The Frozen Generator
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Have you heard of shooting a sync sound film without a silent generator? I guess not unless it’s a silent film.
Well we did just that during the shoot of Frozen. We shot a sync sound film with a 125 kv open generator.
The time we decided that we wanted to shoot a sync sound film in icy heights of Himalayas, people thought we were crazy. How would we take a generator to Ladakh at a height of around 12000 feet from Mumbai?
The generator comes loaded on a van. Now Ladakh has two approach roads one from Rohtang Pass and the other from Kargil. These roads involve driving through few of the highest passes (average height of around 14000ft) in the world.
We were shooting in the month of Jan-Feb 2006. I got the idea of getting the generator van in before the month of Oct 2005 and keep it there till we arrived in Jan 2006 as the roads close for winters for six months. Well I thought it was brilliant. After doing some hard bargaining with the biggest silent generator supplier in Mumbai film world we arrived at per diem rate for the Driver and the Operator. Well to my dismay I came to know the very next day that the van driver’s wife barged into the office of the generator supplier and threatened everybody with dire consequences if the hubby dear was sent on this mission impossible .I had not imagined the “Wife Factor”.
For us mission failed. We couldn’t find another generator or the brave mad guys and the roads got closed.
We started thinking wild. How about using wind energy, solar energy, how about flying in a generator van, etc. I went to the extent of talking to the local solar panel suppliers in Leh (capital of Ladakh). They asked us how much power we required? When we told them the requirement we were told to cover a soccer field with solar panels. Apparently they had the means to supply power for maybe 4-5 lamps in a house.
Thus we decided to “adjust” with the normal generator. A big, ugly and monstrous 125kv generator from Kargil wWe tried it out in the month of Nov 2005 and after we hid it behind a small hillock it sounded perfect. We tried to hear with our sound equipments, nothing. Mission accomplished or it seemed thus.
We started the shoot. And horror of horrors, because of the long distance between the actual location, which was the main house, and the behind the hillock generator there was a huge voltage drop. The big lights were just enough to shoot candle light parties. And another shock was to see the cable wires getting snapped like matchsticks because of cold, it was minus 25 to minus 30 degrees Celsius in night.
The shoot had started without lights. We shot only in the daylight. The intelligent people started giving ideas. Why don’t we bring the generator closer and dig a ditch to put it sort of underground? But we had seen during the construction of the house that the ground was so hard that it would have taken days to dig.
We scouted around and we discovered a natural ditch, sort of a small valley, closer to the house. We got the crane and deposited the generator there. We draped a specially made muffler over the exhaust pipe, the main source of noise. The distance was perfect, the sound bare minimum but it was visible in wide shots. Again we had brainstorming sessions, mind you all this was happening along with the shoot and even in nights. So decided to make a small house over the generator with precision marked holes to have the air circulation and avoid the blowouts. It looks like a big piece of rock but you can’t make out that there is a very big generator hidden under it. To avoid the breaking up of the cables we procured the local heavy-duty cables and taped the whole length of it.
Viola, we had a silent generator on location. And the perfect sync sound film called Frozen. The credit goes to the location sound recordist Tenny and then the Sound Designer Vivek Sachinadandan and the Music Director John P. Varkey of taking care of the “silent hum” of the “Shaadi ka Generator”.
Did I forget to tell you about the Frozen diesel in the generator? Well that’s for another day…
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
Wow..Wow..And here I am acting like a total Wuss thinking of shooting with a limited budget and no equipment in the city. You have inspired me with this story.
Kudos to all of the team for the guts, gumption and ghurdha to do this. This is one of the main reasons I love filmmaking or this industry so much. The innovativeness of the peopel in this industry
Bravo Shivajee Nanbha and this has got me mighty curious to watch Frozen. Any idea when this is slated for a Non Mumbai Release (I live in Bangalore)
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A very good honest post. People like me sit and easily criticize a movie when it comes up..but we never know how much effort actually goes into making even a small scene. Posts like these are eye-openers on the movie making effort.
Keep such post coming
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i’m feeling cold just thinking about what you all went thru to get the generator to work.. but that in itself is one of the beauties of independent filmmaking. it forces you to be resourceful and stretches your imagination to the limits. no doubt from the creativity of your team that you all did exactly that. this is the stuff of gold. keep em coming…
and also, how about the DP’s take on lighting for the film.. fancy filters can make ladakh look beautiful in color (a la lakshya), but it must be a different task entirely to do the same in b&w, i’d imagine?
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@Deepak Venkateshan
I think the lesson is not to make films with your own money or for that matter friends’,families etcs money. Mira Nair told me ki sadak par aa jaoge. I told her that who would have put money in a script like Frozen? Newcomers,right from Director to the first timers like all the HODs of the major departments. And Mr Danny however good an actor he is,it is a fact that he doesnt sell.
