Katte,Kotte,Techche

 In Telugu, there is a pithy way to describe Ramayana in three words. “Katte,Kotte,Techche”. ‘Katte’ literally means ‘tying’. Here it refers to the tying of knot between Rama and Sita. ‘Kotte’ literally means hitting (Rama hitting Ravana). ‘Techche’ is to bring something (I think he brought Sita to Ayodya and then left her.. I am a bit weak in mythology). I am just pointing out how a story is being broken into 3 simple acts since a long time. Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution.
Sceenwriting in movies is supposed to strictly follow this three act structure. Unlike a novel, a screenplay is not supposed to ramble and digress because of time constraints of a movie.The current post examines movies in which stories don’t follow the traditional structure.
 
No Structure
“I don't know what the hell a third act is”- Charlie Kuffman
The most allergic film maker to the traditional structure in English movies AFAIK is Charlie Kauffman. He made a film called “Being John Malkovich”. Now each movie has a premise. The one line “what if”.  For example for Godfather it would be: what if the youngest son in a Mafia family had to solve the inter Mafia rivalry problem. But in the case of Being John Malkovich there is no concrete premise. Charlie Kauffman initially started off with a premise “what if a man who falls in love with someone who is not his wife". Then he added multiple crazy twists at several points in the movie which are not at all related to what has transpired before in the story. As a result there is no concrete premise. In fact some critics say that it has so many ideas that several movies could be made from this final movie. He just threw the rule book out of the window and made the film his own way.
The reason why most of us would jump out of their seats while watching movies is because something unexpected/uncomfortable happens. There is ample scope for such instances when the story structure is not restricted to any rules. 

A Scene in Being John Malkovich

Reverse Structure
Consider Memento. The director chose reverse narration. If the movie had 10 scenes then the 10th scene is shown first and after the 10^th scene ends, the beginning of the 9^th scene is shown. So until the 9^th scene ends you don’t know why the character behaves a certain way at the beginning of 10^th scene!!  

The director chose this narration to put audience into the shoes of  Leonard(the Protagonist).Audience too struggle to make sense of what is happening and should think like detectives just like Leonard.The director is not just entertaining the audience by telling them a story albeit in reverse. He is also enabling them to solve a puzzle!!   

Circular Structure
Quentin Tarantino heavily borrows from Novel’s narrative structure. He even segments the story into chapters and jumbles up the chapters in the movie. What’s more, his movie Pulp Fiction’s narrative has a circular structure. That is because if the jumbled up chapters are arranged chronologically, the first and the last chapters appear consecutively!! Of the total 8 chapters, the movie starts with the 4^th chapter and ends with the 5^th chapter with the rest of them in between thus completing a circle!! 

 

HaHaHa

The Recruitment

On December 3^rd 2008, Jack, a teenager in United States was browsing through an upcoming movie website. A new page appeared in the site which had a hammer game and teddy bear toys. Each toy had an address on it located in a number of cities around the US. The note on the game asked him to go to a specific address where he would get something special. It was first come, first serve. Jack was supposed to say his name was Robbin Banks. He went to the location and it turned out to be a Bakery. After saying the code name he was given a cake which had a phone number written on it along with the note “call me now”. After calling the number there was cell phone noise coming from the cake. Jack dug up the cake to find a cell phone, a joker card and a note !! it read as follows

“Wow, you really took the cake! Now, put the icing on it: call (phone number) immediately from this phone and THIS PHONE ONLY. Do NOT give this phone number to anyone else. Let's hope your fellow goons come through as well as you. Once all the layers are in place, you'll all get your just desserts. I'm a man of my word” 

Upon calling the number on the note, an audio message followed:

"Thank you for calling Rent-a-Clown! Now we know who you are!"

A text message is also received from humanresources@whysoserious.com:

“Good work, clown! Keep this phone charged and with you at all times. Don't call me, I'll call you...eventually hahahaha”...

Well no prices for guessing the name for which this publicity stunt was pulled. This was part of a sequence of events in “The Dark Knight” marketing campaign. At this phase, the Joker has now real people recruited to his army who are awaiting his call!!  

Marketing of The Dark knight

The marketing for the movie was based on the concept of Alternate Reality Game. The primary objective of the campaign was to tell the audience (mostly the fans of the franchise) the story of what happened between the end of Batman Begins and the beginning of The Dark Knight. This had to be done while making them feel as if they are part of this story. In other words, creating an alternate reality based on the fictional Gotham city and empowering them as citizens. Gotham city was simulated by creating websites for various institutions like Cab company, Churches, TV stations and Subway. 

