Sound Design in India
By Dileep Subramaniam and Kunal Sharma
(Dileep Subramaniam – Worked on a number of Documentaries and has been one of the leading technicians in “LOCATION SOUND RECORDING”
Is the Sound Designer of Hum Tum, Trara Rum Pum, Jab We Met, Dharam, ….etc currently working on Imtiyaz Ali’s next.
Kunal Sharma – Is the Sound Designer of Devdas, Paanch, Black Friday, Gulaal…etc…etc…One of the youngest sound designers in the country.)
Resul has just won the Holy Grail of awards, the big O. For the technically inclined, he has the sound mixing awards in BAFTA and better still, the CAS award (Cinema Audio Society) thus making it a Grand Slam of sorts as far as production sound mixing is concerned (location sound recording as it is known in the West). As a fellow professional, I feel a sense of elation as we share the same Film school. Oddly, I also feel relieved, a feeling not unlike an Indian mother having just delivered a firstborn son. I do feel that sound for films in India, deserves a better deal than it currently gets. The awards more than anything, validate my long held belief, that we are as good as any. Even after accounting for Resul’s individual brilliance.
I wanted to share the process as it happens in India to highlight, among other things, what ails our films. Low budgets, noisy units and locations, are a worldwide phenomena and a professional hazard. But the sheer indifference to this aspect of films in India is the main worry.
The Hindi film industry is actor driven, so the mess starts at the top of the food chain. Absence of a trained professional to record audio on location, is greeted with relief by most of the unit. Location sound is a monster, and all who worship at its alter are heathen, who must never be allowed to practice. This is the general belief, with a few lovable exceptions of course. As a result of this, in most of the films made in India, sound is something that is confined to the very end of the cinematic process. That way, all who matter can finish their creative inputs so that the worker ants take over and clean up. Why struggle, when Dub dates can be used to leverage release dates and the last remaining installment from unrelenting fists of producers. The process is so opaque, that expensive studios are blanket booked for long hours, awaiting the stars arrival. A chorus of approval from the gathered unit members (totally unrelated to recording of course), generally greets takes, as they are hastily recorded. Minor considerations, like levels, clarity and lip sync are brushed aside and the poor engineer browbeaten to retain an otherwise unacceptable standard.
Ambiences are treated as fillers, “traffic and birds” after all, who wants it. The tracks, much like the film, must be clean and devoid of any relation to reality, never mind even if the sequence is at a busy intersection in the visual. Wall to wall background music is composed (partly due to sheer lack of confidence in most cases). This is then bolted into the reels, and woe-betide the engineer who dares reduce the master volume fader to accommodate a dialogue. Unless it is an inspired film from a Hollywood action movie, not much time is spent on effects like running, hitting, cars etc. All this, of course has to fit the Indian Budget. The final mix is by consensus, starting with the lead actors opinion and in many cases, producers call upon to reinstate background music that has been rejected as unsuitable. Anything to inject the elusive “energy” in the mix, a word I am yet to comprehend after so many films. Loudness is the key to whatever you do. Often, mixing rooms are battlegrounds where dialogue, music and effects struggle with each other to be fitted into the available spectrum.
Mixing accomplished, the extortionists from Dolby (India) step in. Mind you, they have received their full fee before the film enters the final mix stage. Their job is to ensure that the film mix is going to play out as mastered in the theaters. To attain this aim, they limit and compress the final volume. To avoid lawsuits and class action, in case, the listener gets ear damage. The theaters again displaying Dolby certification are ideally supposed to play at the volume setting that is optimum, but they rarely do that. Fearing damage to their precious speakers and poorly selected amplifier systems, the theaters set the levels less than half the optimum. A vicious cycle is by now in place, with the recording engineers straining the system to raise a human whisper to maybe the level of passing cars (in the visual) at the mixing studios. Theaters keep their settings lower and lower, to limit damage to their systems. The authority that prescribes these levels, Dolby is now mysteriously absent, probably laughing all the way to the bank. “Theaters are not under our maintenance as their equipment is grey market”, is a common refrain. Who said anything about maintaining theatre systems, all we ask is that they be calibrated and the calibrations enforced. Theater owners are the last of the holy cows in this chain that no one wants to tackle. Random speaker settings, wrong placements and arbitrary choice of delay settings plague our theaters, and they often ruin a perfectly acceptable mix.
I have seen the film budgets rise over the last decade, but the trickle down is still to come to the audio section. True, technology has taken a quantum leap; bigger investments have been made in studios and location recording equipment. We use equipment on par with the rest of the world. The difference lies in the amount of importance we accord to this crucial aspect of filmmaking, and only an attitude shift will open Indian filmmakers to world-class work in audio. I have always secretly believed, that to be a sound recordist or mixing engineer in India is the last step on the Karmic ladder after all the others have been climbed. After this stern test in what probably is the noisiest country in the universe, there is only merger with the Universal Soul. In the meantime, a big thanks to you, Resul, for showing us the way.
