is possible in mono as well. But then, the audience has to play with it intellectually. How the audience will receive the sound, how they will interact or listen to the sound, it is going to depend on that. Q: Okay. S: What is happening here is that there’s a lot of separation. You are able fill it up with so much of sound, that the audience will have an overall
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experience. Definitely here also their intellect, their thought process, their background, everything, and even the memory, will be affecting. So, if they carefully listen, they will appreciate your work in a better way. Even if they don’t pay attention, then also I’ll say that you can encapsulate an inattentive audience within an illusion. I think that is possible. Q: And in stereo? S: It is surely possible to some extent in stereo. But the problem with stereo is that if you are using stereo in a theater, the effect will totally depend on the seating of the audience. Q: Yeah, when we are speaking of a theater, then stereo is not possible at all. It is either mono or surround. S: Yes. Now, if someone is listening to stereo at home, then definitely it is possible to some extent. Moreover, stereo has that factor. Q: But Dolby SR was there. What about that? S: Yes, that is four-channels. It did not have a sub - only LCR and surround. Three separate channels for LCR and one for surround. You are feeding only a single thing in all the surround speakers. Q: Okay. S: It had a very nice effect. I have mixed only one film in LCR and surround. Q: How was that? S: Oh! That was amazing. It was very nice to hear. There’s not much separation in surround. Now, say, you have used only one ambience in all of them. So that encapsulates from behind. It is very nice to hear. Q: Okay, one channel for ambience is coming from behind. S: Yes. Q: But now Dolby Atmos is happening. It has as many as 128 channels or “objects” routed to 64 speakers. S: Yes. With that, there are aerial speakers above the head, an extra sub has been added at the back, a rear sub, and the gap has been fulfilled. Earlier, the speakers were set from one-third of the hall. Now that gap is not there. Speakers have come in between that space. Q: If you are asked to mix in Dolby Atmos, how will you do it? S: I don’t know. LG. No idea. Frankly speaking, I don’t know what ambience I’ll put over the head, what ambience can be used for overhead. If it is thundering, that you can put overhead. If an airplane passes, you can put that overhead. What more can you do for overhead? Honestly, you
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know what, this logic of increasing channels has not started in recent days. It had started quite sometime before. It had started since the time of Dolby stereo and Dolby SR, which you mentioned about. Slowly the channels are increasing. The point is that surely there is scope if you increase the channels, but that doesn’t imply that the job is going to be easier. Just because there is scope doesn’t imply that you can create havoc there. If the film is 3-D, it is still possible. I mean, a 3-D film with Dolby Atmos sound - I am sure that will be a great combination. It will be a funny thing as well. What else can I say? If you are willing you create and show a spectacle, you can always do that. But if you are asking me, aesthetically I always prefer and like stereo. I love stereo sounds and absolutely I am in love with stereo. The comfort that I get listening to it sitting in the middle here, I don’t get that anywhere, not even in the hall. I am talking about the cinema hall scenario since we are working here in Bengal. You cannot hear surround properly here. There’s no maintenance. It doesn’t play at the level it is supposed to. These kinds of problems are there. People here think that the speakers will last longer if you play them at low volume - such inhibitions still exist here. To go beyond all of this and hear your work is not pleasant. So, these days I don’t even go to watch my work in the cinema hall, there’s no point. I feel very sad. Whatever little fun will be there watching the film in the theater, will be all I’ll be talking about in the general film viewing at home. That’s why I never got a home theater for my home. I personally think that the fun that you get listening to stereo it is not there in anything else. Q: But stereo could be unbalanced, right? Perhaps the right channel is denser than the left. Whenever I listen to unbalanced stereo, I feel uncomfortable because I feel that I am hearing more on the right than the left. It is never entirely stable. S: Yes, you are right. This kind of thing happens once in a while. It has happened with me also and I have wondered if anything is wrong with the speakers, or if a cable is loose somewhere. I have faced such things. But still, I’d say if you listen to a proper stereo it is really absolutely amazing, especially if you hear with headphones. The depth created in stereo is beautiful and the texture is very nicely brought out in stereo. This doesn’t happen in mono. Since you are more interested in mono, there’s no fun recording ambience in mono - this is what I have observed. I have done mono recording for many films. Since many films don’t have the budget, I have to end up using one mic. What else can I do? For ambience, I feel mono is always a little muddy. The clarity seems to be missing, whereas when I am listening to stereo mics with the headphones, it is a different
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pleasure to listen to ambience. It sounds especially interesting if you are recording binaural. Q: Have you recorded ambience in binaural? S: Yes, I have recorded in binaural but those were personally made by us those binaural sounds. The mics weren’t so good. Q: Do you go to the location or field and record on stereo? S: Yes, I do that. I do stereo mostly. Say, if I am doing 100 films, out of that 80 films will be done in stereo. The films that I cannot do in stereo, mostly don’t have that budget. Q: You record the LR separately in a track, right? S: No. Why would I do it separately? Q: Oh, so you put LR in one track only? S: Yes. LR stays in one track only. Q: Okay. S: Do you mean doing dual mono? Q: Yes. S: No, I don’t go for dual mono unless it is necessary or required. Suppose it happens in such a way that the left is uncomfortably low in LR - that happens at times. Then I have to increase it so that the left comes to the same level, that’s all. Otherwise, I keep it the way it is. In fact, a lot of times in films I play unbalanced stereo. I have used certain sounds for films, which are a little right heavy or left heavy, the recording is that way only. The mic was placed in such a way that the right was heavy. The power of the signal is assigned more to the right and kept lower on the left. I use such stuff. Q: Have you ever tried using MS? I always record on MS. S: The best stereo recording is definitely MS because you are using three mic capsules and the clarity of panning is much more definitely. Q: Well, in that case you have to do LR separately. S: Yes. That is totally different that you are separating LR to hear them separately so that the left and the right play properly. Nowadays, lots of plug-ins are available. So if you put an MS decoder in the insert, you can hear LR in stereo track as well, MS to LR. This is available everywhere now. But the mics are not available here. I am always bound to record XY or something similar. There’s no other choice. What will you do? And what is that French recording method? The one in which mics are put on the mouth, it is called X or something, I don’t remember. The main thing is
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the stereo recording but with two mics. MS will surely have more clarity because you are getting Figure 8 and you are getting a Cardioid on the other side. It’s brilliant. Do you have a 418 personally? Q: No, what I have personally is an MKH60-MKH30 combination as an MS rig. S: But the first one is mono mic. Oh, okay! So you use both and record accordingly and you have a place to fix it that way. Q: Yes, first the MKH 60 is kept above and the 30, below. Then, the L and R are getting recorded separately. I get them onto separate tracks - the R is from MKH60 and then I get the 30 below and I change the phase. I use the LR separately. I would keep that in the centre and the LR separate. But my primary question is about ambience. What do you think would have happened if ambient sounds weren’t there or present less in a film? I mean, the tracks that you are making during the final mix of a film - what do you think might happen if you are using less amount of ambience sound there? I still haven’t got a solution for this question. S: See, what can happen depends completely on the situation. It’s not that we don’t use less amount of ambience. We do. There are times when we don’t keep ambience at all. Let me take the example of Kangal Malsat again. Say Bhodi’s house in Kangal Malshat - it was one of the crucial places that I was tensed about. I mean, while doing the tracks this was one of the primary concerns for me. Q: Okay. Who was playing Bhodi? S: Kaushik Ganguly. Since you’ve read the text well, you know what Bhodi is all about, what class he is coming from. So, one can have an idea of where his house space might be. The director had an idea and he crafted it accordingly. It is like a half slum locale, where people rent out spaces to carry out occult practices and some more dicey activities. He is the captain of the Chokhtar team. So, now, you need to judge this character Bhodi. He is the captain of the Chokhtar team, belongs to the extremely lower rung of the society who are kind of oppressed. That’s how is the politics of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s works. He talks about the most oppressed group of people in the society and they represent a certain portion of the society. At the same time, he is Chokhtar - I don’t know what it is. Neither Nabarun the writer knows nor does the director Suman Mukhopadhyay, all right? I have thought about this a lot of times - what should be the ambience of Bhodi’s house? What does he hear? Does he hear whistles like us in the night while sleeping? Does he hear dogs barking? Does he hear the faint sound of trains passing? Say, Jadavpur is more or less a lower middle class locality in Kolkata. So, what I hear in this area or
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whatever I can imagine of hearing in a lower middle class area, I can imagine that these things will be heard. Some other things might also be heard, like someone might be blaring a loudspeaker in the middle of the night, which is not possible in our locality. Say, someone is blaring sound in a puja, which again is not possible in our locality. What else other than this? So, will Bhodi hear these things only or does he have a different experience of hearing? How will I establish this in the film and how am I going to play with this? This was one of my concerns. When finally I started with the track-laying, I almost created an ambience which sounds like a slum with sounds of pigs grazing around, sound of trains passing by, a Hindi song playing nearby, the radio could be heard, the sound of temple bells at a distance – I got in all these things. The film’s post-production went on for quite some time. The process had become a little complex since the edit of the film was changed a few times. The final edit was not getting locked. It was continuously changing. So, I was changing the tracks, re-syncing as per the edit changes and so on. While constantly making these changes, at one point I felt that this half mysterious side of Bhodi that none of us are really aware of - that is the Chokhtar side of Bhodi. How will I express that with sound? If I am using these real ambiences all the time, then Bhodi is justly represented as a symbol of that society but his Chokhtar side is not illuminated. How will I achieve this with sound? So, at that point I decided that whenever Bhodi – if you watch the film carefully you might also notice this – becomes Chokhtar and talks as that, basically when he is in that mode, even the fyataroos have that. Fyataroos also exist in two different modes. One is the normal mode and the other time is when they’re fyataroos. It’s the same with Bhodi - one is his Chokhtar mode and at other times he is a normal human being. So when Bhodi is a normal being, I have used those ambiences throughout the film - the kind of ambience he experiences or encounters in his real life, the kind of sounds he deals with. During other times when he is a Chokhtar, then I have put off the entire ambience. I have put off all the real ambiences and have just used a few tones in those places. Those tones are absolutely non-musical, eerie at times and at times they are just irritatingly monotone. Say, just like a vibrating tone, nothing else. These kinds of tones I have used while going to the Chokhtar mode and when there have been drastic changes in the narrative of the film, we have also drastically changed and arranged the ambience of the film. Say, that vibrating tone is going on and then a sudden cut to the grazing noise of the pigs and so on. How far did these work in the film is a separate question altogether. But what I am saying is that we do create such situations where the ambience is very less or it is absent totally and without ambience, in
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the sense, we create certain situations, which are totally silent. I have used total silence too in the films. For instance, there was a film called Ami Aadu.6 I don’t know if you know about it - it was the best regional film here in 2010 in the Indian panorama. Q: Did you design sound for that film? S: Yes, I did. The film was good. There was one sequence in the film - I am citing this as an example because certain people told me that this idea worked for the film. I wasn’t sure then if it was going to work. I am not going deep into the story but it happens at a point in the film that a terrible death news arrives at someone’s house. The person who came to deliver the news came on a cycle. This was happening in a village and when this person gives out the news, the mother lets out a shrill cry and due to that all the neighbors in the village gather and we see that this guy who has come on the cycle, slowly leaves the place in the next long shot. So, at this situation, the moment the news reaches, I had put everything off including the ambience - all these incidental sounds. I had totally put off everything. I had only kept the sound of the cycle - only the sound of a broken down cycle slowly passing by. The shot was also similar - the cycle passes by the side of the camera. So, the sound also pans slowly from the centre to the right surround. This worked very well for the film. This is what I am trying to say. During such times we don’t use ambiences, which in fact is unnatural. It is only possible since this is cinema. You can make a place sound and appear extremely real because now you have 5.1 and other things. Thus you can create a tremendously real space and at the same time, you can make it completely unnatural if you wish. This is possible in cinema and it is possible with sound as well. It is not possible to create this with visuals only. Q: Absolutely. S: You can never achieve this, however you try. What will you do? You will turn the image into sepia or black and white? It will become funny. But remove the ambience and then you see the effect. It will become magical, people will cry. They will surely cry, there’s a hundred percent guarantee. I have seen it happening. So, this happens and it is possible in sound. Q: Okay, so the unreal space that you are trying to project is achieved by reducing the level of ambience. Right? S: Yes, by reducing at times and by using tones at other times. At times, we use exaggerated ambiences to project certain things also. I have done this for the film Pendulum. I will tell you the sequence in short. There is a teacher who teaches a student. The student goes out with his girlfriend and
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meets with an accident. This is a one story and from another story we come to know that the teacher’s wife has also met with an accident. So, the teacher comes that day to class and he is a little distracted and mentions that he has to leave soon. He doesn’t mention the reason and just says he has to leave for some work. Then the student’s mother comes to the teacher and requests him to scold his student, since the student respects the teacher a lot. Then she says, “Do you know that day before he went out with his friend and met with an accident? His car went and hit another car. We are lucky that nothing happened to him.” Then the teacher asks where did this accident happen and the mother replies, “At Behala.” Then he is able to relate that this is the same accident in which his wife also got hurt. This is the situation that is created where the teacher realizes that his wife’s accident happened with his student’s car. He is in a puzzled state, unable to figure out what he should do. So, he leaves the room stunned and he had got his salary on the same day. Out of enormous rage, he tears down that envelope with his salary. If you go to the extended metro beyond Tollygunje, you’ll notice that it goes over a canal from Bansdroni to Garia and there are small cement bridges at places over the canal. The metro line passes over those bridges. So, the shot is that he stands on one of those bridges and starts tearing the envelope. At that place, I have used a lot of exaggerated ambiences. I have increased the level of a passing metro sound to quite an extent. Then behind, at off-focus, you can see that a house is getting constructed. So there are long bamboo sticks planted there, sound of cutting rods is coming. All this is visible in off-focus. Then, rickshaws are passing by – so the rickshaw sounds, the hard sounds of hitting on rods, the passing metro sound – I have increased the volume of these sounds to a huge extent throughout the film. So, this is just the opposite - as in the exaggerated use of ambience is also possible if you are intending to create an imaginary space. Q: But, say we are going for a mono mix for a theater hall release that has a limited dynamic range. When the dynamic range is limited, it is the same for the ambience’s volume, depth and perspective. For instance, in the old Bengali films, ambience is almost not there. S: Hm. Q: How do we relate to that absence of ambience? What do you think about that? For example, there was a film in 1968 called Chowringhee7, where the opening sequence of the film happens in a park, the famous park in Dharamtolla called Curzon Park. No ambience was used in this sequence where the part of the wildly busy Curzon Park was shown. How will you relate to these kinds of situations where there is no ambience?
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S: You mean, when I see a film? Q: Yes, if you see a film. Or else, if you are making a film where you don’t have a scope for doing the ambience, say, you are doing in a mono mix. S: No, it is not correct to say that you won’t get the opportunity to use ambience in mono mix. There are many possibilities of doing ambience in mono mix. If there is a desperate situation where I don’t have the option of using ambience, I don’t know what I will do there. It is very difficult to say. Firstly, if I am watching the film, say, when we are going to watch an older film, we take a mental preparation before starting to watch the film. We have a mental preparation. The whole thing about viewing is nothing but a preparation. This experience of watching or hearing has a preparatory phase of its own. When you are watching a film and you see that ambience is not there, you don’t think much about the absence. You take it for granted that this should have been like this. Rather, in the opposite case, you would have been surprised to see how they have used ambience in that place if there was ambience present there. I am telling you about a film which I suddenly remembered about. A few days back, we were having lunch and we just put the TV on. I have the habit of listening to news on BBC or similar channels while having food. So, while swapping through the channels, I just stopped at a channel playing a Bengali film. I couldn’t see the name of the film and I saw it very briefly only while I was eating. I didn’t have the choice of watching it further because I had to work, and the credit list also didn’t appear by then and I didn’t even know whose film it was. This film was very similar to this old Bengali film called Chaddabeshi8, where this man had dressed like a driver and gone to meet his wife’s brother. This film was like that or rather the genre was like that. The hero only was making a lot of incidents happen and drawing attention and his role in the house was of a servant or something like that. Q: Do you remember in which year was it made? S: Some black and white film. A slender hero wearing dhoti, I don’t know him. I anyway recognize very less of the old actors and actresses. I saw very interesting use of sounds, I wouldn’t say ambience. A lot of sounds were present, and very strange sounds. They have created interesting sounds with utensils and all. He has a strange relationship with the maid of the house, who washes the utensils. So, this sound of washing the utensils has been used very interestingly - they have matched it with various sequences and various incidents in the film. There were other things - I can’t remember it all. Overall very interesting stuff was used in that film and I felt very good noticing that. They had given a lot of thought behind such a hardcore commercial film. I should have actually watched the film
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carefully and found out the name, so that I could again locate it later. So, if ambience was not there, I don’t know what I would have felt. It is kind of a mental preparation. I’d have been rather surprised if it was present there. Q: Okay! You’d have been surprised if it was present. S: Hm. Q: Yes, that is kind of a bias or a preparatory thought. Actually, this question of mine is to myself too: what exactly does ambience do in films? S: According to me, it basically triggers memory. Q: Okay. S: Mainly association, yes. Then it also definitely triggers emotion. Memory and emotion are very intricately associated, I think. If I consider emotion separately also, definitely it triggers emotion as well. It is true that memory is more associated with known things but even if it is unknown ambience then also that works. An easy example will be walking on snow. For someone who has been brought up in Kolkata, or in Birbhum like me, this sound will not be known for us. You probably know that sound because you have been present there, but it is not known for us. So, what I am saying is that sound, as a completely non-musical ambient sound, can create a huge emotion. Consider Kieslowski’s Decalogue’s first film, where the kid drowns in the frozen lake because of the wrong calculation.9 Think about the exaggerated sound of footsteps on the snow. Q: Was it exaggerated? S: No, maybe not really - I don’t even remember properly how it sounded in the film. This thought suddenly floated into my head. If we take an example from a recent film - let’s take the film Once upon a time in Anatolia by Nuri Bilge Ceylan 10 - there is absolutely brilliant use of ambience in that film. I have it in my mind almost shot by shot. I like the film very much - I have seen it twice or thrice. It is probably made in 2011. Q: I haven’t seen that film yet. S: You should see it since you are working on ambience. It is a very beautiful film. You’ll find just the sound of wind blowing. In short, the film is about a criminal who has committed a murder and has hidden the dead body somewhere very interior in Anatolia. It is almost an empty stretch of land, a tree once in a while, and hills. So, the criminal has hidden the body in an area like this. Now, the police have arrested the criminal and they have gone out with him in order to find out the dead body. The police have told him to come with them and tell them where he has hidden the body. So, this is the main subject matter of the film. By the time they find out the body, its morning. They left in the morning, they spent the whole
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night and finish only by next morning. There was a public prosecutor and a doctor and a police in this group, like it is generally in such government institutions. They all are individually interesting characters. There’s nothing much in the film - these characters speak among themselves, the criminal is there with handcuffs, and the driver. As the night approaches, the police become angrier with him as to why he can’t remember the place. At first, the criminal was taking the police to wrong places. Ultimately, they find the body towards the morning and return to the city and in the presence of a doctor and the public prosecutor, the post mortem of the body starts. The clothes of the dead person are given to the wife and children of the deceased and this is where the film ends. This is the whole story. If you see this - the whole film doesn’t have any music. At just one place music is used almost like ambience. When they are returning towards morning with the dead body in the car, then almost like a prayer call - like Ajaan or Milaad which is read after death - that kind of a reading starts playing on the car radio or car stereo. The source of that is not clearly shown. We can only see through the car glasses that they are returning to the city - convoy of cars from a top shot, and that ambience is playing. Other than that, there is no other use of musical sounds anywhere. I wouldn’t say musical, but an ambient sound, which has a musical element in it. In the whole film - you wouldn’t imagine - the wind blowing, the trees moving - there is normal ambience happening everywhere. There’s no exaggeration anywhere. But emotionally that is creating an enormous claustrophobic space. And this wind is not very known for us. It is a large empty landscape where wind is blowing loudly, like here it blows towards the end of the spring. The trees are moving loudly and these people are wearing winter clothes. So, it is clear that it is cold. The grasses are swaying. You should see the film. I am not saying anymore. What I am trying to say is how the ambience is working here and making a claustrophobic atmosphere - this is possible by a creative use of ambience only. Q: Hm. S: It is not that this is related too much to memory. I don’t have any such experiences where a dead body is laying or any such horrible experience where a memory of such loud wind or breeze is associated - nothing like that. Despite that, the wind is able to trigger a certain kind of emotion in me. The breeze is helping me to relate with this situation. This is what I will say is the pleasure of ambience. Q: What would have happened if it weren’t there? Would I not be able to associate with the situation anymore if it was absent? S: I don’t know about that.