The nuts and bolt film making is dying a slow death in India. Frozen is the most awarded Indian film abroad in last 8-9 months. But here the distributers tell me that I dont have an audience in India. They are not ready to take it even when I am not asking for any money. So Venkat it will be sheer luck if you could watch it on big screen in India.Meanwhile continue watching the type of films we are churning out week after week.
About my future…can you imagine just a few days back a very senior executive from a very big company asked me to send him the list of top 10 films I love. You know why he was asking me that…so that we can pick a line from there or make a “remake”.He even asked me regional film bhi chalega. I had no answer for that. I did send him a list of 20 films.
So I would say best of luck with your endevour,just be careful.
@Sudhir Nair
Thank you for reading the post. But continuing with what I wrote for Venkat…I have learnt the art of making a film but selling a film is a different ball game. Whatever is the destiny of Frozen…we(the whole crew) made an honest film and the credit goes to all those people who were associated with making this vision come true.Did I mention it any where that Cannes wanted it last year but I hadnt had money to make a print on time.
@Striker
Well we found a solution of fighting the cold and it was to stop talking about it. And more than the cold it was the rarity of oxygen at high altitudes. I used my experience of mountains in taking care of the crew.If I could bring out the making of Frozen out somehow…many of you might find it more exciting,with all the thrills,chills and spills…
About the lighting…one of the points of doing a black and white film was to counter the blue sky and a very bright daytime light. In color it gives a feeling of summer(even if the temperatures are around -25degrees C).As I said in one of the other posts that we wanted to play with the grays. We achieved that in DI.
Shanker’s Words…quote…
The main advantage of making the set as authentic and dedicated as possible was to minimize the use of lighting to create light and shade. More often than not, we used two or three 1K fresnels on dimmers supported by firelamps as practicals to light up the night interiors. Sometimes, a single light bounced off a white board behind the camera would suffice in reproducing the range of greys that existed in the set, something the eye could see with reasonable illumination. We could put the camera anywhere and it would look great. It was so designed that we could shoot 360 degrees without having to shift anything or bring anything extra…unquote…
Both me and Shanker are still photographers too. So we were very clear what exactly we wanted.We had taken lots of stills earlier and tried different stock to come with the right combinations.
And yes the production designing also played a major role. Siddharth and Sonali understood exactly what we wanted and we could create the house and the interior was mind boggling.We were told earlier that even the Ladakhis dont construct houses in winters who are we to even think about doing that. Well we made a house in the month of December and since it was designed by us we knew exactly the space for camera to move and artists to perform. We had a thermocol version in my office in Mumbai.
Yeah it doesnt make a difference how we made a film if it comes out to be a crappy film.But the very fact that it has played in around 21 International festivals(and counting) all around the globe does say something about the final product.(the last sentence was out of context striker)…:-)
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shivajee, whether or not the film will work on a personal level for most people is debatable.. and you know this bc of our discussions at IFFLA (: let’s take that away for a second and look at the sheer effort that goes behind a movie like this on an independant budget, and frozen shines thru as an example of why it takes brass balls to be a filmmaker.
no worries about the last sentence, mate. in fact i’m on the cheering squad for it and have already suggested another festival to pick it up. i guess you’ll know which one when you see me coming up to you after the screening. until then, wishing you the best with all that globetrotting…
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I have attended at least 51 Q and A sessions,the last one being at SFO at the International film festival. People sat till 12 at night on a Monday evening to chat with me.They were surprised that such a film could come out of India. And when I told them at the intro that it hasn’t got any song and dance sequences they all cheered and clapped.I am amazed at what people across the globe think about the type of films we make.I am not commenting about what others are doing. I am just one film old director and whose film hasnt even got a release.But it does pain when people back home tell me to make remakes. It reminds me of the time when I was making “channa vey” the album with Kunal Ganjawala and people told me to make remixes.Well the song still plays.I think we need more guys with brass balls or frozen balls and guys like you to cheer us…cheers…
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great going shivajee. fight the good fight, and don’t do the remakes. i am sure you will be able to raise funding through european television and distribution for your next film.
good luck and keep the posts coming.
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Wow, this reminded me of the details Sidney Lumet talked with while remembering his film shoots. I like the fact that the talks are not about stars, for a change. :-)
Would like to see your stills work. Can I see them somewhere?
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Amazing!!!! -25 to -30 degrees!!!!! Holy horsecrap! Delhi’s winters are bad enough for me; I’d have gone potty out there!
Brass balls sounds like an understatement. Make that Iron Man’s gold-titanium balls
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Kudos to the spirit…
just some technical questions : Was the genset equipped with water-heater ? ( or was it an air cooled genset of such big size ? they dont make air cooled gensets of that size anymore )……also the batteries had to be NickelCadmium…notmal Lead-Acid batteries will not work in that kind of temperatures. Could be that both were present, since the genset was from Kargil?…would love to know about the diesel problems too :-)
Normally in the industry , the soundproofing of the genset is at what decibel – 80 dbA at 1 meter or much silent version of 70 dbA at 1 meter , or super soundproof ?
Just curious…
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