Kunal Sharma adds – It’s the multiplexe’s responsibility to ensure that the audience gets the best possible output as this is the ultimate platform for cinema exhibition. If it is not up to the optimum level all the technicians working on the film are cheated of the work and the hours that they have put in to get desired sound to math the visual and the narrative. The paying audience who is there to experience cinema is curbed of it’s true experience.
If the primary exhibitor’s of cinema do not adhere to an honest/true practice then the only way a consumer experience good sound is either in a sound studio or a good home theatre system…then why the hell have such expensive cinema halls???
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
i see bishwadeep chaterjee missing here. and many others. why so?
FINALLY!!!! atleast someone wrote about it here….amazing post man!!! lack of ambient sounds, hammy dubbing, its bad. “Indifference” it is.
Superb post!!!
great post dearest “sound dada’s”.
its sad that film makers in bombay(won’t comment about the rest of the country) still don’t realise the importance of sound to film making. hope resool’s oscar makes all the idiots realise the importance of sound in film.
cheers and a toast to resool, kunal, dilip, sanjay, allwyn, thomas(these are just some of the awesome sound technicians i personally know or whose work i am aware of) and all the rest of the sound crew in this city for doing the great work they do under the worst of circumstances.
sincerley hope things will change soon! Fingers crossed!
Whatever happened to Dwarak Warrier?
Wasn’t he going places?
Kya hogeya usse?
Why should minute attention be paid on the shooting spot to record the sound for films that do not use sync sound ? Could you explain this.
RGV in his latest blog entry has an interesting take on the awards and he specifically talks about technical awards. Worth a read.
Hi Dileep-very well writtten article. In fact I don’t know when we will come out of this loop of loudness between the mix engineers and the projectionists. It’s high time that sound designing gets treated as a creative craft rather than being sidelined and given step motherly attitude in the whole process of film making.
Hopefully Resul’s recent achievement will open up that mental block in our film makers.
Interesting and informative article…thanks for sharing.
Dear Dileep and Kunal,
very nice article!!!!!
hope someday we will have “sound’ film!!!!!!
Dileep
very well written!
someday someone should do a piece on the history of sync sound in Indian cinema. It is quite amusing to hear of it as some recent technique discovered by Bollywood biggies!
You, Ashwyn and Neogi have been doing sync sound for over 20 years! And didn’t Hitendra Ghosh do sync sound on Ankur, Manthan etc (Dir: Shyam Benegal)? What about pre 1972-73…
I’ll surely be rivetted to such a write up recording one of the oft ignored aspects of our film-making.
Thank you for shedding some light on this Invisible art and the pains of the silent workforce behind it!!
Hey Guys,
Thanks a ton for showing what lies behind.
I was smiling when I was reading parts of your insight as my sound class just started (I am taking film classes in Colorado Film School)and my instructor was pointing out the same thing – sound not being a priority. When it comes to big budgets, things apparently become easier (in usa.)
The mantra here – if you don’t get it right on the set – you can’t fix it in post, which even the great Holman’s book specifies. So the sound guys are extremely focused in getting that right. And my admiration for you is even higher working in our country.
It’s tremendous how you do what you do in the given circumstances. And it’s sad that despite the best of equipment, we keep having the worst of attitude.
I was thinking of ‘Sholay’; everyone raves about the film, but…it’s the sound that really gets you in, and the best part – you don’t even notice it. The echo of the gunshot, the sound of the flip of coin, the train seeming so real courtesy the sound it had…
I am sure that by being insistent and persistent (though it could be very tough against the ‘noise floor’ existing amongst the powers-that-be) you guys keep making things better.
May you have all the appropriate dynamic range!
Hi Dileep… wonderful post. Very true, pretty much all you write about. Have reached a stage where i prefer to see a print only in the Lab and never again in a cinema hall (or heaven forbid, a satellite telecast) for fear of completely breaking down and crying like a baby!!! Months of hard work goes down the drain in the exhibition stage. Unfortunately we have no theatre standards and if we had any, no ways to enforce them. THX like specs need to be brought in both for picture as well as sound quality..
The wonder is that all the technicians still keep slaving away to give their best to the films they work on – keep it up guys!
Excellent views.
I would like to know from the experts, as to how the sound recording used to happen in the olden days in Hindi FilM Industry. Was every film dubbed by artists, lateron ? When did the Sync technology come into Hindi Films ?
Thanks a lot for writing the truth…Dileep…As a fresher to the industry i believe that all of need to act as a unit and not accept wrongs what so ever . Lets make our own group and keep our terms on the table.Atleast this way we can get uniformity in the technical part of sound which ever be the studio. The reason this has prevailed so long is just because we don’t act together for our rights.