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Q: In the beginning of the film Chowringhee, I am there at Chowringhee but there is no sound of that place. This is the case with many early Bengali and Indian films, where I can recognize the place, but don’t hear it. So I can’t associate with it. S: Yes, you can recognize the place for sure, but that experience is different. You are missing at the same time. You are able to recognize it all right and since it is cinema, a certain imagination is also working for you. When we are reading a book, our imagination also parallelly works for us. It is similar with cinema as well. When you are having this experience, your imagination is also adding something to it and making something else work. But like I mentioned, there are some experiences that you don’t have. If you consider this film being made in the silent era when there was nothing - no dialogue or sound, etc. - if we consider a film of Sergei Eisenstein, say in Battleship Potemkin (1925), when the perambulator is falling from the staircase silently, there’s actually no point in thinking if the sound of the falling perambulator would have been present there, what effect it would have created. It is not there and it is still not difficult for me to experience that. But that is because I have a certain kind of imagination. It is also true that if the sound was present there, if that film was made some fifty years later, I don’t know what impact that film would have created on us. It is difficult to say which sound would have created what impact. When it is not there, that is a kind of experience. When it is there, it is a different experience. This is how I will perceive it. Q: Yes, true. S: A lot of people claim that your imagination is able to get provoked more without sound. For instance, we see still photographs and we try to say every time that you can almost hear the incident that is created. What I would call this is creating a movement. People try to do this with sound if you have noticed. I have seen this happening. This is mentioned also in quite a few places that there is a stance of creating movement through sounds like the movement of the horse is such that I can almost hear that the horse is galloping. But I am not sure if the opposite happens. If the actual movement doesn’t have the movement of the sound, which is the opposite of the still picture, only imagination can fill this up. But what happens in that case is that any reality doesn’t work anymore. Say, a film like Chowringhee. It is a film about a very real situation - it is not that the story is a fantasy or an imagined story. Q: Yeah. S: It is the story of a true experience. It is the story of a particular period of Kolkata. This is also true that the Kolkata of that time, the sounds of
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Kolkata like buses, trams and all that was there - if they were present, the experience would have been something else. When they are not there, they are just absent. I don’t know how it is possible to explain that. I think it would have been good only if it was present, it would have been interesting. But this is also probably a fact that in case of a silent film also we somehow want to hear something. Or else, why would the plan of playing music behind a silent film come? Q: Yes. S: It could have been without that. The moment things started moving on screen, only then the need for sound came. One bothered about arranging sound or music as long as still photographs were there. Say, someone called you to show some photographs and they would play a violin track behind - no one did that. Q: Yes, probably to complement that temporality or the durational elements of a time-based medium. But what I want to ask is if I come to sync sound now - in sync sound there is a lot of ambience recorded. S: Hm. Q: Don’t you miss that while doing sync sound? S: Yes, I do, at times. Definitely. Surely. That’s why, you know, at times with sync sound there are incidents where some interesting sounds occur at that particular time which are very difficult to re-create. It is also difficult to imagine at places that a particular sound is possible at a certain situation. Say, when I am approaching a film, or when I am in a way encountering a film, I am doing it primarily with my experience. What is my tool? When I am approaching it through sound, my tool is my experience, my imagination, and my memory. Right? It is a combination of all this. So, at times, it is not possible to find a solution with all these tools. Sound at times creates such an interesting thing. It is true that I miss sync sound. When we first receive the guide track - when the film comes after first edit with guide track before the dubbing has been done - it has happened quite a number of times that I have taken a clue from the guide track or I have kept sounds from the guide track. If you leave these out, it will mainly be because of the texture of the sounds. Say, a shoot happened in an old house and someone had drawn a chair to sit. I am telling you an incident from a film I did recently. A broken wooden chair was drawn to sit - I know that I will never be able to re-create that sound. I’ll be able to create that sound but it wouldn’t be the same. That sound is so beautiful, so powerful that it is basically important, especially that drawing of the chair and sitting. Something important, like an important conversation, is going to happen. The moving chair marks that. I mean, the way the person sits and the way
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he draws the chair is important. So, I have used that interesting bad noisy sound because I know that it is not be possible to be recreated in the Foley. It is just not possible. Earlier, there have been situations where certain sounds are playing at a faraway distance and they are audible with the dialogues - strange sounds are playing. It is not a song. Actually, the sound has been recorded in such a way that what it actually means can’t be understood clearly. It is just a feeling that something is playing. We cannot so easily create this ambiguity in sound. It is because we generally enter a situation with defined sounds – I have birds calling, winds sound, Hindi song etc. – these are all defined sounds. This is how we create the space. Now, to create that ambiguity it is crucial to hear that place beforehand, to figure out what interesting is happening there. It is a fact that all kinds of spaces have different sounds of their own. It is very difficult to create that. I have seen this. For instance, if you are speaking inside a dense mango forest in Murshidabad, that sound is different. It will be different if you record the same thing in an empty field. I have done and seen this. I have recorded the sound of a cycle for a film only. At times, I record incidental sounds on location and not in the studio. I’ve done this many times. Then I cut and use them for the film. In a film made by Shyamal Karmakar, a person is walking in the muck. I knew that I could record this at the studio, but I would have never achieved the same texture. So I went all the way to Katwa. There is a small stream from the Ganges there. We found out where there was muck over there and we recorded the sound over there. The texture that we got, it wouldn’t have come in any other way. I remembered this while shooting in the mango forest. I realized that the dense mango forest - it was filled with mango buds and the bees were humming around no other sound was there, and you are talking amidst that. The cycles and the vans are also passing from within. It is creating a very different kind of sound. When I am recording the same thing outside, where it is empty, like on our Birbhum roads where there are empty fields on both sides of the roads - when I am recording in a place like that, that same texture is not coming but something else is coming. A space also has some specific sounds, it adds to the sound. It adds a different character to the sound of the film. Now, if you ask me if it is really possible to make this sound audible, I would say you wouldn’t be able to often create this intricate difference in recording.
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Notes 1
Duration: 1:15:50 Name abbreviations: Sukanta Majumdar – S, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q 2 Kangal Malsat (War Cry of the Have-nots, Suman Mukhopadhyay 2013) 3 Pendulum (Soukarya Ghosal 2014) 4 Laden is not my Friend (Bikramjit Gupta 2003) 5 Achal (The Stagnant, Bikramjit Gupta 2012) 6 Ami Aadu (Somnath Gupta 2011) 7 Chowringhee (Pinaki Bhushan Mukherji 1968) 8 Chhadmabeshi (Agradoot 1971) 9 Dekalog (Krzysztof KieĞlowski 1989) 10 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011)
CHAPTER 32 HITESH CHAURASIA AND JAYADEVAN CHAKKADATH1
Q: I will just ask a few questions, but if you feel like you can speak more on certain subjects, please add. Do you work with digital technology now? H: Yes. Q: Did you work with optical or magnetic recording before? H: Magnetic, yes, but not optical. Q: What is the difference between working with magnetic and digital that you found while working with them? H: Working with magnetic was very brief - during our student projects at SRFTI. After I passed out, there was one film that I recorded on Nagra. It was not the final track but was supposed to be dubbed. It was just a guide track. The ultimate product was again a digital mix on a digital platform. Q: Did you find any difference in terms of working with the earlier medium like magnetic recording - its resolution, dynamic range or signalto-noise ratio? When you work with digital technology now, you would probably find that the dynamic range has increased. Do you find a difference in these modes of working? H: Yes. Saturation-wise there is a great amount of difference. Digital is like a snap and it goes quickly upwards. But with analog, when you're recording on Nagra or stuff like that, obviously it was much more organic. You could make errors with the tape but the sound would still manage. The tape would adjust for your errors. But with digital, if you make an error the machine will not adjust. The error will be an error. Any peaks will be distorted right away. Q: Did you find working with magnetic more limiting in the scope of your working than digital? H: Initially, when we were working on a quarter inch, it was mono - like one-track recording on location - so obviously it was limiting in that way. If you compare the technology now, sound is not working in isolation. It is
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working with the camera. Initially, people were working with blocked lenses. So it was easy to just use one boom microphone. The dialogues would happen in a mid or mid close. The blocking of lenses was such. But now with a steady cam and Jimmy-jib and a whole range of lenses coming in, the dialogue might happen in a 16 MM lens. Then how close can your boom reach? So, you have to use a radio mic. When you're using two or three radio mics and a boom mic and later you have to mix all these onto one track, which is difficult. If you were getting six tracks on magnetic it would have been still feasible to do accordingly on magnetic. But obviously, it would have been expensive. Q: Particular mediums have certain kind of limitations. Do you think digital technology has lesser limitations than magnetic in terms of channels? H: In terms of channels definitely, but… Q: Dynamic range, signal-to-noise ratio… H: Signal-to-noise ratio yes. But I don't think there is any issue in the dynamic range. Though signal-to-noise ratio obviously was an issue with magnetic. Q: At one point of time, all of us, when working with magnetic recording media like magnetic “rock and roll” and Nagra, used to say that magnetic recording is warmer and sweeter and much more inclusive than digital recording. But standing at this moment, today, I don't think that a statement like that is valid any more. Digital technology has taken over filmmaking a long time ago already. H: The resolution has gone up. It is simple. Let's take a similar comparison. When we used to see images of a PD 150 and now when you see the resolution of images shot on a Red or an Arri Alexa, which are totally digital-based, you are getting richness in the picture quality. It is a different aesthetic. Q: But sound-wise? H: It is same in sound. The aesthetics is slightly different. In terms of resolution you're getting a rich, big resolution and big dynamic range. But the kind of aesthetics that used to be there in magnetic has shifted. A lot has shifted because of the number of channels as well. From mono to surround - it is all happening. From mono you shift to 5.1, from magnetic you shift to digital. Q: Do you think that these technological shifts are happening due to popular demands or because of certain choices we make? For instance, if
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we chose to stick to an Arriflex camera with analog image recording, then probably it would stay and the digital Red camera would not emerge at all. J: It is market driven. It is completely market-driven. Q: Sound-wise imagine that it would be a normative structure to work with a Nagra, but popular demand would be to use digital technology. Do you think that it is the other way around: popular demands want digital technology to emerge and be used, or digital technology is there and you choose? Which one is right? H: When digital came, there was a choice. There were options, because digital had two channels and some of the tapes also had two channels. Then you made the choice for various reasons like it was cheap, recyclable… J: Non-linear editing made a lot of difference. Digital workstations and the compatibility between the machine and the recorder save a lot of time. But what you mean by popular demand? Did you mean the demand from audience? Q: By popular demand I mean the demand from the practitioners, for instance sound designers and recordists. They wanted to use digital sound, which is more open and wider in terms of dynamic range, signal-to-noise ratio; you can erase whenever you feel like, you can record many tracks and even overdub. Of course, in magnetic media you could overdub as well, but it is easier in digital. You can use “good takes” and “not good takes” N-number of times. Should you think that digital technology came out of these demands of the sound designers? They wished that a medium should come with these kinds of possibilities and lesser limitations and that is why digital technology emerged, or digital technology was already there and sound designers chose it - which one is right? J: The second one, I think. The later one will be correct. Surely some people would have demanded it leading to some kind of research and innovation. But now it is like this is the only thing that is happening there. I don't think anybody will go back to analog medium now because we all remember this error with a lot of romanticism, like analog being a very warm sound. Q: Yes this is romanticism. J: But in a market-driven field where economy, finance and a lot of things matter, I don't think we have a choice. Q: But for example, surround sound came out of demand. People wanted multiple channels. It was not like surround sound was there and you chose it. It came out of necessity. People wanted enveloping sounds, right?
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H: Cinema, like any other medium, will slowly lose its charm if it does not evolve new things like technology into it. Initially when cinema came there was no sound, but people were still mesmerized to see people moving on the screen. Then sound came and it became alive. Even with sound, after a certain point of time there comes a sense of saturation. There you need something more. So then stereophonic came and later surround came. It is natural. You are just trying to create the world around you. When you're in a field, you are listening left, right and center. Your wonderful ears are listening to everything. But in cinema you’re listening to the front only. Q: Surround sound came before 1995. Jurassic Park was made in 1993 with DTS Digital Sound. 2 Star Wars was in 1977 with the first Dolby stereo sound.3 J: Walter Murch's Apocalypse Now was also stereophonic.4 And then Star Wars Phantom Menace came. 5 It was actually a demand. Star Wars sounded of so many possibilities. Q: But why is it that surround sound came to Indian cinema almost 20 years later? People here had also watched Jurassic Park and Star Wars. Why is it that they did not think that this technology could be of any use? It was already available. H: Even now, a lot of people are not using surround sound as surround sound because a lot depends on what kind of film you are making. When you're making more of a rom-com where only violins are there in the soundtrack, then where you place the violin doesn't make any difference. It is when you're making a film like Star Wars, and you need direction to your sound, that is when you need this kind of format. When you watch Gravity 6 , it makes sense in IMAX because the format was specially designed for that space. Even in a simple film like The Lunchbox7, if there was no direction to where that auntie was talking from, then you lose the perspective of that whole soundtrack. That is why you need the channel or maybe the channel was there and that is why the design was possible. In mono, it would have simply been a perspective thing that somebody is talking from a distance, not from the top but from a distance. Now that there was a channel, they just panned it slightly on the right or left or topish corner because the format is available. So, I think it is both ways. Obviously there is a limitation of channels and the biggest thing that happened with digital was with the number of channels. So now there is no production sound mixing happening at all. Production sound mixing used to be when you're mixing six mics onto two channels or one channel, and that is when you are doing a lot of things on film. But now you have six
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microphones and eight tracks to record, leaving you with to spare tracks on the recorder. So you're not missing anything. You are just recording whatever is coming and then you're doing the mixing in postproduction. Q: Okay. So you are keeping all the tracks as they are. H: Yes, as they are. You're not doing anything other than making sure that all the levels are correct - only checking individual levels for acceptable volume. Everything else, like the choice of the channel and choice of the track is not made by them - all that is happening in sound editing. Whereas, with magnetic or two-track recording, you had to make choices. At certain points of time you had to shut down extra microphones because they would add extra noise. And the delay was horrible. So it is both ways. Q: Yes, that is a point. Do you think that digital technology offers more creativity? It is not a very important question, but I think it does matter. J: Surely. With digital, if there is a channel like that they will use it for storytelling. It is simple. Q: Like you said, with digital technology you have multiple channels and that is why you could put that woman's voice in some direction. So it is a creative choice that you have that you couldn't perceive and make previously. H: Even when you listen to earlier recordings and find that there is not much of an ambience, it is because that is all the range there was. You had to make a choice as to whether you wanted to hear the dialogues, ambience or the music. Now, with so many channels, you can choose to have the dialogues in the front and still have a feel of the ambience from the back. No two tracks are disturbing each other. That is why the mono recordings were so thin. Most of the times you only had the music or the dialogues. And when there was no music or dialogues, you would have some ambience. Q: But there are instances of ambience being there in some earlier films, when direct sound recording was used, for instance the first Devdas in 1935 by Pramathesh Barua.8 There is a lot of ambience because it was shot in Calcutta. We hear the traffic and the birds. So, there was ambience used before but in the dubbing era there was a lack of ambience usage. When magnetic recording came and it was done mostly inside a studio… J: Another thing is that BGM (Background Music) has got so much of an upper hand. If you take out BGM from some films, they cannot stand on their own. The whole thread is through the BGM. If you mute the BGM and start watching, you might not be able to sit through five minutes. Films are shot like that. You don't need to hear anything else. You just
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need to hear the BGM and dialogues. This is what is happening. If there is no music and there is ambience and that kind of a creative design, you start to feel the time in the film. But now nobody wants to feel like that. People are using BGM to compress the screen time. People say it is dragging and lacking and all these things. They are totally against the idea of sculpting in time. You don't want your audience to feel that time and space. Most often when we mix a film nowadays, we encounter these things. When a BGM comes, most of our ambience and effects will go down because BGM is the one that is going to hold the audience in their seat. If you mute the BGM, there is no cinema at all. That is the way the films are made. Q: When Ram Gopal Varma was emerging, his films used BGM in a very subtle way. J: That's because the script is good and the film is good. It is cinema. Nowadays, we are making dialogue dramas and soap operas. Q: Nowadays the BGM is not that loud. Is that a norm set by Ram Gopal Varma? J: I don't think so. Even Ram Gopal Varma used BGM a lot in his later films. Company9 had a very beautiful sound design and it was very mature work. But these are very big questions that we always ask in the mixing theatre. When BGM comes, the whole sound design is in water. There is no other way. H: Basically it is a choice you make. In the context of Indian cinema, you're always looking for an easy way out. When you're not even working on a script, who the hell is going to work on sound design? If you worked for two years on your script, then I can expect three months of work on sound design. If you're not willing to give three months to sound design… Directors are not willing to sit with the sound designer and discuss the sound design. They are only going for BGM sessions. It is just simply an easy way out. J: You cannot make the emotions reaching the audience. The violin has to be played for people to cry. If the violin is not played, people will not cry. They wouldn't understand the story and even would get bored. H: People can cry but it is just that they are taking the easy way out. Music itself has an emotion. If you just play some music, you can feel the emotion. But sound works with the visual. If you have to create an emotion through sound, it comes with the picture. One picture and sound combined together create an emotion. But background music is independent of even the picture. Even if nothing is happening in your picture, you can create an emotion with music. All the directors look for
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these easy way outs. Rather than working on the film, they work on the music. Q: But that has changed. J: No, I don't think so. H: In majority of the films it hasn't. But upcoming independent filmmakers are trying something different. They are at least open to experiment. Maybe in the final mix they will still keep the BGM up but they will let you design your track and listen to both; in particular sequences they might prefer BGM and in others they will let the sound takeover. There is a choice now. It's not like there will only be BGM. But still, it depends on the director and the creative team as to whether they want to carry the emotion through the music or the sound and video. Q: Take the example of Highway.10 In its sound, I don't think BGM is perceivable that much. It is there but inside the depth of layers. The first part of the film is so elaborate and deep sound-wise. So many layers! Where is the BGM found? J: Yes, you don't even know when it comes and when it goes. Q: Yes. It is a fantastic sound design. Maybe the second half is much more melodramatic in a way, but first part is… H: Obviously again, it depends on your film. Everything depends on your film. If you're trying to make a film like Highway and you don't hear things like them going into different zones, it will become flat. Let them go to Himachal or Uttaranchal or any other XYZ place and if you don't hear that particular location sound, then it's all flat. Q: Yes. But there are also other films, not just rom-coms, like Kaminey11 or Rockstar12 in which we hear a lot of ambience. If, like, what you have just said - that sound is chosen on the basis of genre - Kaminey should not have… It is an action drama. J: Kaminey actually happens in one rainy night. I worked on Kaminey. In that film, there was an event happening, which was thrilling and actionpacked, and then you're going back in time to give the context of what is happening. That is why you are going back to a different soundscape and then coming back to this rainy night - now. In that film P. M. Satheesh used a lot of ambiences. Even in Omkara you hear a lot of ambiences.13 Q: Yes. Omkara also has fantastic sound. Even Rockstar, despite being a mainstream popular melodramatic film, has used a lot of ambiences. J: Have you seen Jab We Met? 14 The first part is a very good mix of ambience, music and effects. It is very beautifully done. It depends on the directors.
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Q: Yes, probably. But I think there is a dominant mode. For instance, the dominant mode at this moment, what I understand from your talk, is sync sound. People are embracing sync sound. But this was not the case in 2005 or before. It was mostly dubbing. J: Actually, the film institutes have made this difference. A new breed of people like Resul… H: Basically. When we were doing a diploma, if we were passing out before 2000 what were the job options you could have got? J: You could have become a dubbing engineer. Q: Yes, dubbing engineer. H: Yes. And then films like Dil Chahta Hai15, Bhopal Express16, Lagaan17 and other films like these happened and became a success, so there was another job opportunity that came up. It was the live sync sound recordist, for which we were trained. We were in a way already trained. We did not know crew management or set management, but we knew the basics of location recording. That is also when the digital era came which the oldies were not comfortable with. So, the new generation got used to these new technologies like digital and radio mics and got the work done. They also did not have big egos like senior recordists. The young generation was just looking for jobs. Some of the films got disastrous sound on location and they had to dub it completely. It was a complete failure on sync sound because the recordist just could not manage. Or maybe they did not get enough cooperation from the people. Whichever way you take it. But it was a new and well-paying job in an Indian perspective, and people grabbed it like being a dubbing engineer or Foley recording engineer or a music engineer. Music used to be the biggest industry for an Institute passout. You could get maximum number of jobs in music. But music industry totally collapsed in the post-2000s era. There was no live music recording happening with digital coming in. All the music directors were sound engineers themselves. There was no need for a dedicated sound engineer. Also, this new job of the sync sound recordist was well paying and a lot of people got into it. To become an independent sound designer that was a great way to begin. You do location sync sound recording, people get to know you and trust you, and then you get to do the sound design for the complete film. Q: Tell me about yourself. Why did you personally choose sync sound as your mode of working? H: I did sync sound in all my Institute projects. Q: But why?
