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Monday, April 07, 2008
Flickr Pro
I've finally decided to pay for something that's an online service. I've gone Pro on Flickr. Check out my pictures here. Having invested in a யானை of a camera, might as well get the அங்குசம்!
Oh! One of the advantages of working where I do is the facility to get pictures of things such as this. 
Seemingly innocuous, retro cool even, but certainly, utterly, even meaninglessly fetishistic... a little piece of Tamil movie history. If interested I could actually get you a list of songs recorded on this machine, from the engineers who did most of the recordings.
Labels: Film, Photos, Tech, Work
Thursday, October 04, 2007
I ravvu de Japaneesu!
Do not miss the commentators!
Labels: Links, Tech, Video, WOW
Friday, May 25, 2007
And because the grapes were sour
Two areas of film practice where I believe I have demonstrable and transmissible skills are in location sound recording and production management. And as sod would have it, these are precisely the disciplines where the industry I work in chooses to display maximum inertia.
Let us take Synch-sound recording for example. There have been a few attempts at it, and it is precisely these so-called attempts that the nay-sayers use to show how impossible it is to practice proper synch-sound recording here. Here is my take on this. Location sound recording is a craft that needs to be practised by trained professionals. OK, so we import a few recordists, WTF? But here is the deal: just like every other craft in the films, this too does not work in isolation.
Who does your so very crucial clapper: Some random errand-boy assistant director, and not the same person everytime. The clapper is a crucial technical task best left to a technician. I prefer a member of the camera team do it. They know the lens and the cameraman.
Announcements: They are too random and not very clear with directors preferring to blare over the PA than give calm direct instructions. And please be advised, you are not saving any film stock by compromising on the announcement/clap. You're merely protracting post-production.
Reports and continuity notes: What goes on the board and what goes on the sheets are very crucial when it comes to synchronising the rushes and naming sub-clips. A script supervisor is not some guy who you reserve to do the prompting.
The attitude: Fixing it in the dub is fallacious and is the path to ruin. Also, when you do a recce, remember not to shoot 1890 period pieces next to PH road. Also remember that sound is half your movie.
With a system like this, no sound recordist or boom operator can make magic. Then the unreachable grapes... oh they are sour!
Labels: Education, Film, Tech, Work
Saturday, March 03, 2007
A desk-top I desperately need
Seen something similar twice before: one a video of some Canadian (I think) college guys demonstrating a lab project, second in Spielberg's Minority Report.
Now, Brian Lam at Gizmodo might be right when he points to "the inverse relationship of proper ergonomics and proper viewing distance on such a setup", but in my line of work, this sort of a thing would be a godsend. So much for geeky wowdroolmultitouchwanking.
I spent a good part of last week snipping, labelling, taping, ordering, re-labelling, matching, tagging, checking, and arranging strips of paper to schedule 11-member crews (from a list of 29 persons) to work over three weeks to make 20 short films. Sometimes all that jugglery and anal attention to detail can be pretty fulfilling, Zen even; but most of the time you really feel that your desk could do with some 'memory', that you don't have to take down every little permutation down to cross-reference or reconstruct later.
