NO SMOKING Coverage continues
The scenes of K’s office were to be shot. The location was Pixion labs, Bandra, which is a post production set up. Kartik was stinking like hell :o I don’t think he took a shower after the airport scene. Anurag made him wash his face and shave in deception of offering one more role:) Kiding. Guys Kartik is in one more role!Read his postJ
John’s wardrobe is awesome! The first thought came to mind was that the I could easily fit in the clothes! John and myself are almost of the same height. Almost of the same built, just have to take some fat from my belly and put on chest n back. May be put some muscles on my shoulders and biceps and I would be all set. You might be surprised to know how much it costs. Astounding 16 lakhs for the wardrobe 8-} Sunglasses were quoted at 4 lakhs 8-> Damn, I could pay half the cost of the much wanted apartment in western suburb of Mumbai with that stuff!
K’s Wardrobe.
The film is been shot in super35 format, but is framed in 16:9 setup. It sounds confusing I guess:-? Super 35 would expose comparatively larger portion of the negative than a conventional 35mm, giving better results. The shots would be taken according to 16:9 frame, which is marked on the viewfinder and monitor. You got it right that the negative would contain unwanted elements in between 16:9 and super 35 formats in the image, when it’s developed! Wouldn’t that be a problem? Well if the prints were to be made directly from the negative then it would have been a slight problem, which could have been corrected by using optical methods in the lab. But since this a DI (digital intermediate) film it’s not a major issue at all! DI is a popular world nowadays in Bombay films. Most of the big budget films do DI. It’s a process in which the negative images are digitally scanned for computer graphics (CG) work. The main reason is not only the CG work but to make images look more beautiful/colorful by increasing the depth of colors. Not so long ago the big production houses use to DI the songs to make them more colorful. Presently it’s a trend to DI the whole film.
How the post production work would happen? When the negatives would be developed they would be scanned in beta/digibeta tapes, then grabed into an editing software such as Final Cut Pro, Avid Express or may be Smoke. The extra exposed portion would be easily overlapped by black boundary and you would get a perfect 16:9 frame as the director wanted. When the editing is completed a cutlist would be generated for each ‘Jumbo’. A film could be divided into Jumbos (similar to reels). A Jumbo is 18 to 20 mins long. A 2 hour long film would have approximately have 6 to 8 Jumbos. A cutlist as the name suggest is a sequence of frames, which are needed from the exposed film stock cans. When arranged in an order would complete a jumbo and combining various jumbos would create the whole film. The sound departments would use these Jumbos to sync dialogues, sound background score, sound effects, songs etc to make a separate optical disc of Dolby mixed tracks. If the film was not to undergo DI, the negatives would have been cut according to the cultists, joined together on the table and prints would have been made from it. Since it’s a DI the negatives would be scanned onto a Hard drive and not to a tape using the cutlist. The reason been the quality of the transfer. The Beta tapes are good for 700 lines resolution, whereas the film negative has resolution of anywhere between 2000 to 3500 lines resolution. With hard disks there is minimal loss. The hard disks would be grabbed into ‘Smoke’ where the DI process will take place and the prints would be made from the resulting image. The important point to be noted is that the perception of human eye is good till 2000 lines beyond it, it can not differentiate. Hollywood is using as high as 4000 line images in forthcoming films but it is as good as 2000 lines for the viewers. The DI process would give quality of around 1200 lines, which is not bad, when seen on screen. The Dolby tracks are embedded in the print itself. So the Dolby prints do not have additional sound print or disc. It consists of an Analogue track and a digital track. I hope I did not bore you guys with the technical stuff J
It was a regular fun on the sets but today was special. It was producer Kumar Mangat’s birthday. Anurag had hatched up a plan for a surprise birthday celebration but did not work out as the birthday boy was out of town. Never the less cakes were ordered and cut by the captain of the team AK.
Cake and the Cake cutter.
Theres a break for next 3 days. Anurag must be down south supervising the animation work been done on his ‘Hanuman’ project. Isn’t it amazing he worked from 7 to 8 yesterday and wrote the article on Satya at night, in spite of having to fly early in the morning!
More pictures coming soon!
(I’m moving all pictures to a new post… Manjeet please check your email… ~ oz)
Tags: The No Smoking Diary
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Well thanks manjeet for the technical aspects of the shoot …. (and pls put up more pics !!)
It feels good coz he is incharge of the technical side … while I like to indulge myself with the more creative side …
Coming soon 2 posts … a first script review of No smoking
and more details on how I GOT THE DOUBLE ROLE IN THE FILM !!!
P.S : Manjeet I always have a bath when i come on the sets … grrrr
Manjeet:
NSC is going great.
Picssssssssss! Oz
damn.. i should join a film school just to understand all the lingo you talked about manjeet! great stuff nevertheless =D>
Manjeet lovely post. Good to see you covering the technical aspects … those which i always convineiently ignore… as I’m caught up noticing the expressions …
Dude !!! I had had a bath that day grrrrrrr … Seems like your nose hadn’t recovered yet from the cold. If it has recovered… let it be prepared for another assault .. .that of my dhai kilo ka haath !!