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H: I found that dubbing was a waste of my energy, actor’s energy, my team’s energy and everything. Everyone can shoot the visuals live with actors and restrictions and limitations. Then why can't we just do the sound too in that way? When we were doing my diploma, the period film was set in 300 BC and the protagonist was talking Pali. We were shooting in Ghatshila and there is this bridge where the traffic is going through. But we managed. When we went on recce, the thing I asked was, “How the hell are you trying to shoot this in the middle of Subarnarekha where there is a bridge on the river? There will be honking and all sorts of noises.” And on the day we were shooting, there was a marriage happening in a nearby area with all this music and wedding songs playing on loudspeakers. And this actor is talking in Pali. Then the director and the production manager came in. We stopped the shoot for a while. Then the loudspeakers went off and we shot it. There were a few things that we still could not shoot – a couple of lines that we could not manage while the music still playing. We went to a different area and recorded it. The end result was fantastic. Q: What about you JD? Why did you choose sync sound? J: Actually, I did not choose sync sound that way. I also did most of my projects with sync sound at the Institute. But my diploma was not sync sound. It was dubbed because we had to use other people's voices. In the early stages of the film itself, my director wanted to use another person's voice. I came here to become a mixing engineer. Mixing was the one thing I wanted to do. There was no possibility for me to get into mixing and there were no vacancies. That is when I started assisting these multi-cam shows and then moved into sync sound. I also did postproduction works. I was doing dialogue editing for Subash Sahoo18 and because of that I was much more interested in sync sound as I was mainly working with human voices, like dialogue cleaning, setting the tone, equalizing and remixing dialogue tracks, rather than effects and ambience. I did two or three films with him as a dialogue editor and then I moved to my own films. Q: You, Hitesh, from the very beginning, decided to stick with sync sound. H: Yes. After passing out, I did two feature films in which I was recording guide tracks. For Sagar's film, our senior in SRFTI.19 J: Somebody had sent me Sagar's contact saying that he was looking for a sound recordist. H: And then in one Marathi film. There is obviously this thing when you're doing guide track recording for an Indian film - you are as good as a non-existent entity. It does not matter if you're there or not. Sometimes
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people don't even call for roll sound. They just assume that the sound recordist should roll. That is one thing that I observed. After doing a diploma in sync sound where I had whole control on the set, I get a feature film as a pilot sound recordist where I realized that I don't exist on the set. I have no say in the whole process, which was pathetic. Why the hell did I do a three years’ course if I had to do something like this? Those experiences also added to my decision-making. From then on, I have always been doing sync. I still do postproduction but we try to use our knowledge of sync sound to make sure that the dubbed film does not sound like a typical Indian dubbed film. We try that using different kinds of microphones, using different kinds of… J: Trying to give some kind of perspective to the dialogues, use more ambiences and merge the space with the sound. That is the most important thing – you are trying to use the spatial aspect of that feel. If you're sitting in a room and you are giving that kind of a reverb and ambience that are outdoors, you're actually trying to engulf the space. That is what you get from sync sound. Postproduction has actually improved a lot. H: Yes. Sometimes we are not involved during the filming when it is a dubbed film, but if we are involved then we would like to send a guy, not with the Nagra, but a two-channel digital recording with some stereo ambience recorded from the location and some additional stuff so that we get something from the location. We can put them together and create that location. J: For the last Malayalam film I did, I went to all the locations for 16 days. After the shoot and the edit, I watched the film and made a list. I went to all the locations according to the time. If it was evening, I went there in the evening and recorded the ambience and used it like that. Even the vehicles like the Ambassador, Vespa, Lambi scooter and all these things we recorded. It was a Malayalam film and they were doing it for the first time. Godly went and recorded all the ambiences and we were trying to do it like that. H: But definitely we are working in a much better time for sound. People are at least open. It's not like there is a template for sound and the sound will happen only that way. People are open to other possibilities. Maybe in the mix you will lose out on the basis of argument or whatever one chooses. But you can do your work and present, and in the final mix a call is taken as to what prevails. This is a much better time to work as a sound designer or a recordist. J: You can tell a story with some portions of the story being told through sound. It's that kind of thing and not a completely visual media.
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H: Even on location if you have a correct logic and explain things properly to the team, they listen. If you are not talking nonsense, they will listen to you. You can get the work done on location. Even with the biggest of stars, whoever it is, if you are confident with what you're saying they will listen to you. Q: Why has this situation changed? Sound has become better or people have become more aware of sound? Or the production team has become more inclusive of sound? Why did this change happen? Is it because of technology or popular demand? H: It is more to do with the exposure to world cinema. Nowadays, the filmmakers who are coming have obviously watched world cinema. With Internet and lot of international projects releasing properly in India, not just dubbed but released in English, and people watch and realize the difference. Right now, 80% difference of quality in Indian films as well as international films is because of sound. Even camera and other stuff, obviously scripting, are parts that people ignored. That is the way of filmmaking in India. Sound also they used to ignore heavily, but by watching international films they have realized that this is one element that we are not paying attention to. And until and unless we pay attention to this one element we will not be able to create… and these films are going to festivals and they are completely unknown. No dubbed films anymore. The moment it is a fully dubbed film, it is a minus point. They realized this fact. So even if it is very difficult they prefer doing in sync, like I did this recent film called Sunrise; it was by an Indian guy called Partha Sengupta who studied abroad and had an international crew.20 The whole film was supposed to happen in the rain. We would have dubbed the whole film. But he said, “I will still do live sound because in the international circuit I cannot say that I dubbed the whole film”. Luckily the whole film turned out to be correct. But the initial thing was that “I cannot go to the international community saying that I made a film by dubbing”. Q: But it was shot in the rain! H: Constant rain throughout the film. There is not even a single shot without rain. And the rain was created with the rain machine. Q: How did you manage to do sync sound then? H: The good thing was that the film had a maximum of 40% of dialogue and the other 60% is all sound. It is not a dialogue heavy film. It is more of an action film where things are happening and people are watching. Not too much of it talking filled. That helped. For the portion, which had dialogues, we had a plan after working for two or three days and the recce
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of the location and everything. He knew from the very beginning that it has to be raining. So we planned the whole sequence accordingly. Q: So, watching international films also changed things quite a lot because of these new sensibilities about sound. Why are people getting aware of sound? Is it because of certain exposure? If you give good food to people they will only accept good food. They will never… H: We never used to eat pasta. But when the Italian restaurants came up, certain people liked it. Obviously now it is their favorite food. There was no pasta when I was growing up. I never had pasta in the first 25 years of my life. Once you have it, you might like it or you might hate. If it is good, it will stay. Q: Do you work with digital technology for better resolution, headroom and clarity? Does it mean that doing these aspects are better than the previous formats? H: Right now there is no choice. You cannot record on analog until and unless you're looking for a very specific kind of film. J: People are not going to listen as a day-to-day environment. They're not listening in a surround sound mode. You are listening in a stereo mode as a human being, that itself can give you all the perspectives and depth. But in cinema you're enclosed in a theatre with a dark background and if you want to communicate something, you're using it as a totally different thing. When you're doing a fiction storytelling, it's altogether another thing. Q: What do you really mean by ambience? Some sound effects can also be termed ambience. Such as footsteps, when we don't see them, can become ambience sometimes if spatial information is there… J: Spatial information. That is the basic thing. When you define a space, how do you do it with a sound? Presence felt is through ambience, for instance in David Fincher's Seven21 - the train goes on and on and this woman gets upset. But the whole thing is never being shown in the film. There are so many films with such use of ambience, like The Godfather.22 Q: Why? Why do we have to go to The Godfather? We have Satyajit Ray. Just look at Nayak, The Hero.23 Everything is shot inside a train and every single compartment has a particular and recognizable kind of ambience. When you come inside the coupe where that religious guy is sleeping, there is a peculiar vibration and inside the old man's coupe the vibration changes. It’s an absolutely fantastic use of ambience. And he made it in 1966. J: Even in Sholay24, I think, they have used good ambience.
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H: If you see Pakeezah25, the establishing shot where the whole of Meena Kumari's area is being established, you have the depth of visual and the depth of sound as well. You have at least 7 to 8 different songs happening in different places, and you can hear all of that. Plus the horse cart, which is passing through the ground. Then you have these Paanwallas and pimps. You hear everything in that one long shot and you know that it is the red light area or in those times or the area of courtesans. It is brilliantly done. And what about the vessel of the train? What about in Bandini26 when they establish the prison? This guy goes on top of the wall and says, "Everyone is all right?" And you hear the long delay of "Everyone is all right?” That is when you realise how big the spaces are and all these women are trapped there. There is no ambience as such like what they put now, the low rumble and all. It is just as one voice with this long delay, which establishes how lonely and trapped these women are. And he does it four or five times. He goes to all different corners and says, "Everyone is all right?" It is also a procedural thing that might even be continuing now and which used to happen at that time. It's inspecting everything in the evening and making sure everything is all right, and the shout: "everyone is all right?" And you hear this long delay. It is black-and-white. In the end you hear the ship's whistle again. The song is happening and the climax is happening on sound. Thrice the ship horn comes and she is to make a call whether to board the ship or stay with the hero and the ship is constantly calling. She can go and start a new life but she chooses to stay with the hero. She does not go for her new life. Ambience is not only like say the traffic or the birds. Ambience is again part of the sound. Dialogue can be ambience. Anything can be ambience. Q: …which carries spatial information. H: Correct. Anything can be ambience. Sometimes we choose to withdraw ambience to create another kind of space. The moment you withdraw ambience the space becomes something else. Like in Guide27 when he's lying in the temple and suddenly he goes into his thought process there is obviously no ambience because it is his thought process. In that thought process there is no ambience. Q: The lack of the use of ambience in the dubbing era is an established fact. For example, films like Dharmatma28 or Deewaar29 or Amar Akbar Anthony and those kinds of films. Even later films like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak 30 did not have much ambience. Is it that in those times ambience was not used, or this was not the norm? Why is it that there is almost no ambience?
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H: Because in the script the city used to be Rampur or Lakshmanpur. They never establish the city you are in. They never want to commit the space or the time. Q: Like a fictitious place. H: Yes. You are always used to hearing "I have to go to Rampur" or "I have to go to Sonapur". Q: But look at Shanghai.31 Shanghai is also a fictitious place but you hear a major amount of locational information in sound. H: But in Shanghai, even though he's not saying it because it might become controversial, it is Mumbai. There was the slogan from political parties saying let's make Mumbai India's Shanghai. So that is why it is Shanghai. So it's clearly Mumbai and everybody knows that it is Mumbai. But just to save his ass he is not saying it is Mumbai. Because the moment he says it is Mumbai, it becomes political. Q: This is a good point that most of the places were fictitious. Ramgarh is a fictional place. J: Completely fictitious, but they use some locational information. H: Sholay was more on effects than ambience. The effects were brilliantly done because they did Foley and everything. J: It has a very good influence of Western films. Q: Sholay should not be a representative film. It is an exceptional film. Generally the films produced in those times came with very poor quality of sound. H: Even when you're talking about Deewaar, the opening scene when the whole rain is happening and the people are there with umbrellas, and the union strike is happening… Q: Look at the voice! He's speaking in a rally in an outdoor situation and we hear the father's voice which is full of room reverb. Look at it. There is no spatial information. Sounds from an open space should provide the sense of space, which should be reflected from different directions. It should not have room reverb. J: It should not have any reflection at all. H: But at the same time, this iconic dialogue happens "I have my mother!" You can hear the children singing the anthem and the train passing, because they meet below that train bridge. The meeting point is very significant. It is below the train bridge. The train crosses and these two guys come and because it is the 14th or 15th August in the script, you can hear in the background children singing the anthem. That connects to their
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old memories of school when they used to sing and parted their ways and he decided to become a don and the other decided to become a police inspector. So, that anthem has a role in the whole script. That is the choice whether it comes from the script, whether a sound designer can interpret the whole space in his own way and add… J: Again, it is not only spatial but also calling back the past through the sound. Q: But there is no information about Mumbai. J: No. There is nothing about Mumbai. As even Ghatak uses much better ambience. H: It is not just the ambience. The dialogue quality and everything else in the soundtrack of films in that era, like say from the late 70s to the late 90s, they are obviously and totally dedicated to music. The soundtrack meant music. So there was no work done on sound as such. Before the 70s, in all the Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and other films, ambience were still lacking but there were pieces that were very vital to the whole film. And this was there in the script. J: But it is almost like a radio drama in that way. You are giving the sound of a whole and saying that the ship is the... It is almost like a radio drama. It does not give any information about the space or geography. Q: I'm very curious and this is my basic question. Why suddenly (I see suddenly but you might know it better because you're into it), there is an interest in the spatial information in Indian films? Look at Lagaan, which is a major breakthrough in Indian cinema. After Lagaan, there have been so many films made. Most of them really want to give ample spatial information by the use of ambience. Why is there this change? What is the reason? H: I think it is because the technology is also available. It is not that people did not want to give that information. There was always an ambience track when we were mixing live on a mixer. Like in FX track, music track or a dialogue track, there was an ambience track. The moment the dialogue track came, the ambience track would come down. And it used to come down to a level where you could not hear it or it was not disturbing the dialogue in mono mix. When you have the surround mix, you have the option of putting the ambience in multiple tracks. So the director does not mind as long as his dialogues are not disturbed. But even now, the moment you disturb that dialogue, the ambience will be cutoff. Even now, in Hindi films, imagine a character is talking at CST railway station; if you suggest keeping the ambience loud because the station is naturally loud on the expense of one or two words in dialogue, it is not going to happen. The
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dialogue will come out on top and you will have to abate the ambience. A rich and thicker layer of ambience will be present. But there is no chance that it will take over. Q: Do you think that ambience is used relatively more now than before only because there are extra channels? J: That is just one reason. And the other reason is that there is a new breed of well-trained sound designers and directors who want to play with sound. H: Channels are there. The non-linear digital technology is there. You don't have to do the effects the way we used to do it on magnetic tapes, where once it is done, you have to reload and playback and punch on the correct options. Now, you can even add ambience at the last stage of your mixing. If you are missing something after doing the mix and you decide that one particular piece of music is not required and it's empty, you can still pull back your ambience and mix it immediately. So it is a combination of things. Even from the location you can dedicate one channel to your ambience, like the way it records. On the field you can always have a stereo mic, which is recording ambience - sometimes simultaneously, at other times separately. So a recordist is getting a dedicated channel for ambience. Some people record ambience from the location just after a take. Sometimes stereophonic and sometimes even a 5.1 microphone to record ambience from the location. And then they mix it with their own libraries and give that kind of feelings. J: I did a film in the Andamans Islands and we shot completely on the beach with the waves coming and going. The dialogues are happening like that. So I always kept a stereo microphone, an MKH 60/30 pair. Q: Was it a 60/30 combination? J: Yes, 60/30 combination. One is a figure-8. Q: MS stereo? I use that combination all the time. J: It is very common in Mumbai. It is very good. I don't like 418 or anything like that. So in a film where you're seeing the waves coming and going, if you keep the ambience as it is, you don't need to do anything else in the postproduction. You don't need to add anything other than some kind of wind or something like that. Everything else is there. It is anyway always there in the dialogue track as well. But when you keep this ambience, you can define the space, and as you said the whole information from the location is included. I always keep it a bit away, because anyway I have to cut it down during my mix and I have to give way for my dialogues.
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Q: This is my personal question, because I see, watch and listen to the films from an audience’s position and perspective because I'm not directly a part of the Indian film industry. I have worked on sound in a few international film projects. How do the Indian practitioners use ambience? Why do they use ambience? And what do you think that ambience does to cinema? H: It is basically what we do: sound design for films. Ambience is just one of the elements and tools of sound design. Dialogues are a way to tell the story but dialogues are also part of my design. And so is ambience - a part of my design. We have ambience, live effects, stock effects and lot of other things to create a space. Ambience is just one of them. Q: So it is just a material, isn’t it? H: It is a tool for us. For instance, if you ask me why does the cameraman use so many lights, he can do it with one light. For us it is one of so many options. Q: What about you, JD? J: Yes, that is the thing. But my purpose would be, for instance, if a character is in a space, what is he dealing with at that moment? You can say a lot of things with ambience. At some point even if you want to isolate him from the whole city, you can do it through ambience. And if you are asking what is the purpose of ambience in cinema, it is a very difficult question to answer. Q: Because you're using it, so perhaps you have a perspective on this. H: In one of the films that I did not do the postproduction ultimately, I saw the edit and it was doing sync sound. In one particular sequence, there was ambience. Obviously, when you do live sound on location there will be ambience. I said “for this particular sequences we should do the ADR, because I don't want this ambience.” As a sync sound recordist, I said I don't want to hear any honk, traffic, rumble or a hum in that particular sequence. I wanted that space to be isolated from the world. How do I achieve that? Q: Okay, that might be particular to that sequence. H: Yes. So for me as a designer, ambience is not the only tool. Q: Of course. But it is a very important tool. H: Yes. A very important tool. I cannot think of my soundtrack without ambience. Even if you're sitting in an AC room, there has to be an AC hum or a room tone.
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J: And if you're shooting in a set, a sound stage for a film like Rangeela32, 80% of the things are shot on the set and without ambience that does not work because it is supposed to be set in Gujarat and we're shooting in Mumbai in a set. Q: So, what do you do? J: I was giving my complete attention to getting the dialogues because all the ambiences have to be added later. I'm trying to get the dialogues as clean as possible and in the postproduction, somebody else who did the sound design added the ambience. Q: Did you go to Gujarat and record the ambience? J: Yes, a lot of ambience. When we went to shoot some particular things there, I went separately and got the audio for a lot of things like the market, wind, birds, peacocks and a lot of other things. We used most of the things. Q: If you are unable to use ambience under certain pressures, let's say from the director, do you feel happy? I mean would you feel a bit unhappy if there is no ambience in your soundtrack? H: No. It is not just about ambience. If the director intrudes into anything in my sound design space, I will not be happy. If he says, “reduce the footsteps”, then also it is a problem. I have kept those footsteps on a certain level for some reason. I would not keep it just for my pleasure, saying that my sound should be loud enough. If the birds are on a certain level, obviously I have a space in mind. When he wants to reduce it, it is not just the volume. A lot of things change with the volume - the whole atmosphere changes. If he cuts down the birds a bit saying “bring it down!" - it means that the purposes are lost. If my birds were at a window it is lost. Q: Does anyone make the final mix on stereo? J: I mostly mix for 5.1, and stereo mix only for TV or satellite distribution. But regarding the thing that he just told now, the last film I did was a Malayalam film and the climax scene had a police firing. They were showing it very symbolically showing the police and the guns and some people striking and it suddenly becomes slow motion. Two kids are watching the strike and the police are about to shoot. Now you see these kids are shutting their ears. It means that the police are shooting. For this scene I gave three different options and the director did not want any kind of music in this film. Q: That's great.
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J: It was Biju's last film. I was in a difficult situation there. He did not want any gunshots to be used in the soundtrack. First, I suggested that we use some music but he was totally adamant saying that he does not want any music because right after this the title track starts and for it to be very clean and strong we should not use any music. This is one thing I learnt in that film. The next option I gave them was with effects, using ambience and some drones like some musical kind of sounds from the beginning of that scene and I built it up to a crescendo and then abruptly cut it when the kids are shutting their ears meaning that they are stopping to hear. Again he did not like it. The thing that he wanted to underline was the fact that these kids die does not make a difference to anybody. So let's just keep simple ambience. These are two adivasi kids and it does not make a difference to the world if they are dead or alive. So you don't have to underline it with sound. It is a day to day… Q: So it is avoiding the subjectivities of the subaltern kids? J: Yes. You don't need to tell that these boys are dying and it would make any change in the rulers or the power game or the world. It is a very dayto-day thing. A lot of people are getting in police firings and lot of other things. It is a very directorial decision about storytelling. I had a lot of argument saying that the scene is dragging and that the scene is not working out sound-wise for me, but as a director he had a point. When I'm trying to do something with the sound, like when I cut abruptly, it is attracting attention. But what he was saying was that the scene is fading out, and it is because that does not make any difference to the world. So, as a director he has a point. Surely we are unhappy at times that we are not able to do this or that. It happens. But when he's talking very logically, from the person who hears it first when he's writing, we have to surely go with his vision. Q: When you're working with surround sound, does your choice of use of ambience change? J: Surely. If I would have done the same film in mono or stereo, my choice of sounds would have been totally different. Here I can have different layering and still make it heard in different layers and at levels that I want. I can have a lot of bandwidths and the differentiation between layers. I can achieve these very easily with these kinds of technology. And, with Atmos you have complete spatial control. Even with 5.1 people have done great works. 5.1 for fiction film is like a beautiful medium. Q: If you can use it properly. J: Yes. People also abuse it very properly.
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Q: For example, in the film The Lunchbox: in the rear speakers I don't hear much except when we encounter the urban landscape. Then some of the sounds are spreading into the space in my behind, not much. Such as, the train is going around on the screen, I can hear it more in stereo and a little of it is coming also from my behind. But when they are going closer to a person or when we are going inside the home there is nothing in the background. H: That is what I told you. It is very quiet. The only problem I have with The Lunchbox is that it is much quieter than it should have been. Even if any sound designer, not even me, would have designed it, I think it would have been much louder. For most of the so-called arty kind of Indian filmmakers, my theory is that there are two kinds of films happening. One, you get a DVD from Hollywood and either buy or not buy the rights and make a Bollywood film, like the mainstream Hindi entertainment films or you make a remake from South Indian films. And the other types of people are those who have seen films at the film festival circuit, and who are into the European films and they want the soundscape to be a European soundscape. There you will see for three minutes without any sound, just wind. There won't be a guy for three minutes. It would be a long shot and there would not be any person in the field. But in India wherever you keep the camera, there will be a guy… J: Thousands of films. LG. H: There will be a cow, there will be buffaloes, dogs; there will be something. You cannot take an empty frame for three minutes in India, for God’s sake! So, what framing are you doing? You're trying to replicate that European framing! That is what my problem is. You're trying to replicate those colors. You are trying to replicate that kind of music, that kind of loneliness that is not there in India. J: Technically also… H: I told you that in The Lunchbox the sense of loneliness would come out if you put in a lot of sound and make noisy. Then this guy will be lonely at his old house. But if you try to make it European and want to play with a nice little piano piece and light subtle ambience, then it is not an Indian soundscape. Q: But then, Highway is, in that sense, a lot noisier. Noisy in the sense how an Indian landscape should sound like. H: Yes. J: Still, I think it should have been a little louder.
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Q: Highway? H: Even the picture here was showing so much of beauty and landscape. My problem is with the picture more than the sound in Highway. J: Yes, surely. H: It is too picturesque. They are too beautiful images, too beautiful shots. Q: That sense of beauty inflates all these problems. H: Yes. It is shot too beautifully. This girl who's going through all this trauma and pain, and who has run away from the house, is not going to look at things so beautifully. It is just an open space for her. It does not matter. Even if she were there in a Mumbai local crowded train, at least then she would have felt the freedom that now she is on her own and that she can move around. It is not that you don't have to go to the Himalayas, or the mountains and stuff. Anyways that is a kind of escape. Q: That Danny Boyle film Slumdog 33 also has a very rich sound environment. It is shot in Mumbai and you can hear that it is Mumbai. J: Derek and I have the same issue. It is like they have used very clichéd Indian sounds. H: But that is to happen because the designer was not Indian. J: Yes. The designer is not Indian. H: Resul must have given much better recordings. J: I think it would have been much better if Resul did the design. Q: Of course. H: If Resul would have designed it, again, just like in Lunchbox, it would have been much noisier. J: It almost sounded like a Nat Geo, Discovery India kind of thing. H: The whole filmmaking was like that. Q: Remember that sequence where this guy is coming to meet his brother on a big high-rise. Can you remember that sequence? J: Yes and the construction was still going on. I was telling someone how our national vehicle is JCB and national sound is this construction ambience. Wherever you go, you hear this construction ambience, tak tak tak, and these cement mixing machines and all these things. In my last Malayalam film too, there is this shot of this construction crane going up to the 12th floor. I used this crane sound in a lot of places. There is this sequence where this guy comes out of his dream because of the sound. I used that sound.
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H: Sometimes in the soundtrack of films we just make the ambience for the sake of ambience. It is not adding anything to the visuals or your picture or your storytelling. You just put it for the sake of putting it. If you show an urban high-rise in any Yash Raj film, which is happening on the 12th floor of a building or a lobby of a hotel, you just put the ambience for the sake of ambience. It is actually not enhancing the whole experience. Q: But if it's not there… H: Then also, for that particular film, it is not going to need any enhancement. J: If it is not there, you might be noticing the absence of it. Q: You also feel like there should be something. I don't relate to the space being shown. In order to make you relate to the space, you need to have some information. Probably it is not adding to the narrative, as you said. But it is adding to the sense of presence. J: Yes, surely. Still that adding kind of things is very rare in many ways. Q: I don't think that ambience has that burden that it should add to the narrative. Ambience gives a subconscious sense of presence. J: That is what I said. Then it becomes a design element. As I said about Seven, it becomes a scripted thing. Some people call it a state of mind of that particular character. People are using ambience and silence and it becomes a very conscious decision to use these particular sounds. H: Like this Marathi film that I did. It was basically theatre actors rehearsing their lines in an auditorium where there wasn’t anybody. It was a blank auditorium with one actor rehearsing his lines. So, the whole world came from the sound because there was no sound inside the auditorium. They were just rehearsing the dialogues. Q: How did you work with ambience? H: Sometimes we showed what he was saying. Sometimes we showed what the director wanted to say through the lines. Things like that. The sound was recorded live but I did not do it. Two FTII students recorded on the location. It was pretty decent. For dialogues, we had this little room tones, which we kept. So, that is the space. Then there is another layer of what they were talking about and the third layer is what the director wants to convey through those dialogues. So we created those three layers. There, the ambience becomes the main thing. Otherwise, it is people talking for 90 minutes without anything. There are no effects as such. They are also parts of ambience. There is no vehicle or traffic or anything. So there are no effects because nothing is happening. So the effects like lightning and everything that are coming are a part of ambience and not a
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part of the effects. In that sense, there are no effects as such and we did not do any Foley as well. Whatever was there on location was there. We did not add any Foley. Q: When ambience comes from the location shooting, it comes to you if you're a mixing engineer. I think sometimes you do mixing for films, isn’t it? H: No, I don't mix. J: We sit with the mixing engineer. H: We just supervise. J: It is the same thing. We give an idea or concept - something like it should sound like this - because we know the story and we have worked in the film for much longer. He tries to get that particular thing. Q: As a mixer, how much do you keep and how much do you erase? What does a mixer do with ambience? Does he clean it to a certain level? J: Sometimes. It is like you're monitoring the whole thing in a different room and when you're going into a bigger room, things sound pretty different at times. Sometimes we have to add ambience to make the dialogue smooth. You can touch the dialogue at times because if you touch the dialogue it will become sharper, it'll sound different, totally be bland or flanging will start. So, you have to add noises to mask a lot of things in the dialogue and still make it clean. I did not do too many sound designs. I only did five films and most of the times it went through as I wanted. Sometimes when I wanted to keep it very noisy, I kept noisy. Again, it depends on the film. Most of the films I did rarely had any music - maybe six minutes of music in the whole film of about hundred minutes. Q: That means you have wider scopes. J: Yes. Almost the whole of the last film that I did was shot in the street. It was the story of a municipality sweeper. The whole film is happening on the streets and the place where he is staying is supposed to be near a railway station. It is on the curve of a nearby railway station and sometimes the track is seen and the vehicles go. In the night you're hearing the railway announcements and all this crap because you want to make it like you're still there. This railway station is there and people are there and this guy is there too. You want to make the spatial thing again. You want to give that sense of geography that there is a railway station nearby. There are some… You use it. Everybody uses it I think. There are some particular dogs I used, very restless dogs, all the time in the night. It is a part of the effects and at the same time it is a part of the ambience. When you reach this particular slum, you start hearing these dogs. Otherwise you
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don't hear it. I used a lot of religious announcements in this film. The film starts with a religious announcement because in Kerala people are playing bhajans continuously in the night at high levels till about 11 pm. Wherever you go, religious announcements, political announcements are so much present. It is a part of the soundscape now. I've recorded so many political speeches in Kerala. Different speeches. A lot of them are used. Q: I think at one point of time both of you will work with Atmos, which I think is already there in a number of theatres in India… J: Yes, in many theatres. Q: Vishwaroopam of Kamal Hassan.34 J: Even Sholay was mixed again in Atmos by Parikshit recently. But perhaps most of the current Indian films still do not need Atmos. H: The sickly Dolby is going to die because film is dying. So Dolby's patent is dying. Thus they have come up with Atmos which is a digital surround rather than… J: No, Atmos is a bit different in a way. Atmos is more into spatialisation. Q: 128 channels. J: More than 128 channels, in this room, for instance, if you are keeping this about two feet away, in every room wherever you listen to this, the bird will be two feet from the screen. Q: So, it is an absolutely realistic perspective. J: That is what I'm saying. Do we need that much? For the films that we are making in Bollywood or India, do we really need this much of information to be told through audio? H: It is again the same thing. Till very late, Arri did not accept the digital thing. Everyone else came with a digital camera and Arriflex realized that they will lose the business and so they also adopted. Dolby is now losing the business because of digital releases and the digital market. Dolby had compulsion only for the print. If you're not printing then there is no Dolby required. Q: But there are also Auro 3-D and BARCO… J: I heard Auro 3-D. I watched Gravity in Auro 3-D. H: From the very first five minutes I loved the sound. J: That particular sound quality of the taped voice from somebody else through the headphones, the world realization of that voice is very beautiful. H: Ultimate.
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J: The same thing happened with the film The Hurt Locker35, the way they used the breath. Q: What will you use in Atmos? You will have 128 tracks… J: That is the thing. Here actors are continuously talking and there is no scope for something else to be heard. Walter Murch says that you cannot hear more than four tracks at a time. Q: Two and a half. J: Now it is more than four tracks. You cannot concentrate. That is all the information your brain can handle. Then what are you going to give in 128 tracks? Q: Did you need that amount of channels? J: That is the thing. It is going to be abused again. H: I'm saying again. When you were asking in the initial portion whether it was the technology that is available or whether people were demanding…. Nobody was demanding Atmos, but Dolby is dying. So, they have to come up with something new. J: It is a market-driven thing. H: We were never demanding for smartphones J: It came and now it is a necessity. H: We never demanded for Facebook. Did you demand for Facebook? Q: No. H: I never demanded for Facebook. It came and then people liked it and then it became an addiction. J: It is the same with audience also. Once they heard surround sound, they are now used to it. Now if you mix in mono and ask them to watch, they will not be able to digest that thing. They will say that there is something wrong with this. Surely. Even if the mix is very good. It is completely market-driven. H: The Internet came out of a demand for communication. You had to move fast and do things. Internet was a demand, a much-needed technology. But you did not ask for Facebook. Or you did not want Instagram. Q: But of course there was a… J: It is a demand in a way. Any technology that comes out is, in a way, out of necessity. H: No. The market creates…
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Q: I think the surround sound or Dolby Atmos, from mono to stereo to 5.1 to 7.1 and Dolby Atmos - these trajectories are not just technologies that are there and you choose and you like it. Definitely there is some sort of a wish. J: Yes. Some sort of wish is surely there. To solve some problems you have to go for that. It might be that you don't find a solution for it at that time but it comes later. It is both ways again. For Indians, I don't think we demand something and then it comes out. For the rest of the world they demand something and then they make it. For us it is already made. Q: But this is clear. I think you all will agree that recent films are using a lot of ambience in India. J: But in Hollywood they're cutting the ambience. They are not using too much ambience. Q: So, why in Indian films? J: Because we just want this toy. We are not using it at all but this is something new. Shambhu did a feature film that was a big hit in Kerala. The film is happening during a particular one-day festival in Kerala. All the women gather from the villages and they cook rice on the streets of Trivandrum. There are a lot of announcements and things happening. In that film, when you're walking down the streets on that particular day, at random you're hearing one particular song at one point and when you move you start hearing from another speaker an announcement and you go forward and hear another bhajan. When you're moving within a particular shot, the soundscape changes drastically. A guy called Godly from FTII, one batch junior to us, gave the sound. Beautiful. He tried to create that ambience. You feel like you're in that particular festival. Q: How? J: He recorded that thing. During the festival, he put that thing in high levels. It is unprecedented in Kerala. People are saying that something is good but at the same time there is something lacking. But you can't say it is lacking. Rather it is working. It is like they are confused of what is the problem. A much-respected musician gave beat-to-beat music for this film but Godly and Shambhu used only six minutes of the music for the whole song. These announcements, these bhajans, these people’s sounds and all these things keep on coming to the soundscape. It also holds the viewers onto their seats, they're watching and it is a hit now. It is a big leap for sound in Kerala or Malayalam films. They do not use ambience. If you go to Tamil, maximum 10 films in India… Q: Like Bengali films. There is saccharine sweet music all along.
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J: What you hear as Foley is only tak tak tak. That is what he mentioned as plastic. It is footstep, there is no tak here. Where are you coming from? What are you walking on? What kind of shoes are you wearing? It can give a lot of information but we don't give that kind of particular sound. Q: It is strange, but Satyajit Ray was working with so many different layers even in magnetic recording. Indu tape, I think, he used. Even with that bad quality tape, he used so much spatial information. Bengali filmmakers did not learn much from him. H: Technology has never limited your creativity. You will always find the way out if you want to achieve something. Maybe you'll achieve in a symbolic way. When you see Ghatak’s film where this whole theatre group is working, there is a constant sound from the workers working on iron, which is in a way the restlessness of the whole group because they are all Communists, revolutionary theatre activists. Whenever they are rehearsing, this sound is there. It is not that mono or magnetic or anything was… And people make worst kind of sound with surround and Atmos. Most of the recent Bollywood films made in Atmos, you will not be able to hear anything in the world after you watch that film. With Atmos it became like a norm to put everything loud. So, it is the same thing coming from 10 channels. J: It is a competition between sounds. If you raise the music, you will have to raise the level of the dialogues, raise the ambience and raise the effects and everything else.
Notes 1
Duration: 01:39:55 Name Abbreviations: Hitesh Chaurasia – H; Jayadevan Chakkadath – J; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q 2 Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) 3 Star Wars (George Lucas 1977) 4 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979) 5 Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Episode I, George Lucas 1999) 6 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) 7 The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra 2013) 8 Devdas (Pramathesh Barua 1935) 9 Company (Ram Gopal Varma 2002) 10 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 11 Kaminey (The Scoundrels, Vishal Bhardwaj 2009) 12 Rockstar (Imtiaz Ali, 2011) 13 Omkara (Vishal Bhardwaj 2006) 14 Jab We Met (Imtiaz Ali 2007)
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Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Wants, Farhan Akhtar, 2001) Bhopal Express (Mahesh Mathai 1999) 17 Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) 18 Indian sound recordist, also part of this book. 19 Indian film director Sagar Ballary, an SRFTI graduate and maker of independent films like Bheja Fry (2007) 20 Sunrise (Partho Sen Gupta 2014) 21 Seven (David Fincher 1995) 22 The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola 1972) 23 Nayak (The Hero, Satyajit Ray 1966) 24 Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) 25 Pakeezah (Pure, Kamal Amrohi 1972) 26 Bandini (Bimal Roy 1963) 27 Guide (Vijay Anand 1965) 28 Dharmatma (Feroz Khan 1975) 29 Deewaar (Yash Chopra 1975) 30 Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (Mansoor Khan 1988) 31 Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee 2012) 32 Rangeela (Colourful, Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) 33 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle 2008) 34 Vishwaroopam (Kamal Haasan 2013) 35 The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow 2008) 16
CHAPTER 33 ANIL RADHAKRISHNAN1
Q: You have primarily worked with eight channels – out of which two or three channels were for dialogues. Isn’t it? A: Yeah, a maximum of four channels - three lapels for three characters and one boom. But, usually, the seventh and eighth channel will be free because most of the time in a scene, you have the characters but you don’t have that many dialogues and so you have the freedom of having the seventh or eighth channel for ambience. Q: What about balancing the boom and the lapel mic? How do you decide on the location? A: See, basically all are getting recorded into separate channels. I monitor a mixed track, but the balance between the boom and the lapel is not that important if you do a multi-track recording, since everything is getting recorded in different channels. You have the freedom of adjusting the level on dialogues. Suppose, you want the boom at this level and the lapel at a separate level. In dialogue recording, we can just keep the boom at a good level and keep the lapel just for the presence, depending on the scene. Sometimes, if it’s really noisy and you don’t want that much noise, you keep the lapel a bit up and reduce the boom. While recording, I’ll keep a medium level for the lapel. I don’t really do the balance between the boom and the lapel on location. Since it’s all recording on different channels, you can do that in the post. But in earlier times when you mixed into a two track or something, then you needed to have a balance between the boom mic being a single-track recording. Then you needed to mix. Q: On location you have to mix, right? A: Yeah, and you cannot have all the faders up. Now you can. Even though the other character is not speaking, then also the fader will be up because it’s getting recorded in different channels and it’s not disturbing any other tracks. But earlier, suppose three characters were talking - they used to operate the faders according to the conversation. If you kept all the faders up, it’d make more noise and get more floor noise. It’d add noise to the track. So they used to keep all the necessary faders up. Nowadays
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people - even I also operate - if a character is going out of the frame then you reduce the track or keep that out. Otherwise you keep all the tracks on. Q: So you don’t need the production mixer anymore, right? A: You need a production mixer because in a scene sometimes there are dialogues, which can be very loud. Sometimes certain dialogues are very soft. So you need to adjust those individual channels. What I’m saying is that balance between the boom and the lapel is not very important. But you need to balance all the tracks. That level you need to take care of. Q: How do you maintain continuity between ambiences? For instance, if you shoot in a day sequence, let’s say in the late afternoon, and then you record dry ambience on location, but that ambience primarily consists of production noises. A: Yeah. Q: For example, people speaking, camera handling, operator’s sound those noises. A: No, that we control. That is not allowed on a sync sound set, at least while we shoot. That is all we have to control. Those are the things we need to take care of while we shoot. There should be a discipline on set. All that unwanted sound we stop, control it at least. But like you said, when the day progresses the change in ambience is there. The morning ambience is not the same as the afternoon ambience. So what we do is supposedly I record two tracks of the ambience in the morning and along with that I sometimes record room tones of different time. I record a morning room tone and may be as the day progresses, I record a different time’s ambience. So towards the evening, it’s like having many different ambiences all together. We’ll have more. That time also you record a different ambience and during the dialogue edit, you have to put on the ambience for one or two tracks in dialogue edit. We used to do that in dialogue edit. Not for the effects edit or the ambience laying - we select one ambience and we put it throughout the scene. That will mask a lot of the ambience jumps between the... Q: Okay. One ambience track continues, isn’t it? A: Yeah, continues. Q: For a sequence? A: For a sequence - for a scene. That’s why we record like a one-minute continuous ambience track. You cannot just loop the small bit, you know. So you take a 30 seconds 40 seconds continuous ambience, then you loop it and make it a continuous loop and if you have a continuous ambience for the entire scene you’ll lay that.
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Q: Is that ambience placed in mono? A: No, that’s also stereo. Sometimes, when I record a room tone after a shot or something, I try to record a room tone for all the scenes. Even though it’s interior or exterior, I’ll record ambience and room tone for each and every scene, irrespective of whether we shot here yesterday or today. If shooting here, I try to record one ambience for that scene. Sometimes, you know, someday - some construction or something is happening. So maybe the sound is different than the other days. It’s always better if you just record the room tone of that day if you’re shooting a scene today. I record one with the boom and I use a stereo also. Basically we keep the boom in the centre for the centre track where your dialogue is, so that it is also in the boom. You’ve to layer continuous centre track ambience for the centre speaker, and then you have a stereo that you lay for the left and right speakers. Q: And for surround? A: In surround, you lay and make. On the dialogue editing stages you don’t really put a surround ambience. Most of the time different people are doing different jobs. One dialogue editor will do the dialogue edit and may be a guy who’s laying the effects and the ambience - he’ll be doing the ambience track. But he’ll also use some of the ambiences, which we recorded on the location because he has also access to that file, whatever ambiences I record. But that will be one layer because he has to create the ambience using different layers. So, maybe, he has to take from some other library effects and he has to add some elements in the ambience. Since you want to get a character to move from a space, he may add some elements in that and put some elements in surround. So, basically, surround ambience is designed by the guy who is doing the effects and the ambience. We do for the left, right and the centre to get a continuity of the ambience, so that when you watch a scene you shouldn’t feel that jerk in the ambience from one shot to another. Q: But you said you also record ambience outside of the shoot, right? A: Yeah. Usually I keep a day for ambience recording. Q: Where do those ambiences go? A: We all have the access. The dialogue editor will also have the access for the folder and the effects editor, who is doing the ambience, will also get the same thing. So, both of them will have the access. This guy basically puts whatever ambience is in that daily folder, which I recorded. He’ll use it for the dialogue edit. The other guy basically goes through the ambience we recorded extra.