Guys : Lets all ^:)^ bend down and celebrate Kumar mangat’s birthday .. the man who gave us Omkara and now is giving us No Smoking .. Thank you Sir ….
hey manjeet wat about the animation film..tell us more on that too.
thnx
Striker: A film school or working on a professional film would surely help in understanding the film maker’s point of view. After that you would start watching films as a film maker, noticing so many creative and technical things invovled. A film school will only teach you the very basics of film making. The terms and process mentioned above are very common in Bombay film industry. Things which I have learnt in the post production process of a film, on sets experiences and by attending exhibitions related to film making. I am not sure if the processes are same in Hollywood. I just want to explain the people what is involved in film making. The things mentioned are not difficult to understand or deal with provided you work in a film in any capacity and are observant, trying to learn every bit possible. Cinema is a very vast field you learn everyday almost from everybody no matter what position you are at!!
Kartik bhaiya: When did we decide of sharing the technical or creative parts? The only purpose of my article is to make readers aware of real life film making experience covering all the aspects of film making. Needless to say you are free to cover your so called technical,creative or even gossip sections.
Man if you could stink so bad after taking a shower in few hours I wonder how would u smell after few days without no bath=))just kiddin bro.
manjeet, completely agree on your last statement.. i guess a lot of the terminology is new to me as i’ve only worked on a couple of things that’ve been shot on film (stuff i’ve done with discovery channel).. the movies i’ve worked on have all been DV or HD, so i have a pretty good grasp of the canon XL2s and the likes.. and making use of the 24p to make digital look like film. i also like being on top of the technical aspects of filmmaking so your post was really new territory for me, and one i like being in. if filmmaking is food, you just fed me my 8th course in a 7-course meal.. shukriya sirji
manjeet anurag’s animation film deals with what..like to know more on that front. sounds exiting..tell us man
@ striker- manjeet is saving our money, dude! by letting us know all technical stuff without having to join a film school.
saare bolo manjeet kiii jaaai ^:)^
Striker: Films on dv or hdv….I can visualize what u mean.. I was a member of one of the independent film making salons in the US. They use to make films on mini dv. Even features on mini dv. When the films were showcased, there were so many flaws. Lot of people did not even had the basics write:) Some of the stuff was worth watching.There were people who had gone to a film school, some were planning to go to a film school. But it was a good group of people passionate about film making. There were some very good actors. One of the guys had worked on shows in NYC.Some talented folks had even made a start in Hollywood. But these people rarely showed up i the meetings.. Its just something u reminded me off…
Premal: I have no clue about the animation flick. Ask Anurag to tell about the flick. Its a good idea… Anurag creating a special section for Hanuman!!
Tushar I do not know if I am really doing that but you guys are certainly getting to know the Bollywood process of film making!
Found some interesting stuff on aspect ratios and advantages of shooting in Super 35.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35
Internet is other great medium to learn film making:)
@manjeet – thats the best thing we could learn. I feel we are at the best time of learning cinema, understanding the Indian perspective as well as adopting the ways of the west with experimenters like Anurag.
great goin man!
hi manjeet,
with reference to “The film is been shot in super35 format, but is framed in 16:9 setup. … The shots would be taken according to 16:9 frame, which is marked on the viewfinder and monitor”: based solely on what I’ve read about film stock and aspect ratios, does this mean that anamorphic lenses are not being used? Your notes later about post-production also seem to indicate that this is the case.
The Super 35 format offers economic advantages, so its choice makes sense; the same holds true for non-anamorphic lenses. Cropping and squeezing the image previously resulted in an optical intermediate that had high grain; DI eliminates the creation of this “inferior” intermediate and, hence augments the appeal of the super 35/non-anamorphic combination.
manjeet.. yup, have seen plenty of those home-video type movies which are made with the “i have a DV camera so i can make a movie” attitude.. on the other hand, i’ve also seen movies shot on DV, that might not be the best technically, but the stories and the execution are worthy attempts. sad thing is with a slightly bigger budget, these films do have what it takes to get noticed on a bigger scale, so at the most they end up at film festivals, which i suppose is the right amount of credit they should deserve. a small budget doesn’t necessarily mean a bad film just as a big budget doesn’t necessarily mean a good one. i’m not sure why i said that.. i think everyone on here knows this already
in any event, i think you should attend the workshops by baiscope entertainment with kartik.. i’m sure you’d meet more technicians there to help you learn more about the nooks and crannies.
Hi George, You are correct the film is not been shot on Anamorphic lenses. You might be knowing this but I cleared my doubt yesterday by asking assistant cameraman Kalpesh Bhandarkar, who is a cousin of Madhur Bhandarkar!!
I did not understand why an anamorphic lense would need more light as the light readings would be same. Kalpesh correctly pointed out that most of the anamorphic lenses have a maximum aperture of 4 very few of them have 2.8. On the sets I have seen the camera team shooting at 1.9, which is lot bigger than 4 something. The camera crew is very professional they use minimum resources. I also realised its stupid to light up a scene for a f stop of 4, when you have an option of using 1.9.You can imagine how much light and time is saved by using spehrical lenses!!
Striker you are 100% correct with what u said. You never know when u could make a Hyderabad blues or Open water. Any efforts you make only improve u.