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Q: When the effects and ambience tracks are done by this guy and all the tracks are done - do they go to the sound mixer? A: Sound mixer, yeah. Q: And he decides which track to keep and how to route it, right? A: Yeah. What happens sometimes is that we record a camera perspective and we record a stereo boom track. So, maybe, there are some situations where you feel that somebody is walking and she is wearing a lot of jewelry and we feel like that is four-directional. You can feel that it’s coming from her left. So then he’ll adjust the width of the ambience so that it won’t disturb you from the scene. Also, it won’t disturb you from the dialogues. All those things are taken care of by the mixing engineer because that is the space where exactly you hear all the final tracks - like the dialogue’s final edit and your ambience with your music, BGM. Even though you have a reference to all those sounds, maybe you have a stereo track, all the open tracks come to the mixing engineer. Q: How much spatial information do you think of keeping in an indoor sequence, say for example, in this apartment? A: Hm. Q: You are recording dialogue. Will you prefer to have not only this room tone as the ambience but also the reflections that are already there? Will you prefer to record that reflection? A: Yeah. That’s what I am saying - that’s basically the use of stereo mics. This room has a reflection but that reflection you may get in the boom only. Suppose, you have a big space, like, a big hall or something. So you need to have more reflection to give to the space, like it’s a big space, you know. Then you need to have more reverb and if you record only with one boom, you don’t have the freedom to increase and decrease the reverb only. So, you have another mic or a stereo mic or something, which you basically keep for the reverb. Maybe from the camera axis, not on dialogue, you keep a little away from the character. So you get all the reflection and everything. Then, you have the freedom in the post if you want to increase and decrease. For example, in Dedh Ishqiya2 I did one scene where one character, Naseeruddin Shah, was outside the door and Madhuri Dixit was inside the room and she is not seeing anything. She’s just standing and crying there. What I did is, I kept a boom inside the room, I kept a boom outside for Naseeruddin Shah’s dialogue and then I kept a boom inside the house. Even though the door was closed, I kept a boom inside the room. It’s like a big Haveli (palace) – it has high roofs and it’s a lot of reverb. During the post what we did was that we didn’t use much of artificial reverbs. We basically added balance between the
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outside-boom. You cannot keep only the inside-boom because you won’t be able to understand what he’s saying. So we did a balancing of the outside boom and inside boom and without adding any external reverb, we got a very nice reverb with these two booms only. Sometimes I try to capture these things from the camera perspective, even though the characters are outside. Usually what people do is that if the character is outside and the camera is inside, they keep only one boom outside because they say that the dialogue is outside. But what we try to do is that we keep one boom inside also. So, we had the freedom to get a natural reverb of that space. Q: Okay. Were these practices not used before? From what I hear, it sounds very nice; but in earlier films we don’t hear these room tones. A: Yeah. Q: We don’t hear the room perspectives; we don’t hear the room reverberations, never. Not even in 1990’s, late 90’s or early 90’s films. The first room tone we hear in commercial cinema is in Dil Chahta Hai.3 A: Okay, I know. Q: In Dil Chahta Hai, we hear room tone for the first time. We were never even aware that room tones could be recorded and used in cinema. This is now the usual practice. A: Yeah. Now, I think, people want more of the natural sounding dialogues. If you do a sync sound film, I don’t think it should sound like a dubbed film. For that, you need to have this room feel because every space, every room has a different sound. It’s not the same. That’s why you’re doing your sync sound. Otherwise, if every room or every space sounds the same, then there is no point in doing sync sound. Then it’s only for the performance. When you do a sync sound then you need to capture all reverberations of the room, that space. Q: Hm. But sometimes the reverberation can be disturbing. A: Yeah. Then we need to try and reduce that also. That call you have to take - whether it is disturbing your dialogue very much or it is not. Then you need to use carpets and stuff to reduce the reflections. Q: And a sound designer then has access to all the tracks you’ve recorded including edited dialogue, right? A: Yeah. Q: Do you keep the stereo ambience in the centre? A: Yeah. Q: Do you record other ambience tracks beyond shooting?
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A: Yeah. Q: The effects, which were recorded maybe during the shoot, are also organized I guess. Do you also then record some Foley? A: Yes. Suppose we’ve shot and edited the film and we are in the sound stage, then also you need some more effects for sound design. You feel like you need to record some more effects. Then we again need to go while the film’s sound post-production is happening. At times, even after we go and record some more sound effects, we feel like we need some more here. At that stage also you have to go and record some sound. But that time you know what exactly you want because you’ve seen the edit and only then you’re going. We see the edit and make a note of exactly what we want to fill that place with. So then we go and record those particular sounds. Q: Why do you need Foley? A: One thing is that you need to have a balance between the dialogue and the Foley. If it’s recording on location – first of all it’s not a very silent room. So if you boost the soft sounds more than a point, all the noises start coming. Secondly, they want an international track. Q: What does that mean? A: They want an international track in the sense they want a track without the dialogue and all other things. Q: Okay. A: If you want to dub the film in some other language so then – still what we do is - while we do the dialogue edit we have three or four tracks on the timeline, which are for the production Foley, production sound effects. So, for footstep, incidental sounds like keeping the glass or whatever sounds, what we do is we usually don’t put those with the dialogue tracks. From the dialogue tracks, you cut that and put it into different tracks because one needs to have it in a different fader for a mixing engineer. When you take these international tracks - music and effects tracks - then if you put in the dialogue track, all the Foleys get muted. Q: Yeah. A: Then you need to put it in different tracks, but there’ll be production Foley tracks. Then, during the mixing or the pre-mixing, usually premixing, we need to match the production Foley with the Foley, which you’ve done and get a good sound. Otherwise, the sound will double and all - a little difference in two sounds, and you’ll hear two sounds. Suppose, for a footstep, you do a Foley and you have a production track also. But if
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there is a time difference between these two sounds, there’ll be a double, like two footsteps. Q: A bit of delay. A: Yeah. So you need to match this production Foley with the Foley that you have recorded. Sometimes it helps you. You have the production Foley and you need to have one Foley. You have to balance between these two and get a good sound. Q: Are there instances of using only production Foley but no studio Foley? A: Yeah. I don’t remember the film. Some film that I did had light footsteps on wooden stairs. But we didn’t like what we did in the Foley because we were hearing the production Foley. Finally, we muted the Foley, which we did in the studio and kept the location Foley only. There are a lot of places we do like that. If we have a good location recording of effects, we keep that only. Whether it is footsteps or incidental sounds, we keep that. If we feel that we need a bit more, only then we add the studio recorded Foley. Q: Does the sound designer then decide how much to keep volume-wise and also which channels to send in? A: Yeah. Q: Which channels to send in terms of ambience because stereo ambience cannot be sent in the rear channels. Right? A: Yeah, you can pan that also. Like if you have a different layer of stereo ambience, you can assign only into the surrounds. Q: I was watching and listening to Highway4 and I felt that most of the ambience stays in front of me, just little bit like this - 120 degrees to 140 degrees in front of me, not 180 degrees. A: Yeah. Q: Sometimes in some very outdoor sequences, some elements are coming in 180 degree, not even 360 degree. A: Okay. Q: Do you think that this is the usual practice or people keep something in the 360 degrees space? A: They keep some ambiences in there. Suppose you have a rain sequence. You need to have different layers of sound. So, you need to keep different layers like, maybe, water dripping, rain sounds, thunder sound, etc. Then what we usually do is we keep different layers in different positions. But the prominence will always be from the front. You can’t hear that separately, but it’s there. It adds to the sound of that thing but you cannot
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differentiate like this is coming from there. But if you remove that, you will feel the absence. So it’s adding to that entire thing but you prominently are hearing from the front. But it’s always there. For each and every scene, there are ambiences, which are coming from rear and the side. But it’s not very prominent so that you can differentiate that this is coming from right speaker since you’re always hearing the prominent thing from the front. But if you mute this surround ambience, you feel that something is gone. Q: So it’s an expanded kind of ambience. Right? A: Yeah. It’s not only one layer. You add different layers and create one ambience. So people will put some layers in surround and then pan it a bit to surround. But prominent ambiences will always come from the front. Q: Voice and dialogues are always at the centre, no? A: Centre. But sometimes you pan a little bit. Q: Within the stereo? A: Yes, within the stereo. Sometimes they put a bit in the surround, but not in the rear and all. A bit to the left surround, or right surround, but not much. Q: In the second part of Gangs of Wasseypur 5 , the panning is very elaborate, like there is a lot of panning. A: Okay. I saw the stereo only. So I don’t know. I saw it on stereo speakers here only. Q: The film is intended for surround. I think it’s better to watch and listen to it in surround. A: Gangs of Wasseypur? Q: Yeah, both the films, also Highway, I wanted to watch it in surround. A: I saw Highway in the theater. Q: Did you like the film? A: Yeah. I like the sound also. The ambiences were nice. Q: He has used different kinds of elements for different places. A: Yeah. Q: Like a peacock is chirping in Rajasthan but when you cross Rajasthan, there is no sound of peacock - those kinds of elements. A: Yeah, because in different places you hear different ambiences.
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Notes 1
Duration: 00:22:53 Name Abbreviations: Anil Radhakrishnan– A; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Other Abbreviations: Laughter - LG 2 Dedh Ishqiya (Abhishek Chaubey 2014) 3 Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Wants, Farhan Akhtar, 2001) 4 Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) 5 Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap 2012)
CHAPTER 34 NITHIN LUKOSE1
Q: Let’s start from the story, the “lizard” story because you will be working with Hitendra Ghosh.2 N: I met him for the mixing discussion. He used to tell a lot of stories. So one of the stories was about his experience with Satyajit Ray. They were doing the sound design for one of the last films of Satyajit Ray. At that time, mixing engineers used to be the sound designer too. So Satyajit Ray wanted to use a lizard sound in a house. Hitendra Ghosh said, “if you use only the sound then it may not get registered”, because he had to use it many times in the film as a sound motif. So he suggested shooting one lizard in the house somewhere. If you establish it once visually, then you can use the sound anytime. People will get it. Then they arranged a camera and shot a closeup of a lizard that is sitting somewhere in the studio. By introducing this shot, they could use the lizard sound anywhere in the film as a motif. This is the story. He suggested something and Ray said, “ok, let’s do that”, as you could make the presence of sound felt with visuals. Q: What is your perspective about the synchronization of sound and visual, which is known as the ventriloquism effect? Something like you make a “married print” where sound and image come together? But cinema during its early years was primarily silent, moving image being the only medium. So when sound is joined with visuals there is something different happening. N: I think when a writer writes a film and then the director conceives the film, maybe the writer is conceiving it as visuals but the director is conceiving it as a film, which is plus audio. That’s a wrong conception by people. They consider image as visuals. Image is not visual, image is a combination of visual and sound. Then it becomes an image in a cinema. It is an audio-visual image, because without sound it is not complete. So when a director conceives a film, s/he conceives it with audio and visual. Then only it is complete. When a director knows his/her medium very well, s/he becomes masters of this. They know how to use it. So when two images are there, it is not that two visuals are blending, two images are
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blending. There is sound also, there is visual too, that’s how we make a montage. Film is all about the montage we make from the moving images. People from the industry, the technicians and the directors still believe that visual has a prominence in cinema. Maybe in the history of cinema, it was visuals mostly and sound came later and it became a talkie. During and after Chaplin’s time we started making talkies. When cinema became a talkie, it got another perspective. We can do more experiments with audio and we are still doing it. When I am working with Dibakar Banerjee, he is an experienced director.3 He is clear about what he is looking for and we used to experiment a lot. There is a song in the film where the hero is dancing on a stage. It is a marriage function and the song is playing in an auditorium or a marriage hall. So we needed to record the crowd around it. So we recorded the crowd, the cheering and everything, and this guy was also singing the song. We recorded all the Foley of the floor, stage and everything. We made it more like a space of the sound so it is no more a song. Using these sounds apart from the song made it more realistic and gave a different preception to the guy dancing on the stage. He became a hero among the people and that’s why they are cheering him. Otherwise, if it is just a song, this may not have happened. So there is a lot of experiments we can do with sound. And it is a matter of how much time and effort we want to put into it. We can always take it to another level. That’s what I am experiencing in my films. Q: But there was an initial resistance to sound by silent filmmakers like D W Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Rene Claire, although Claire later said that coming of sound will change films for better. So they thought that coming of sound would disturb the purity of moving image. But then sound came anyway. Many directors after hesitation started to use sound in their films. Also in India. So how do you think that sound changes the experience in cinema and what does sound bring to the table? N: Sound brings reality to cinema, that’s what I found as a technician. When sound comes it is more believable. Cinema gets believability, sound gets reality, and that gives reality to cinema. Indian films recently started doing sync sound. 80% Bollywood films are sync sound now. The regional films are doing sync sound too. Film is a technical art, so when you implement a news technology, at that moment cinema changes. There is a belief that on every Friday when a release happens, cinema changes. Every one-week cinema changes into something else. Someone comes with a cult and then cinema changes, people will look at like, “how to make something like that” or more than that. With technological changes, cinema changes. Whoever adopts to it will sustain him or her in the industry, who cannot do it will go out. I guess that’s the history we have.
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Like when cinema changed from analog to digital, people were not ready to accept it. Well, they were confused how to do it but it had to happen and it happened. That’s how sync sound is also working. I am very happy to say that sync sound is changing cinema but people do not know it is getting changed. They don’t know what is exactly happening to it. Also, actors are becoming better actors. Because s/he has to perform it. S/he cannot listen to the articulation by the assistant director and they can’t repeat it. They have to feel it, they have to prepare themselves, and they have to learn it. In Malayalam industry also there are a lot of films, which are doing sync sound. Commercial films, mainstream cinema. The actors are realising that it is changing something. They are finding that they are becoming good actors and they are demanding for it now. They want it now, it is doing something to them, something to cinema. Slowly it is changing. Sound is bringing more reality to cinema. I think we basically adapted cinema from drama in Indian cinema. From that to this point. After 90s the digital revolution came. Now the sync sound possibilities are there, so it is slowly changing cinema into a more realistic stuff, what Hollywood and European films are doing. We used to have a dance-drama culture for cinema. It is still there but it is becoming more of a believable art. That’s what I think, when I think of how sync sound is changing the industry. Q: Before sync sound, there was a long stretch of time when dubbing was primarily used for sound production and before dubbing era there was the direct sound era where sound was directly recorded sometimes on the optical film itself. Later, with the advent of magnetic tape, there was a possibility to mix. Dubbing started to be used in the early 50s and shortly it took over filmmaking. Do you have any experience of the recent changeover from dubbing to sync sound? What is the role of dubbing? Is it getting diminished as a primary mode of sound practice in Indian cinema? N: In dubbing, you lose the performance of an actor. That’s what I have experienced. I have dubbed actors but they can give about 70% of their performance if it is a good performance – but that’s a special moment, you cannot recreate that moment later in dubbing. If you are shooting but not recording the sound then and there, you are losing the moment. So you are basically compromising it. That compromise was always there when the film was dubbed, but we never felt it because we saw those films as given. If some of those films were not dubbed but were sync sound, they would have been different films. We never know. We have not seen that reality. Q: You mentioned reality. Do you have a definition of cinematic reality? Do you think there is a difference between cinematic reality and lived reality, the reality we continuously experience?
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N: I think a better word would be believability than reality. Because we think that it is real. When we watch a film we forget the fact that it is a film. We watch it as if it happens. So it is becoming more believable with the new technology that is coming in. It is a psychological thing, as you know sound is not a conscious experience. We are not equipped with our brain to experience sound as a conscious thing. So subconsciously things are getting changed. We believe what we are listening. Q: But in dubbing era, this sense of believability was not so strong, right? N: No, we can’t say that. It was there maybe but we didn’t see what were the actual performances on that space. It is a technical change. But I am sure that cinema is changing because of it. Because of technology it is changing. Like analog to digital, like dubbing to sync sound – it is changing. Maybe tomorrow something else will come up. So we have to adapt to it. We cannot say “no” to it. If you say no to it, you will be out of it in some time. That’s why someone like Clint Eastwood is still making films. And Geroge Millar. They were all working in the late 80s. He made Mad Max.4 It is difficult to imagine that this old man made this film. I think they are adapting to new technologies that’s why they are still alive. In India, you cannot find any filmmaker at such an age making films. Q: So you mean to say that dubbing based films were believable but not to the extent of believability that we can create with digital technologies, for example, sync sound recording? N: I think so. Q: Because most of the audiences used to imagine that this is happening, they needed to invent their imagination to believe something. But in sync sound, the believability is already presented to them. N: Because the space is presented to them. We captured the space; in dubbed films we didn’t capture the audio. So we lost it, then we recreated. But in sync sound we capture it, we use that most of the times because that’s the reality of the space. If you lose it then recreating it is challenging. You cannot clone it. You can but only to an extent - not only the performance of the actors, but also the space, and everything. Because when I am doing sync sound I will be recording with a stereo mic, which is capturing the ambience of the space. I will be using that as a stereo track in the whole thing. That is the reality. That is the ambience of the space and other things are addition - our interpretation of sound for the mood of the film, for the emotional track of the film. It’s always good to do that. If you are doing a film that is to be dubbed, the editor will always demand whatever pilot is recorded, so I can listen to the sounds of the space which
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are recorded. So I try to recreate something like that. Otherwise, a completely imaginary thing may not work. You need the space. Q: Yeah. To be specific: how will you articulate the role of ambience or ambient sounds in films? N: The ambience makes the space in cinema. That’s how we use the surround sound technology now. To make a 360 space. When you are watching and listening to it that is giving you the believability, suspension of disbelief. You are making them believe that they are in a space like this. So we use ambiences for that purpose. If you are just using music and dialogue, without ambience, there is a drama but you lose the space. So the amount of believability is getting added with the ambience we use. It has something to do with the suspension of disbelief. Q: And you also use ambience in different technological era differently. For example, in monaural films, most of the sounds were mixed into mono. Also in the early films, direct sound was used – sounds recorded directly on film. Then some films were made in stereophonic mixing during the late 80s, early 90s, like Disco Dancer.5 And then came digital technology. In different eras, ambience was recorded differently. What do you think about this transition from mono to stereo to surround – not only in terms of sound production but also in the recording and use of ambience? N: It’s a technical evolution that happened according to the demand of sound in cinema. Maybe we needed to have more resolution; we needed to design the space much better in cinema. Maybe it happened as an evolution from mono, then stereo, then surround sound. People are experimenting with it. What is a difference if you watch a mono film? When I am watching a film in mono, say Rashomon of Kurosawa6 at the FTII theatre with a film print, that experience is different. Because I am getting ambience, dialogue, everything from one speaker. When I see a latest film today, I am getting more resolution. It is the clarity maybe. As an audience, I am much more clearer about the space. I think it is clarity. Visually also. When you have more resolution to video you have clarity and I think in sound also it should be like that. They are always complimenting each other. Q: So this movement from mono to stereo to surround and so on - is it the movement towards more clarity? What is the future if you follow this evolutionary path? N: Now the latest form is Dolby Atmos. Atmos is giving maybe 10 or 11 times more resolution than 5.1. So it is maybe like the difference between 4 K and 1K resolution. And it can go up to any extent. Atmos can go to
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any matrix, like 64, 128, whatever speaker system you can go. This resolution will be always there because technically you can do that. But the problem is how much you want to use it. Because you don’t want to use it in every film. Now people use Atmos just as a fashion. But maybe in an independent film like Thithi7, I may not go for Atmos mix because I don’t feel the need for Atmos in this film. Maybe I will be fine with a 5.1 or a 7.1 mix. I think it depends on the need of the film. And the evolution will continue but I cannot predict what is going to be the next. When mono was there you never thought of a surround format. Maybe something else will come. Now VR is very much there; maybe that will evolve further. I think the growth or evolution is faster with technology. Q: Why do you think that Thithi did not need an Atmos mix? Thithi is shot on location and its environment, the atmosphere of the village, is so much important to give not only as believable, but also in detailed account. N: Maybe if I am doing it now, I would have gone with Atmos but that time it wasn’t there so we never tried it. It is more like, we detailed it but the number of channels was less. But I think this detailing could have been done in Stereo also but when we have 5.1 we have little more possibility to play around. Maybe at today’s time I would have gone for Atmos. Maybe I am wrong. Q: Thithi was recorded in sync sound, right? N: Yes. Because it is all set in the villages, and they are all nonprofessional actors, so there was no option to dub. But that’s not the main reason, we wanted to use sync sound there and we did it. It worked with the performance of the actors. Every shot we used to take 15 to 20 takes, for them to get into the mood and get the right expression and dialogue; they took time to do it, so we used to do that. Q: Are you also doing sync sound in the new films of Dibakar Banerjee you are working on? N: Yes. We shot in Delhi, we shot in Uttarakhand. It is yet to release. Q: Will you add Foley later on? N: We have done Foley and sound design and it is ready to go for a sound mix. We have almost locked the sound design now. Q: But you don’t dub. N: We will be dubbing a very few things. Maybe 3% – 5% of the film is dubbed. Maybe we will be adding some dialogues, off-screen dialogues, changing something, few things for clarity and stuff. And the crowd I was talking about - we are also dubbing those sounds; and a few portions to fill up.
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Q: And do you record the sync sound in multitrack format? N: Yes, multitracks. Q: You bring it to the studio and you clean it? N: Yes, we clean up the dialogues and then dialogue edit. Q: What do you usually clean? N: Cleaning it up means matching the shots. Maybe there will be hiss, hums and other things. We don’t clean it up much because I don’t prefer it, as it is the sound of the space; if there is something disturbing we try to take it out a little bit but basically it is a dialogue edit and after that the shot by shot jumps, to match that we need to clean up a bit – these are the things we do. That is the process. Q: Do you also use the original sound effects that you recorded apart from Foley? N: Definitely, we prefer that and Dibakar always wants that. He never allows me to use Foley. So Foley is like maybe 30% in a film but most are from the diegetic sound effect. We try to record footsteps separately so we make the actors do a wild take after the take is done. So, mostly we use the location recordings and Foley we use to fill up things, if it is necessary. Q: When it comes to ambience, nowadays you have Dolby Atmos or at least 5.1, 7.1 mixing. The adding of the tracks means that you are also using ambience in the rear channels but usually you don’t spread voice around. Voice is mainly on the centre or on the screen. Do you pan the voice within the screen where the actor is moving? N: Mostly. When we work in the south India’s film industry, they do it everywhere, maybe someone is shouting from behind and accordingly pan it in surround. Like there is no rule that you cannot do that but when you do it, it is quite a disturbing thing, you will turn back. But I think it depends on the film and the filmmaker. Generally, now we do everything with the screen and left, right and centre. Not to distract the audience. Q: And you also keep the effects on the same position of the actor? N: Yeah, we move around with the actors, the footsteps and whatever. Q: And music usually spread a little bit outside of the screen? N: Yes, the left and right channels. When the rhythms, pads and strings are there, they will pan it to the surround. They will mix it. The music engineer will come, and music director will come and listen to it. If they are fine with the mix then we proceed. Q: So it is mostly ambience that you spread on the rear channels, the extra channels that you have, right?
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N: The idea is that you are sitting within a space, say on a chair in the theatre which is a 360 space, that is the basic idea of panning the ambiences in surround. We have front ambience, surround ambience, then we pan it and balance and EQ it out according to the space and the mix. Q: Is the movement as you said it, inclined towards clarity and believability? Is there any other articulation that you would like to make regarding the use of ambience, right now, and looking towards the future? N: As a design decision sometime we use an ambient sound or an effect sound within a location. As a motif also you can use it, for a character we can use it too. In Thithi, there is an old man called Gadappa, the whitebearded man. When he is coming to the screen every time we used a particular bird sound. It is a cute bird sound and this guy is a very cute guy. That’s a motif, which we used to associate with the character. Before introducing the character we started the sound. Whoever is watching will get an idea that he is around. And we tried it with different characters. Q: So ambient sound used as a motif instead of music? N: Yeah, instead of music. Usually, music is a motif but we can use ambience also as a motif. We did that and we have seen it in a lot of films. That’s a design idea we developed and it usually works. People don’t know what it is but it works subconsciously. It is like an associative effect. Q: Usually the role of ambience is to create that sense of place - that you are there, to create that sense of space, which is depicted on the screen, making it more believable. Sometimes the films are recorded on the space itself, as in location sync sound, but sometimes you also record on sets. N: Then we need to design it according to that. In film school also we used to have short film exercises of 10-12 mins, the dialogue exercise, which we shoot in a studio but we need to recreate the ambiences outside. One of my juniors made a set of a ship in a studio and we made wind and everything. It is all happening in a ship, but there was a storm outside, it is about a stormy night in the sea. So we shot within the studio but we created everything with sound, that’s how it works. Q: What is the difference between settings created within a studio and onlocation shootings, where a natural setting already exists? In the first case, you design everything, the ambience, and the sonic space – within the studio; and in the second case you go to the location and collect everything from the location. What is the difference in approach? N: I think, on a location we have the sounds, which is the reality. But in the studio, we don’t have it. We need to imagine it and we need to recreate it, which is, of course, different, made out of our imagination and
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experiences. One is the reality and the other one is fictional space created in a studio. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why film school has an indoor exercise to make us think about the possibility of sound. But when we do our final project, the diploma film, we can go out and shoot, so that’s a reality that you capture and use. But in the other case you imagine and create a space. Q: Yes, like radio drama. N: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s why these exercises are there in a film school to make us understand what is the magic of sound in cinema. Q: Well, when you go to a location, say a beach or street corner or rooftop, every location has a particular sonic environment, which might be very specific about that location. To what degree do you record that particular environment? N: I think whenever we go to a location, the first thing I try to do is to distinguish the ambiences that the place has. The sound gives a character to a space. That happens through sound design also. If we are designing for a dubbed film, there will be different ambiences from the sound banks, like wind, general day ambience etc. But there might be one particular sound missing, which is the character of the space. Identifying that sound is the actual job of the designer. When my sound editors are layering the sounds for a dubbed film, we find that there is no character to it. But there has to be one sound, which will be the character of the space. It needs to be found. Standing in a location when we are recording, there will be many sounds but one ambient sound would be the character of that space. So identifying that is the most interesting thing. And then we record that separately, with perspectives, close up. Q: Can you elaborate on the idea of the character of a particular location in terms of sound? N: Say the crickets in the night. When I was at home in Kerela this time, there were a lot of sounds coming in. So the character of a scene of a film is the emotional element or the mood of the scene that should be complemented with the sound that we are using. The types of cricket sound that I am using in a scene that should complement the emotion of the scene. In a very sad or very emotional scene, I cannot use very fast crickets - I have to use a slower tempo. Q: Character in relation to the script. But usually, a location has many more different characters. N: Yeah, that’s true. But when we create a space for cinema, the design term comes in. We need to find that character and if that works, then the
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scene works. That’s what I have experienced. But if you are generally recording in a location, there will be a lot of things and you can record whatever you want to record. Maybe a close miking, in the degrees you are recording, you can experiment with all that. I do both. I record for cinema; otherwise also I carry my recorder and record stuff but I remember what I record, somewhere in my memory they remain. When I see some scene in a cinema, I may not remember the date I recorded but I remember that I recorded this sound somewhere, so I find that out and think this will fit here. This way, memory works. Memory is a world for motif. When we use ambience, motif is memory, people remember the motif. When someone is listening to sound in cinema, it is a recollection of memory, that’s why we call it motif. Q: Another word could be association. N: Exactly, with the memory, we associate. Sound does that very well. Like smell, sound is a sense but it is not easy to identify. It is a subconscious thing. Q: When you go to a location you carry your sound recorder? N: Most of the times, whenever I am traveling I am carrying it with me. Whenever I go home I do that because in every season a place changes. I would like to record and keep it. It is interesting. And whatever recordings I have done, in most of my films I use some or the other. I remember what I have recorded and I can feel that “okay, this thing might fit in”. It is a connection, an association and most of the times it works. Q: When you shoot for a film, you also have other recording equipment, production recorders. Do you combine your own recording with the production recordings? N: When we go to making films, it becomes more about the dialogues, the actors. We will, however, always have a stereo mic recording the ambience. We will be capturing the whole space. Q: Okay. That stereo mic is capturing between shots, right? N: It will be but it won’t focus here. It will be mostly at the back, 25 meters back to me. The idea is that this is my surround ambience of the space. So I will be capturing that and if there is a dialogue in that track we may not be able to use it but usually, we can use it sometimes. The surround ambience you are always getting from that mic. Q: That is very interesting. N: That’s interesting. You are shooting here and if it is an exterior scene, I will take this mic a little away and record from exterior. So you get your
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exterior space. The reality is there. Most of the times I can use that reality. That’s a good exercise. Q: And you like to add something to it. N: Sound is helping me as a person to realise my environmnt. It is a spiritual sense. That’s what I read in the books, learn from FTII, and get from the films I have seen. Because basically, you can see your life like that. When you deal with sound it does something to your subconscious and to your soul. I am very happy that I am doing something with sound. I will never leave the field of sound. If I have to do something in the future, I will be doing this throughout my life. Because this is helping me to find a balance in my life. Maybe when I am recording an ambience of a night, where there is no sound of civilisation, I am just getting the nature, that’s a great experience. When you listen to the uncorrupted nature, it is a beautiful experience. I think everyone should do it. I think even if you record it for 5 minutes and you are quiet, that’s a wonderful experience. Q: The nature as you see and hear - the pastoral, but also the nature humans have made for themselves. Like a city can also be nature, manmade nature. Do you also include the nature of the city as well? N: Yeah, it is. But it’s a different experience to listen to a space without the existence of human civilisation. A city is something that we have made, without that sense of purity, that’s the reality. As a species we are born into a space like that. Then we created everything, which we need. But that identity of us, the connection with the nature, that also helps. Maybe it is a spiritual thing. Q: Well, when we think in terms of sound, in the city there are a lot of low-frequency rumbles. Electrical machines, equipment, ACs and all that. At night you can hear those rumbles when human beings are not talking. Do you recognise the rumbles when you record them? N: Yeah, the low frequencies. You can hear them better especially at the night. Because then it is quiet. Q: You can arrive at a more spiritual sense of sound when the dialogues are not there. N: You are right. Q: So in cinema there is a conflict between the use of dialogue and use of ambience, isn’t it? N: Yeah, when it is a mostly dialogue-oriented film, then the chances of playing around with sound is less. Otherwise when we watch for example, Amit Dutta’s films 8 , and all other art-house films, it is a completely different experience. It is a creative madness. This is a realisation that one
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needs to have. That’s how film is an art and there are masters who make that kind of works. They know how to use silence very well. It is very tough to use it. Because it is a very loud world and we are used to it. We are happy with it. We can distinguish between silence and the loudness. Maybe as you said, if you are quiet, then the world will be a better place. LG. I just got this idea right now. Q: But there is a burden of entertainment. It is an entertainment industry. So you are supposed to entertain. Do you think it is a burden for you to entertain people through sound? N: I don’t think it is a burden. Maybe I enjoy some films. I am used to it from the films we have seen. But after a point when we went to a film school and started studying cinema and sound, then the perception changes. Maybe I won't be doing it from my heart but I will do it sometimes. Q: How do you think about entertainment? Do you undermine it or are you part of the entertainment industry? Like songs and dances in typical Bollywood? N: Personally, yes, if I am a filmmaker and the producer wants the film to run in a theatre and wants to make money, because I don’t want anyone to lose his money while he is making a film. It might be a five-minute thing and then I can forget those five minutes if I don’t like it. If I like it I will enjoy it. That’s how the industry works. It is a business, film business. Cinema needs money. If someone is putting in money then let him make money back. I think that’s how it works. Q: There are degrees of entertainment, like hardcore masala films. Would you like to balance your artistic sensibility and the entertainment that you need to make in a public exhibition of the film? N: Yeah, I have done very commercial Kannada films, regional cinemas, and I also did a film like Thithi, which is different and polar extreme. But I enjoyed both. I don’t know how many films like that I am going to do. I have never done a film like that before, but I would like to experiment with. It was something else and fun. I think the experiences are different. I cannot say that I will only do one kind of cinema. I am open and would like to do all kinds of cinema. It is good to experience all. I need to know what is it. If I don’t know then I cannot blame it just blindly. That’s my approach. Q: In terms of satisfaction, what kind of films will give you deeper satisfaction?
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N: Some film like Thithi … I think it depends also on the relationship with the script, with the filmmaker. Because Raam Reddy is one of my close friends, so when I work with him, the chemistry works in a different way. With someone else it is different. So it is an association with the filmmaker and with the film too, it’s both ways. And how deep that is it varies. Maybe there is satisfaction in some unexpected films. After the final mixing when you listen to the film for the final time, maybe you get excited, that this is working. That’s a kind of satisfaction. Whatever kind of film it may be. When I am taking up a film, it is a job, and I enjoy doing all kinds of cinema. This is the baggage of the film school students that they are supposed to do one kind of films only. It is not good. That’s why directors can’t make different films. I think an FTII passout or SRFTI passout - a film school passout direction student should jump into the commercial industry and do something. Maybe then something different will come up. Something interesting can come up. You never know. That’s what Sriram Raghavan is doing. He did Andhadhun.9 He has that class. He knows how to do it. But getting to deal with the people is difficult. That’s why film school people are not getting into it. Q: You started out with a cassette player. What were you doing with a cassette player? Was that before film school? N: This was when I was studying in 5th or 6th standard. My father bought a BPL Sanyo - the old cassette player. At that time we used to have audio recordings of cinema, regional cinema. I was living in Kerala. There were a lot of Malayalam films and I might not be able to go and watch them in a theatre. If I told my father, he wouldn’t be interested to take me for the cinema. So we used to get the tape recordings for it. I used to buy or hire it from a friend and we used to hear it and record it on a cassette. I used to learn all the dialogues of those films. In 90s when I was in the school we used to do that, it was fun. And we used to record with the mic. These experiments we used to do. But I never thought that I would end up in film sound. Maybe there is a connection like that. Q: And you also got a microphone? N: Yeah, I used to have a microphone that time. Q: Were you also recording nature or cities? N: No, at that time we used to record voices, play them back and hear. It’s completely different experience when we hear it through a microphone. Me and my brother used to do that. Q: What was the change happening in the recording? Can you articulate a little bit? Like the voice sounding so different, what was the difference?
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N: In a microphone it is different than what we imagine in our head or what we hear. When we record ambiences of a space it is not like what we hear. Mics record them differently. Because they have different patterns. So in a space, I used to do like this (gestures) to listen to it. This is how I hear my voice. When you talk you get most of the frequencies. This is richer. When you are in a space, if you do this (gesture) you are closer to a microphone. It gives a good judgment. Q: Recording takes away many more realities that are possible in a space and it reduces it to a certain degree. It always does. N: Not always. It depends on the mics you use. If you use a MS recording mic, which is a 180-degree mic, you have the figure of 8 polar pattern; that’s why I also prefer MS. Like these kinds of things you can record 120 or 90 degrees space and then change. Q: You work with art projects. What is the difference that you feel when you work in cinema and in artistic projects? N: It is completely different because cinema has a… I think the objectives are different for both. So is the discourse. In art films, you can experiment. Otherwise, you can also, but there is a limitation. When you are doing the poetry installation that’s a completely different experience for me. When a poet is narrating poetry, it has a direct meaning and an indirect meaning also. You can design sound for both or one. It is a choice how to define the space with sound - the sound design is your choice. It has more freedom. Q: So your freedom is taken away in film context because of the story? N: Because of the story and because of the visuals. I think the barrier is the visual mostly. When you do an art exhibition, you don’t have the baggage of visuals, you don’t have to follow anything, even the sound, but we have limitations of the visuals. Otherwise, we can experiment a lot. Q: Sound needs to either complement or follow the visuals in cinema, right? N: Not really. Q: Then what is the limitation? Why is the freedom less in cinematic context? N: Because there is a reference of the visuals. That’s a reference point. Sound needs not to be complementing visuals. That’s what Robert Bresson says in a book, something like this: Visual and sound are different. 10 Nothing has to complement each other. When directors say that you design for the visual, I never do that, I do the opposite. Why should I complement the visual? Sound doesn’t have to go with it. Q: But there is always a limiting reference of the visual.
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N: Yeah, but you can be a rebel sometimes. LG. Sound designers can be a rebel to the visuals. Like say, you use a very pleasant happy music in every emotional scene. Something like that. You don’t have to complement it. You can disagree with the visual also. We can do that. Q: Will the script or director’s vision allow that? N: Most of the times they won't understand what we have done. See, you can’t explain everything to everyone. If someone like the director of Thithi is the one I am working with, then I will explain to him and he will understand that because we agree in most cases. It depends on the director. If someone is not agreeing with the suggestions then we may not discuss it. But I know it will work in the film, because I know the film, I know the location. That’s my conviction. That’s why I am defined as an artist, that’s my contribution to cinema. Otherwise, I need not be there as an artist. Q: Does that mean your artistic position is primarily to contribute in terms of sound but often in rebellion? You need to rebel in order to encourage your artistic sensibility to emerge? N: Sometimes you may have to do that. It’s fun. Let’s try that. Why not? Because I went to film school as a rebel. My family did not agree with me going to a film school. They did not want that. Nobody believed that art will feed you. I believed it. I was a rebel and I am still living as a rebel. Q: But you may have to make some compromises as well to come to term with the entertainment industry, and its rules, regulations, normative structures, and demands. N: Yeah, it is about how we balance it out. We can deal with it. If an actor is dubbing and if he has too much of an attitude, then I have to take a decision, should I go with this attitude or should I push him. I will try to push him and if he is still going on I will say “fuck off, you go with your attitude”. LG. I mean this is the reality. The industry is about managing people, and the decisions that we make and stand by them. Q: You are not meaning to say that entertainment values are putting barrier on your artistic sensibility, are you? N: No, I know how to skip. One needs to know how to balance it out. You just need to find a balance. Maybe in a very commercial cinema, I may not have a lot to do according to my sensibility. Maybe I can have 60 or 40% satisfaction. If that’s what the film demands then I am fine. I am not working for myself. I am working for cinema. Q: Last question. Who is your best audience? Is it you or do you imagine the audience as someone? Who would you like to satisfy?
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N: I am the audience. I am of course the first audience. I actually hate to have a reference of an audience. How they are going to feel it. Although I myself sometimes say that the audience is going to feel it. When I am telling a story to someone, I will say that the audience will think in that way. Which audience is going to think in that way? You don’t know each and every person. It is a general perception. It can be wrong too. It is his or her sensibility, right? I am the first audience - there is no other audience. If nobody is watching the film then where is the audience? Q: Are you only satisfying yourself? N: I think so. Q: But there is also a strong popular demand for certain kinds of songs to be included, e.g. the item numbers. N: I am a popular film guy. I have watched a lot of mainstream popular Indian films before going to FTII. I haven’t watched a lot of world cinema before going to FTII. Maybe I started watching world cinema one year before going to FTII. Otherwise, I was watching Indian loud cinemas. I have that sensibility. Which is good. If cinema needs it I know how to do it. If the film needs some different approach, I have learned that too from the film school. That helps. Q: You also listen through headphones. Do you think future films will be listened more through headphones, in closer personalised environments? N: This is a discussion we used to have from FTII, we used to have a lot of fight on this. In a film school, we have a film screening, which is about a group of people sitting in a dark space and watching cinema, that’s the idea. Now people are watching films in their rooms, on their laptops, with their earphones. The perception of cinema changes with that. In a theatre when you watch it with people that affects you. If somebody is smiling in a scene maybe you will smile after one or two seconds, because you know it is a joke. When you are watching it alone, it is a different thing. I think film is something to be watched in a group. I think both are different experiences. We used to have a lot of fights on this question. Now we have a possibility to watch it like this, so we do, but the older generations did not have that personalised film viewing. Resul Pookutty also used to have arguments about this. He said, “Now you don’t watch it in theatres, you watch it in your laptop, what’s the point in that?” Q: It’s a social experience. But in a VR kind of setting, it is extremely concentrated, intensely focussed personalised experience. And also listening through headphones. How do you think that affects cinema in the near future?
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N: It is an evolution from theatre to laptop to VR I think. Technically it is better. The space and resolutions are better. It all depends on technology. I think cinema changes with technology. Cinema doesn’t change with filmmakers or the films being made, it changes with the technology. It is a technical art. That’s for sure. That’s what the history says.
Notes 1
Name Abbreviations: Nithin Lukose– N; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Q; Other Abbreviations: Laughter - LG 2 Hitendra Ghose is an Indian sound recordist and re-recording mixer, who is part of this book. 3 Dibakar Banerjee is an Indian film director and screenwriter known for his work in independent India cinema. He is considered one of the most promising among younger generations of Indian filmmakers. 4 Mad Max (George Miller 1979) 5 Disco Dancer (Babbar Subhash, 1982) 6 Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa 1950) 7 Thithi (Funeral, Raam Reddy 2015) 8 Amit Dutta is an Indian filmmaker, who is considered to be one of the most significant contemporary practitioners of experimental cinema known for his unique style of filmmaking rooted in Indian art and aesthetics. A recent article about his filmworks is published on Scroll magazine: https://scroll.in/reel/969879/in-amit-duttas-bold-and-beautiful-cinema-anunforgettable-exploration-of-indian-art-traditions 9 Andhadhun (Blind Tune, Sriram Raghavan 2018) 10 “If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear. And vice versa, if the ear is entirely won, give nothing to the eye.” – Robert Bresson (p 149) in Weis, Elisabeth and Belton, John (Eds.) (1985). Film Sound: Theory and Practice. Columbia: Columbia University Press
PART III: LISTENING OBSERVATIONS
CHAPTER 35 SUMMARIZATION
This collection of free-flowing and in-depth conversations with prominent sound practitioners illuminates the field of sound research in Indian cinema. A particular focus on the creative use of sounds informs this inquiry. It was the intention of this project to locate the dominant tendencies and predilections of sonic diversity in India with a practice-aware approach. Critical, auto-ethnographic, and self-reflective observation methodologies were used to engage with the practitioners’ elaborate processes of sound production. The inquiry was guided by a number of semi-structured questions around the history of sound technology, the emergence of digital sound in cinema, and creative uses of sound. It was pursued by studying complex and intercepting threads of production trajectories in a vastly heterogeneous national cinema, loosely unified by technological and aesthetic developments. A critically observational and reflective attitude helped to locate the major historical developments in hands-on sound practice, which is in itself an underexplored subject in film, media, and screen music research, as well as within the emerging field of sound studies. The aim was also to facilitate a study of film sound that questions the classical assumptions of the sound-image relationship and shifts the focus towards the making of sonic spatiality as a vital narrative component. Through these expanded conversations, the interviewed practitioners help underscore a number of realities that were not previously unearthed or explored, namely: the different phases of Indian film sound practices leading up to the use of digital technology; the impacts of digital technology on sound production; the underrated role of certain sound components such as ambience; the problematic creative intervention of the sound practitioner in the commercial filmmaking process and the hierarchy of labor in the film industry; and the intricacies of rendering sound with the various methods available. All of these elements are new knowledge. The conversations help to realize that a generalized perception of sound in Indian cinema could be erroneous if we consider the historical trajectories of sound production as opposed to exporting an essentialist typecast around its popular tropes of routine song and dance sequences. Since their advent in Indian cinema, digital technologies have had a
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significant impact on the industry, particularly on production formats and on the subsequent aesthetics of cinematic sound. Technologies such as location sync sound recording and surround sound design have altered the ways in which film soundtracks are produced. For the audience, these transformations have consequently initiated a reconfiguration of spatial, temporal, and cognitive associations, which contrast with the experience of earlier films made with monaural and stereo production formats. Audience tastes, expectations and anticipations have changed as a result. Post-1990s spatialization created by digital film technology imparts authenticity related to location-specific sonic details. An emergent fascination with real locations instead of film sets and documentary evidence suggests a rediscovery of cinema’s realistic origin from before the dubbing era. For example, in the recent works of an incipient generation of independent filmmakers, the previous practice of dubbing, stock-sound effects, and studio-based Foley is gradually being replaced by location-based sync sound and a creatively designed surround environment. These sound innovations incorporate the elaborate spatial diffusion of sound into the film space, adding depth, texture, and realistic perspectives. The spatially cognitive and associative sound experiences triggered by these practices emphasize the need for developing new approaches to listening and meaning-making in cinema. These shifts are articulated within the interviews in terms of emergent aesthetics in film sound and the choices available. The interviewed practitioners suggest that Indian cinema in the digital era facilitates specific sound practices that mediate spatially present and associative cinematic experiences rather than conveying mere realistic representations of the site to the audience and/or evoking emotive responses (Chattopadhyay 2015, 2016), as found in previous eras of optical and magnetic recording. Digital sound practice incorporates the surround design of digital multi-track sync sounds into the cinematic experience that engages the audience in spatially cognitive ways rather than catering to a merely vococentric audio-visual contract (Chion 1994) or, more particularly, relying on spectacular song and dance sequences upheld in many earlier Indian films.
CHAPTER 36 THE UNRAVELING HISTORIES OF SOUND PRACTICE IN INDIA
The book hints at a historical trajectory of sound practice in Indian cinema due to the input of its practitioners. Such a trajectory reflects the critical observations of technological shifts and emergent aesthetic strategies. Its point of departure is to be found in specific phases of technological innovation and transitions in sound production but is not limited to a discussion of sound technology’s history. On the contrary, the mapping highlights characteristics that delineate sonic aesthetics emerging from these prominent technological phases. Delving into the essential elements of sound production through in-depth conversations has provided firsthand information of what has historically transpired in Indian cinema. And this research has become a valuable prerequisite to understanding how mise-en-sonore or the auditory setting (Chattopadhyay 2021) has been produced and shifted in different phases of Indian cinema. A discussion of current practice and the claim that digital sound production has impacted the cinematic experience, making it more spatially elaborate, was met with complementary empirical evidence and anecdotal accounts from the “horses’ mouth” in the interviews with the practitioners.
Early developments Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani 1931), which used optical sound recording, was India’s first talkie. The following period from the 1940s to the late 1950s was an era in which cinema adapted to the technicalities of direct synchronized-sound in films that were largely music-oriented and/or devotional in nature. The directly recorded sound in these films is evidence of the fictional space that was sometimes created in monophonic narration. Throughout the trajectory of monaural sound use in Indian cinema from 1931 roughly until the 1950s, characterized by recording techniques and equipment with a somewhat limited dynamic sound recording and production range, the potential freedom of microphone use
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on location was reduced to focusing directionality and recording “almost always the voice” (Chion 1994: 5), establishing sound films of an essentially vococentric order. Despite this, louder ambient sounds occasionally intruded onto the film’s directly recorded soundtrack, providing information about the pro-filmic space. The significance of such site-specific sound elements lies in the direct recording of sound from the real location where the film was shot. These direct sounds provide the distinctive and realistic evidence of a live pro-filmic space captured in early direct sound practices in Indian cinema as learnt from veteran practitioners such as Jyoti Chatterjee. The realistic representation of locations, settings, spaces, and situations is especially emphasized in Satyajit Ray’s use of sound in films that distinctly recognize locational observation and documentation, establishing his legacy for realism in Indian cinema. Here the definition of “realism” refers back to the tradition of observational cinema that represents reality by recording vision and sound that “comes from within the world of the film” (Kania 2009: 244). Chatterjee informs us that Ray’s early films mostly used direct recordings made on location or direct dubbing when the location was too noisy. And his later films used many sound effects and ambience sounds recorded on location, using them as the primary source material of aural stimuli, information, and evidence. Ray’s debut film Pather Panchali (1955) allows its audience to relate to different locations of the village Boral, where the film was shot. This is achieved through the use of actual environmental sounds such as wind through grasslands, the drone of electrical poles beside the railroad, the friction of tree branches blowing in a gentle breeze at the forest’s end, etc. In Aparajito (1956) from Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955-59), one can distinctly hear different urban areas of Benares through the ears of protagonist Apu following his exploration of the location. The respective cinematic passages are built with ambient sounds that make use of their location-specific textures, realistic depth of field and detailed perspectives. In Charulata (1964) the elaborate use of sounds from street sellers and their antics engage the film’s audience with its representation of a secluded and idyllic 1870s Calcutta neighborhood. Such a spatio-temporal manifestation of sounds was one of Ray’s challenges to the Indian cinema of his time, which was otherwise typically a verbose and vococentric exercise with continuous character dialogue as the primary source of narrative, arranged with loud background music, sporadically punctuated by loosely arranged song sequences.
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The dubbing era Direct recording continued throughout the 1950s. The period is known as the Golden Age of Indian cinema when film auteurs such as Satyajit Ray, Chetan Anand, and Guru Dutt emerged placing their national cinema on the world stage. Through a gradual conversion to more convenient, portable, and robust magnetic recording and re-recording, the Golden Age gradually dissolved into studio-centric production practices from the 1960s onwards, following the commercialization of popular mainstream Indian films. This era, in contrast, is famous for its colourful antics, halfrecognizable foreign locations and spectacular song and dance sequences largely from the 1980s and 1990s, yet still somewhat ongoing today. When the magnetic medium emerged, it became possible to clean, erase, overdub, and employ multi-track mixing. The use of loop dubbing and ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement) in Indian cinema became a regular practice when Arriflex IIC and Arriflex III cameras became available from the late 1960s, which required a blimp (a soundproof cover) to shield their notorious motor noise during location shooting. Such distracting camera noise meant that all sound had to be re-created in the studio. Eventually, this practice became the standard in Indian films. Therefore, dubbing emerged alongside the standardization of studio-based magnetic recording and mixing facilitated by tape-based studio rerecording. Dubbing was dominant in Indian cinema roughly between the 1960s and late 1990s. It was a long stretch of time that illustrated a growing interest in the controlled deployment of a few sound elements as design material in films, keeping the primacy of the voice along with a prominent usage of background music, song and dance sequences, and processed sound effects. In this particular hierarchy of sound organization, ambient sound was notably lacking. As interviews with senior sound practitioners, who were exposed to the production practices of this period, illustrate, dubbing was wholeheartedly embraced as a narrative strategy by practitioners focused on getting a clean and legible vocal sound over other components. This phase of magnetic recording, dubbing, and re-recording instigated a technologically mediated approach to representing reality in overly expressionistic, spectacular, and melodramatic overtones (Kerins 2011; Sergi 2004). The heightened emotional responses of audiences to sound generated at distance from real locations became the norm, giving rise to the studio’s control over cinematic sound practice (Chattopadhyay 2015, 2016, 2021). Magnetic recording and mixing rendered an expanded fantasy-like experience with lavish, action-packed song and dance routines in foreign lands using synthetic and processed sound effects far removed
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from the reality and authenticity of the film’s sites. Largely studio-centric and industry-dependent technicians tended to construct a film’s sound environment by artificial means using songs and louder background music as aural masking and paying little attention to authenticity. In other words, such practices tended to approach over-modulation, manipulation, and abstraction to enhance sound’s emotional and affective qualities, playing on the fringes of the audience’s imaginings and fancies. The specific sonic representations of characters were constructed using vocal manipulation as well as extended reverb of their footsteps, other movement and even violent action affecting visceral responses in audiences by “affective mimicry” (Plantinga 2009: 94) and mirror responses aimed at producing popular mass appeal, exemplified by mainstream films Dharmatma (Khan 1975), Deewaar (Chopra 1975), and Coolie (Desai 1983).
The digital realm Practitioners note that a major upgrade occurred in Indian cinema during the early 2000s: digital technology, which introduced sync sound recording techniques and surround sound formats, accelerated the industry’s corporatization and globalization. At this time sound production aesthetics were significantly redefined and terms like “sound design” emerged. The digital era in Indian cinema commenced in the late 1990s with the gradual, large-scale conversion away from analogue recording, analogue production practices and optical film exhibition. Digital technology was integrated into the production and post-production stages of filmmaking as well as into projection/reproduction formats. The ramifications of Indian cinema’s adaptation to a new technology have been far-reaching; new perceptions of how sound can be used have been especially evident. Digitalization’s substantial impact on cinema’s production/reproduction chains has had a consequent effect on the aesthetic choices, strategies, and resultant appreciation of cinematic sound. Digital sound technologies such as sync recording and surround sound design have altered the ways in which film soundtrack standards are perceived; even song and dance sequences from mainstream Indian cinema have been influenced by the digital era. The digital domain is completely different from its predecessors. Its advent in cinematic sound has helped overcome the limitations previously imposed by optical or magnetic recordings. For a sound practitioner, this means a wider, easier, and more flexible milieu of sound recording and design practice that invite freedom and flexibility in their working
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processes. Mark Kerins (2011: 53) writes of American cinema (which is also valid for Indian cinema to a certain degree in this instance): “When 5.1-channel digital surround sound (DSS) first appeared (…), it offered filmmakers better dynamic range, more channels, and greater flexibility for placement of sounds within the multichannel environment.”
Likewise, digital technologies, such as multi-track digital recording and surround sound design have reordered the organization of sound and the sonic environment in Indian films. The advent of digital technology, not only surround sound formats but also widely available and easy-to-handle digital sound recording devices, applications, and facilities has made various options and strategies available to sound practitioners. Sync sound as a direct descendent of this trend allows for sound to be recorded on location in synchronization with the camera. Authentic sound recordings— mostly of actors’ voices recorded live in situ, and also ambience and sound effects—that are directly linked to the sonic environment of real pro-filmic spaces, are used in post-production stages without the specific need to incorporate extensive stock sound effects and pre-recorded ambiences from sound banks. This practice has initiated in-depth methods and options for translating the pro-filmic space (Chattopadhyay 2021) through the use of authentic sound recordings in the design process. Sync recording on location is supported by recent developments in devices with multi-track options that have greater flexibility, access to the farthest corners of locations and applications with precise control over each recorded clip. Multiple options for storing numerous ambience layers, sync sound effects and dialogue tracks open up possibilities for recording a larger number of sound elements and working with multiple layers of sound captured from a location. In the studio scenario, ample choices exist for digitally enhancing location-specific “actual” sounds, edited and cleaned with noise filters, to be treated as fundamental layers of surround design. Various applications are now available that can manipulate recorded sounds to restructure and reorder their spatial characteristics into the cinematic sound experience. Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker 2001) was the first mainstream Indian film shot with location sync sound. In this film, location sync recording and Dolby digital sound technology were implemented following a major debate; since then, however, most of today’s films embrace the digital revolution. Lagaan unfolds a multitude of sounds that were previously unheard in a mono or stereophonic rendering of sound in Indian cinema. The use of sync sound and surround sound advanced in Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle 2008). Production mixer and location recordist
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Resul Pookutty won an academy award for his work on the sound. He is still a campaigner for the use of sync sound in Indian cinema. In this film, several sequences shot in real urban locations record the complex depth of ambience that Indian cities offer. In a long conversation during his interview for this book, Pookutty explains the process in detail. In the phase of Indian cinema that follows, sync sound gains momentum and more films employ the production practice. Independent filmmakers like Dibakar Banerjee have used location sync sound to its fullest potential. In Shanghai (2012), the raw, noisy, and rustic realism of an Indian city and its political world are truthfully and authentically represented by sound recordist and designer Pritam Das and re-recordist Hitendra Ghosh by the use of sync recording and surround sound design as a newly established idiom in Indian cinema. As the new trend in sync sound and surround design becomes the standard experience anticipated in emerging urban Indian multiplexes, sound practice incorporates the newly available technological improvements over existing set-ups. Post-production techniques experience a faster technological development in editing, designing, and mixing in multichannel studio, as does sound replayed during film projections in new theatres and multiplexes, including Dolby 5.1 and 7.1 surround set-ups and recent Auro 3D and Dolby Atmos. The first Indian release that used Dolby Atmos was Sivaji 3D (Shankar 2012). The format then faced strong opposition in Auro 3D, which entered Indian cinemas with Vishwaroopam (Kamal Hasan 2013). Both formats work on technologies that split sound into multiple digital surround speakers.
CHAPTER 37 SONIFICATION OF CINEMA AND A BETTER PRACTICE
Digital technology has substantially affected the stylistic features and aesthetic choices filmmakers and film industry personnel can utilize and make. In his book Beyond Dolby, Mark Kerins argues that film history is rich with examples of technology influencing aesthetics (2011: 54). For example, the introduction of sound, colour, and magnetic tape initiated deep changes in corresponding aesthetic cinematic features. Film scholar Rick Altman’s seminal writing also articulates the aesthetic implications of sound technology in cinema (1992). Indeed, digital technology makes it possible to reconfigure the aesthetic strategies of earlier standardized modes of sound production (e.g., monaural mixing and dubbing) for a new realm of practice marked by an intensified awareness for clarity, quality, flexibility, and democratization. This shift helps to recognize and appreciate the arts and crafts of the sound practitioners. The digital realm instigates an affordance for situated-ness and spatiality, and likewise, a sonic realism. A new breed of Indian filmmaking is methodologically distanced from popular mainstream Indian cinema known for its typical narrative tropes of visually spectacular yet sonically compromised song and dance scene extravaganzas. This new trend in Indian cinema tends to uphold an immersive, immediate reality of contemporary India (Chattopadhyay 2016). This book is empirically informed by extensive interviews with the foremost sound practitioners active in India’s film industry to indicate a major shift observed within Indian cinema. This shift is marked by the proliferation of a new tendency—audiences are responding increasingly positively to convincingly real and believable sites within the constructed film space as a diegetic universe. A number of recent films such as Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love, Aditya Vikram Sengupta 2014), Court (Chaitanya Tamhane 2014), Masaan (Fly Away Solo, Neeraj Ghaywan 2015), and Killa (The Fort, Avinash Arun 2015) do not rely on music. They practically do away with it, using a reduced amount of dialogue instead (or even removing all dialogue, as with films like Asha Jaoar
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Majhe). These films represent a renewed sense of realism in listening to the everyday life through the meticulous inclusion of the lived sound environments in contemporary India with its re-emerging urban spaces and urbanizing rural hinterlands. Due to this narrative strategy, the specific realities depicted in these films become significant agents of the storyworld spatially rendered through sound. I term this new realm of sound in cinema the “sonification of cinema”, which is principally crafted through the sync sound and surround design of site-specific sound elements in the spatially associative and cognitive sonic environment to create presence and believability. These experiences are enhanced by an elaborate and intricate spatialization of location sync sound, including voice and ambience as primary layers. “Sonification”1 refers to the emerging areas of sound practice such as VR/AR, Sonic Interaction Design, Gamification, where the term has been used in reference to novel auditory practice approaches that convey information, meaning, and spatial qualities in interactive media environments. I propose that the contemporary sound experience in Indian cinema could be compared to these emerging areas of sound practice and their betterment facilitated by digital technologies. Little official documentation or a manual related to best practice in sound production exists for the Indian film industry. However, examining these interviews and in-depth conversations with several sound practitioners may shed light on the perception of a better practice, critically gauging industry standards within this context. Currently, awards are given for the “Best” Location Sound Recordist, Sound Designer and Re-recordist of the Final Mixed Track.2 Many of the interviewees for this project received these types of awards from national (as well as international) bodies based on the industry’s evaluation of the highest level of craftsmanship in sound production. But what do their “best” works sound like? Do they indeed represent and exemplify exceptional works of film sound production in India, those that demonstrate sensitive artistry of sound practice? In my opinion, sound-based creative endeavors are often characterized by a refusal to be standardized, destabilizing existing systems of industrial norms and protocols. The book’s interviews reveal that producing “better” sound based on personal standards of quality and efficacy set within the film industry’s significant constraints is more important to practitioners. They testify to how the creative utilization of sound, especially regarding ambient sounds and effects, has expanded in the digital era. Ambient sound is categorically singled out by these established practitioners as film sound’s primary artistic element for creative exploration.
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In a handful yet increasing number of Indian “indie” films, sound takes its own course by creating layers of multiple impressions within, around, and beyond the visual narrative and overarching story. Here, the artistic interpretations of sound and space by both film directors and sound practitioners are paramount and crucial when developing an auditory setting in cinema. However, even though the digital realm opens up possibilities for creative intervention by the practitioner, shaking up the hierarchical and feudal chains of industrial and studio-centric production, sound production in mainstream Indian cinema is still dominated by pervasive film industry norms and rules. Nevertheless, sync sound now requires the glorified actor’s complete participation on the film set, on a par with the location sound technician, who has long held a lower status in film crew’s hierarchy, therefore recognizing the importance of the arts and crafts of the sound practitioners and their valuable contribution to the making of a film. This book advocates for the practice of film sound to be more inclusive in terms of personal sonic sensibility, more playful, more aware, and more nuanced in its application. The book intends to distance itself from industrial norms and regulations in search of more creative freedom for practitioners, which manifests in both concrete terms such as time available and financial rewards, and abstract ones such as respect and recognition in and outside of the film industry, film fraternity and larger world. Their creativity may ask to hack the technology and subvert the industrial standards in favor of artistry rather than sticking to the tried and tested, the obvious, the pre-sets. This book, therefore, is critical of the industrial idea of best practice when it comes to individual artistry and calls for greater inclusiveness and sensitivity when building the architecture of sound in cinema. Instead, a “better practice” envisions a future of film sound where these creative sensibilities can be explored through continual improvement, nurturing and encouraging the attentive listening ears of sound practitioners to strive for abundant creativity and artistry in their work for cinema.
Notes 1 2
See: http://sonification.de/son/definition See: http://dff.nic.in/Archive.aspx?ID=6
REFERENCES
Altman, Rick, ed. 1992. Sound theory/Sound practice. New York: Routledge. Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-vision: Sound on screen, translated and edited by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. 2021. The Auditory Setting: Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (in press). Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. 2016. „Being There: Evocation of the Site in Contemporary Indian Cinema“. Journal of Sonic Studies 12. Research Catalogue. Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. 2015. „The Auditory Spectacle: designing sound for the ‘dubbing era’ of Indian cinema“. The New Soundtrack 5 (1): 55–68. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kania, Andrew. 2009. “Realism”. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Carl R. Plantinga and Paisley Livingston, 237-247. London: Routledge. Kerins, Mark. 2011. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the digital sound age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Plantinga, Carl. 2009. “Emotion and affect”. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Carl R. Plantinga and Paisley Livingston, 356-365. London: Routledge. Sergi, Gianluca. 2004. The Dolby era: Film sound in contemporary Hollywood. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
BIOGRAPHIES AND FILMOGRAPHIES Shyam Benegal (Director and Screenwriter) Selected filmography: Ankur (1973) Nishant (1975) Manthan (1976) Bhumika (1977) Junoon (1979) Mandi (1983) Trikaal (1985) Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (1993) Mammo (1994) Sardari Begum (1996) The Making of the Mahatma (1996) Zubeidaa (2001) Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005) Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) Selected awards: 2005: Dadasaheb Phalke Award 1975: Second Best Feature Film for Ankur 1976: Best Feature Film in Hindi for Nishant 1977: Best Feature Film in Hindi for Manthan 1978: Best Screenplay for Bhumika 1979: Best Feature Film in Hindi for Junoon 1982: Best Feature Film in Hindi for Arohan 1984: Best Historical Reconstruction for Nehru 1985: Best Biographical Film for Satyajit Ray 1986: Best Director for Trikal 1993: Best Feature Film in Hindi for Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda 1995: Best Feature Film in Hindi for Mammo 1996: Best Feature Film in English for The Making of the Mahatma 1997: Best Feature Film in Urdu for Sardari Begum 1999: Best Feature Film for Samar 1999: Best Feature Film on Family Welfare for Hari-Bhari 2001: Best Feature Film in Hindi for Zubeidaa
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Jyoti Chatterjee (Sound Recordist, Sound Mixer) Selected filmography: Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, Satyajit Ray 1984) Ekdin Pratidin (Mrinal Sen 1979) Shakha Proshakha (Satyajit Ray 1990) Anup Dev (Sound Re-recording Mixer) Selected filmography: Chennai Express (Rohit Shetty 2013) Son of Sardaar (Ashwani Dhir and Anil Devgan 2012) Shahid (Hansal Mehta 2012) Ra.One (Anubhav Sinha 2011) Delhi Belly (Abhinay Deo and Akshat Verma 2011) 3 Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani 2009) Moksha: Salvation (Ashok Mehta 2001) Selected awards: 2014: IIFA, Best Sound Mixing for Chennai Express 2010: IIFA, Best Sound Re-Recording for 3 Idiots (2009) 2001: National Film Awards, Silver Lotus, Best Audiography for Moksha: Salvation Anup Mukherjee (Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Jogajog (Shekhar Das 2015) Chaar (Sandip Ray 2014) Rupkatha Noy (Atanu Ghosh 2013) Koyekti Meyer Golpo (Those City Girls, Subrata Sen 2012) Iti Mrinalini (An Unfinished Letter, Aparna Sen 2010) Moner Manush (Goutam Ghose 2010) Kailashey Kelenkari (Sandip Ray 2007) Herbert (Suman Mukhopadhyay 2006) Iti Srikanta (Anjan Das 2004) Dekha (Sight, Goutam Ghose 2001) Utsab (The Festival, Rituparno Ghosh 2000) Lal Darja (Red Door, Buddhadev Dasgupta 1997) Agantuk (The Stranger, Satyajit Ray 1991)
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Selected award: 2005: Silver Lotus, National Film Awards, Best Audiography, Iti Srikanta (2004) Hitendra Ghosh (Sound Re-recording Mixer) Selected filmography: Jodhaa Akbar (Ashutosh Gowariker 2008) Rang De Basanti (Colour it Saffron, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra 2006) Swades: We, the People (Own Country, Ashutosh Gowariker 2004) Aks (The Reflection, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra 2001) Ashoka the Great (Santosh Sivan 2001) Mammo (Shyam Benegal 1994) Parinda (The Bird, Vidhu Vinod Chopra 1989) Saaransh (The Gist, Mahesh Bhatt 1984) Ardh Satya (Half Truth, Govind Nihalani 1983) 36 Chowringhee Lane (Aparna Sen 1981) Bhumika (The Role, Shyam Benegal 1977) Selected awards: 2007: IIFA, Technical Excellence, Best Sound Re-Recording, Rang De Basanti (2006) 2005: Zee Cine Awards, Best Sound Re-recording, Swades: We, the People (2004) 2001: IIFA, Technical Excellence, Best Sound Re-Recording, Jungle (2000) 1984: Filmfare Award, Best Sound Recordist, Vijeta (1982) 1982: Filmfare Award, Best Sound Recordist, Kalyug (1981) 1980: Filmfare Award, Best Sound Recordist, Junoon (1979) Dileep Subramaniam (Sound Recordist, Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Gunday (Outlaws, Ali Abbas Zafar 2014) Jab Tak Hai Jaan (As Long as I Live, Yash Chopra 2012) Cocktail (Homi Adajania 2012) RockStar (Imtiaz Ali 2011) Mausam (Season, Pankaj Kapur 2011) Guzaarish (Request, Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2010) My Name Is Khan (Karan Johar 2010) Love Aaj Kal (Love Nowadays, Imtiaz Ali 2009)
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Nakul Kamte (Production Sound Mixer, Sound Designer, Sync Sound Recordist) Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra 2013) Delhi-6 (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra 2009) Like Stars on Earth (Aamir Khan and Amole Gupte 2007) Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan 2007) Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya 2007) Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. (Reema Kagti 2007) Krrish (Rakesh Roshan 2006) Rang De Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra 2006) Bride & Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha 2004) Lakshya (Farhan Akhtar 2004) Dil Chahta Hai (Farhan Akhtar 2001) Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (Ashutosh Gowariker 2001) Selected awards: 2014: Apsara Film Producers Guild Awards, Best Sound Design, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag 2007: IIFA, Best Sound Recording, Rang De Basanti (2006) 2002: National Film Awards, Silver Lotus, Best Audiography, Lagaan (2001) Aloke Dey (Sound Re-recording Mixer) Selected filmography: Kahaani (Story, Sujoy Ghosh 2012) Love Aaj Kal (Love Nowadays, Imtiaz Ali 2009) Jab We Met (When We Met, Imtiaz Ali 2007) Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (Aparna Sen 2002) Selected awards: 2005: Zee Cine Awards, Nominated: Best Sound Re-recording for Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyo (2004) 2004: Zee Cine Awards, Nominated: Best Sound Re-recording for Koi... Mil Gaya (2003)
684
Biographies and Filmographies
Resul Pookutty (Sync Sound Recordist, Sound Designer, Production Sound Mixing Specialist) Selected filmography: Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014) PK (Rajkumar Hirani 2014) Ra.One (Anubhav Sinha 2011) Ghajini (A.R. Murugadoss 2008) Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan 2008) Black (Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2005) Musafir (Traveller, Sanjay Gupta 2004) Selected awards: 2012: Zee Cine Award for Best Sound Design, Ra.One (2011) 2010: National Film Award, Best Audiography, Pazhassi Raja (2009) 2010: Padma Shri by Government of India 2009: Asianet Film Awards - Special Honour Jury Award 2009: Academy Award, Best Sound Mixing (with Ian Tapp and Richard Pryke), Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 2009: BAFTA Award, Best Sound (with Glenn Freemantle, Richard Pryke, Tom Sayers and Ian Tapp), Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 2005: Zee Cine Award, Best Audiography for Musafir (2004) Ajith A. George (Re-recording Mixer) Selected filmography: Drishyam (Jeethu Joseph 2013) Nayakan (Lijo Jose Pellissery 2010) Ritu (Shyamaprasad 2009) Gaja (K. Madesh 2008) Swades (Ashutosh Gowariker 2004) In the Name of Buddha (Rajesh Touchriver 2002) Let's Talk (Ram Madhvani 2002) Dubai (Joshiy 2001) Bollywood Calling (Nagesh Kukunoor 2001) Zubeidaa (Shyam Benegal 2001)
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Baylon Fonseca (Production Mixer and Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Mimi (Laxman Utekar 2020) Rush (Mahesh Munasinghe 2019) Luka Chuppi (Laxman Utekar 2019) Veere Di Wedding (Shashanka Ghosh 2018) Fukrey Returns (Mrighdeep Lamba 2017) Raees (Rahul Dholakia 2017) Blues (Manassvi Nirupma 2016) Dil Dhadakne Do (Zoya Akhtar 2015) Kai Po Che (Abhishek Kapoor 2013) Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Zoya Akhtar 2011) Game (Abhinay Deo 2011) Rock On!! (Abhishek Kapoor 2008) Selected awards: 2012: Technical Excellence, International Indian Film Academy, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) 2012: Silver Lotus, Best Audiography (Location Sound Recordist), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) 2012: Silver Lotus, Best Audiography (Sound Designer), Game (2011) 2009: Filmfare Awards, Best Sound Design, Rock On!! (2008), Shared with: Vinod Subramanian Vikram Joglekar (Sound Designer and Dolby Consultant) Selected filmography: Road, Movie (Dev Benegal 2009) English, August (Dev Benegal 1994) Nazar (Mani Kaul 1990) Subash Sahoo (Location Sync Sound Recordist) Selected filmography: N.H 10 (Navdeep Singh 2015) Hasee Toh Phasee (Vinil Matthew 2014) Mickey Virus (Saurabh Varma 2013) Once Upon a Time in Mumbai (Milan Luthria 2010) Kaminey: The Scoundrels (Vishal Bhardwaj 2009) Manorama Six Feet Under (Navdeep Singh, 2007)
686
Biographies and Filmographies
Khosla's Nest (Dibakar Banerjee, 2006) Omkara (Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006) Selected awards: 2008: Silver Lotus, National Film Awards, Best Audiography, Omkara (2006) (Shared with: K.J. Singh) Manas Choudhury (Sync Sound Recordist, Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Aisha (Rajshree Ojha 2010) Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (Shimit Amin 2009) Well Done Abba (Shyam Benegal, 2009) Welcome to Sajjanpur (Shyam Benegal 2008) Firaaq (Nandita Das 2008) Chakde! India (Shimit Amin 2007) Three Walls (Nagesh Kukunoor 2003) Selected award: 2008: IIFA, Best Sound Recording, Chak De! India (2007) Bobby John (Sound Editor) Selected filmography: Peepli (Live) (Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui 2010) Blue Oranges (Rajesh Ganguly 2009) 15 Park Avenue (Aparna Sen 2005) Vinod Subramanian Selected filmography: Umrika (Prashant Nair 2015) Sold (I) (Jeffrey D. Brown 2014) Patang (Prashant Bhargava 2011) Delhi Belly (Abhinay Deo and Akshat Verma 2011) Rock On!! (Abhishek Kapoor 2008) Ab Tak Chhappan (Shimit Amin 2004) Selected awards: 2009: Filmfare Award, Best Sound Design, Rock On!! (2008) (Shared with: Baylon Fonseca)
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P M Satheesh (Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Baahubali: The Beginning (S.S. Rajamouli 2015) Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola (Vishal Bhardwaj 2013) The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mira Nair 2012) Ishqiya (Romance, Abhishek Chaubey 2010) Road, Movie (Dev Benegal 2009) Kaminey: The Scoundrels (Vishal Bhardwaj 2009) The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey (Ketan Mehta 2005) Selected award: 1999: National award, Best sound recording and design, Kumar Talkies (Pankaj Rishi Kumar, 1999) Bishwadeep Chatterjee (Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Bajirao Mastani (Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2015) Piku (Shoojit Sircar 2015) Teenkahon (Bauddhayan Mukherji 2014) Buno Haansh (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury 2014) Madras Cafe (Shoojit Sircar 2013) Satyanweshi (Rituparno Ghosh 2013) Cloud Capped Star (Kamaleswar Mukherjee 2013) Afterglow (Pratim D. Gupta 2012) Do Dooni Chaar (Habib Faisal 2010) 3 Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani 2009) The Last Lear (Rituparno Ghosh 2007) Lage Raho Munna Bhai (Rajkumar Hirani 2006) Antarmahal: Views of the Inner Chamber (Rituparno Ghosh 2005) Parineeta (Pradeep Sarkar 2005) Raincoat (Rituparno Ghosh 2004) Choker Bali: A Passion Play (Rituparno Ghosh 2003) Selected awards: 2014: Silver Lotus, National Film Awards, Best Audiography, Madras Cafe (2013) (Shared with: Nihar Ranjan Samal) 2014: Apsara Film Producers Guild Awards, Best Sound Mixing, Madras Cafe (2013) (Shared with: Justin Jose)
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Biographies and Filmographies
2014: Zee Cine Awards, Best Sound Design, Madras Cafe (2013) (Shared with: Nihar Ranjan Samal) 2010: IIFA, Award for Technical Excellence, Best Sound Recording, 3 Idiots (2009) (Shared with: Nihar Ranjan Samal) 2006: Filmfare Award, Best Sound Design, Parineeta (2005) Kunal Sharma (Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Bombay Velvet (Anurag Kashyap 2014) Lootera (Robber, Vikramaditya Motwane 2013) Monsoon Shootout (Amit Kumar 2013) Bombay Talkies (Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar, Karan Johar 2013) Shaitan (Devil, Bejoy Nambiar 2011) Udaan (Flight, Vikramaditya Motwane 2010) Selected awards: 2012: Screen Weekly Awards, Best Sound Design for Shaitan (2011) 2011: Filmfare Award, Best Sound Design for Udaan (2010) 2009: National Film Awards, Silver Lotus, Best Audiography for 1971 (2007) Gissy Michael (Production Sound Mixer) Selected filmography: Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran (Abhishek Sharma 2018) Beyond the Clouds (Majid Majidi 2017) The Blueberry Hunt (Anup Kurian 2016) Island City (Ruchika Oberoi 2015) Margarita with a Straw (Shonali Bose 2014) Koel (Bonny Mukherjee 2011) Daayen Ya Baayen (Bela Negi 2010) Manasarovar (Anup Kurian 2004) Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women (Manish Jha 2003)
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Pramod Thomas (Sound Re-recording Mixer) Selected filmography: Rajdhani Express (Ashok Kohli 2013) Akashathinte Niram (Colour of Sky, Bijukumar Damodaran 2012) Jaane Kya Tune Kahi (Do Know What You Say, Nisha Ramakrishnan 2012) Veettilekkulla Vazhi (The Way Home, Bijukumar Damodaran 2011) Walkaway (Shailja Gupta 2010) Enthiran (Robot, S. Shankar 2010) Amala Popuri (Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Befikre (Aditya Chopra 2016) The Man Who Knew Infinity (Matt Brown 2015) Yeti (Abhijit Mazumdar 2014) Bombay Talkies (Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap 2013) Fireflies (Sabal Singh Shekhawat 2013) Mahathma (Krishna Vamsi 2009) Dipankar Chaki (Sound Recordist, Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Take One (Mainak Bhaumik 2014) Jaatishwar (Srijit Mukherji 2014) The Last Poem (Suman Mukhopadhyay 2013) Mishawr Rawhoshyo (Srijit Mukherji 2013) Me and My Girlfriends (Mainak Bhaumik 2013) Shabdo (Sound, Kaushik Ganguly 2013) Kanamachi (Raj Chakraborty 2013) Aborto (Circle, Arindam Sil 2013) Maach Mishti & More (Mainak Bhaumik 2013) Dutta Vs. Dutta (Anjan Dutt 2012) Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards, Qaushiq Mukherjee 2012) Selected award: 2013: Silver Lotus, National Film Awards, Best Audiography, Shabdo (2013)
690
Biographies and Filmographies
Pritam Das (Location Sound, Sync Sound Recordist, Sound Design) Selected filmography: Titli (Kanu Behl 2014) Shuddh Desi Romance (Maneesh Sharma 2013) Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee 2012) LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (Dibakar Banerjee 2010) Selected awards: 2011: IIFA, Best Sound Recording for LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2011: Filmfare Awards, Best Sound Design for LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha Anish John (Sound Designer and Mixing Specialist) Selected filmography: Bulbbul (Anvita Dutt 2020) Ghost Stories (Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap 2019) Cargo (Arati Kadav 2019) Laal Kaptaan (Navdeep Singh 2019) Karwaan (Akarsh Khurana 2018) Newton (Amit Masurkar 2017) Trapped (Vikramaditya Motwane 2016) Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love, Aditya Vikram Sengupta 2014) Sukanta Majumdar (Sound Recordist, Sound Editor, Sound Designer) Selected filmography: The Churning of Kalki (Ashish Avikunthak 2015) Kangal Malsat (Suman Mukhopadhyay 2013) Four Chapters (Suman Mukhopadhyay 2008) Hitesh Chaurasia (sound designer) Selected filmography: The Bright Day (Mohit Takalkar 2015) Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (Ravi Kumar 2014) Maunraag (Monologue, Vaibhav Abnave 2013) Gajaar: Journey of the Soul (Ajit P. Bhairavkar 2011)
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Jayadevan Chakkadath (Production Sound Mixer, Location Sync Sound Recordist) Selected filmography: Perariyathavar (Names Unknown, Bijukumar Damodaran 2014) Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela (A Play of Bullets, Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2013) Olipporu (The Guerilla War, A.V. Sasidaran 2013) Inkaar (Denial, Sudhir Mishra 2013) Anil Radhakrishnan (Sound Mixer, Sound Recordist) Selected filmography: Dedh Ishqiya (Abhishek Chaubey 2014) David (Bejoy Nambiar 2013) Road, Movie (Dev Benegal 2009) Nithin Lukose (Sound Designer) Selected filmography: Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar (Dibakar Banerjee 2020) Mallesham (Raj Rachakonda 2019) Certain Lives in Twilight (Praveen Sukumaran 2018) Shuddhi (Adarsh Eshwarappa 2017) Thithi (Raam Reddy 2015)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The contents of this book were initially developed during my doctoral project conducted at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, from 2012 to 2015, and successfully defended at Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2017. I warmly thank Prof. dr. Marcel Cobussen and Prof. Frans de Ruiter of the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts for their valuable comments and suggestions towards developing the final version of the dissertation, where a few of these extended interviews were published in an unedited version. I am particularly grateful to Marcel Cobussen for kindly agreeing to become my supervisor during the final and crucial stages of defending the PhD, providing me with valuable guidance. I also thank the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, for supporting and financing earlier fieldwork for conducting these interviews in India. Latter research and fieldwork for this book was supported by Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in India during a Film Research Fellowship from 2016 to 2017. I would like to thank Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute for the support. A Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut from 2018 to 2019 also helped me develop the manuscript and provide me with productive time for editing. I thank the Center for Arts and Humanities at AUB for the fertile working environment. My background as a sound practitioner has helped me contribute a novel perspective to ongoing film sound studies debates, providing critical observation and reflection alongside an analytical approach to sound production. Hence, this book is practice-based and self-reflective in order to conceptualize the aesthetic, historical, and technological developments in film sound in India. First, I would like to acknowledge the inspiration drawn from fellow sound practitioners. Their vital contributions have enriched the development of sonic experience in Indian film production. This project would not have been possible without the active participation of many eminent filmmakers and practitioners in India. I wholeheartedly thank Shyam Benegal, Jyoti Chatterjee, Anup Dev, Nakul Kamte, Resul Pookutty, Anup Mukherjee and others who kindly provided their valuable time for the interviews. Their work truly remains the impetus for embarking
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on this journey. I would like to thank Rumjhum Banerjee and Sreya Chatterjee for helping me transcribe the interviews from audio recordings I made during fieldwork, and Jayadevan Chakkadath for his active presence in some of these interview sessions. I also thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing for kindly taking up the project.