The campaign had several phases starting with the revelation of the Joker’s face to the launch of the fictional “Gotham Times” newspaper to the Ringing cakes stunt to the Election rally for one of the movie character Harvey Dent. The objective was to increase the number of people exposed to the movie with each phase. 

One more amazing example of how the campaign simulated the movie world is the “Harvey Dent Campaign challenge”. It was launched to draw female audiences as they thought the actor playing this character had high appeal among them.The campaign required participants to submit their contact information on the Ibelieveinharveydent.com site. The site was regularly updated with instructions on how to go about supporting the Harvey Dent. It also used live audio content in the form of phone calls in which  pre recorded voice of Harvey Dent instructed the participants about how and when to organise public rallies !! It was a success since the audience participation increased by 38% at this stage of which most of them were women.

Result

Till Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the movie held the record for the biggest opening weekend revenue of all time at $158.4 million. Nearly 10 million participated in the marketing through mobile content, webpages, Interactive games, artifacts of movie etc. In the Imdb site 27000 people voted on the movie after just the first day. It became the first film to be ranked #1 on the site within two days of its theatrical release!!

  

Let there be light..... ok that’s enough

An epic scene in Lawrence of Arabia

Pick a movie you have seen a few years earlier. What do you recollect? My guess is that you would have hardly remembered the story. Most often what will leave a lasting impression are the visuals..

In the earlier days the metaphor of cinematography was `painting with light'. The literal translation of the word cinematography, which derives from Greek, however is writing with light and motion. This post is a small illustration of light and motion in cinematography.

According to the cinematographer of Godfather, the impact of the brassy yellow imagery was so big that it became the default color for many period movies which were released after Godfather

Painting with light

In the earlier days of Hollywood when black and white films are made, the dominance of leading actors meant that cameramen were required to do mainly close ups and medium shots. This was needed to make the actors look good. Sometimes the leading lady had little more light on her than others so that she would stand out. (Guess this explains why I was madly in love with Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn)

In the movie In Cold Blood (based on the novel of the same name), there is a scene in which the convict who is about to be hanged is standing near a glass window and there is rain pouring outside. As death looms, the convict is sad and telling the Chaplain how things went wrong in his life. We are accustomed to seeing people in such situations usually having an emotional outburst. But here the convict talks in a very unemotional tone. He doesn't cry but we see some thing strange. something similar to tears are  slowly dripping across his face...

what actually happened was that the rain outside the window was artificially created and apparently the fan which was supposed to blow the artificial rain against the window was instead blowing the spray from the rain against it. When light hit the window, the movement of spray water dripping slowly along the glass window is projected onto his face. As a result it appears as if the tears are dripping slowly across his face. The visuals are crying for the convict although he maintains a straight face. The cinematographer Conrad Hall says luck played a huge part in this and none of this was conceived by him.

Writing with light and motion

In the movie Jaws, the camera was placed very close to the sea water level in many scenes. As the movie progresses, the audience increasingly feel that may be the shark is just lurking under the water. It’s a very interesting illustration of just a camera angle evoking an emotion in the audience.

In the movie Goodfellas, Robert De Niro plans to dispense off Ray Liotta and the latter comes to know of it. In their last meeting they both are sitting in a Café talking and trying to outguess each other. The camera tracks back and at the same time zooms in. As a result a peculiar effect is created where you see the same people in the frame but the restaurant and car in the background get closer and closer. The cinematographer’s intention was to subtly convey to the audience that the world around these people is changing and their relation is no longer going to be the same.

This kind of shot was coined as Reverse tracking shot after the movie

Vroooom Vroooom.. Dishkao Dishkao.. Dishum Dishum

Why do so many people like watching movies? Apart from the fact it is a combination of so many arts, it has the power to transport us into some faraway place in the world or an altogether different century in the past. It makes us vicariously experience the movie character’s life. Sound effects are one of the many elements in movie which help in making this possible. This post celebrates the role of sound in movies. 

 

Sound may not appear to be as significant as background music or dialogues. But without it the experience is not the same. It’s like a side kick to a hero in a movie. Like a bass guitar in music. Like a papad u crave for along with the thali.. like a paint to the red bricks of a fifty year old campus with great infrastructure and architecture (yes i suck at metaphors) 

Sound in our Desi movies

Heard this anecdote from a prof in an Intellectual property rights class. A Hindi film maker (i think it was Ramesh sippy) during a movie shoot, canceled a shot where in a lady pours Tea into a cup. He said that the tea was not hot enough and ordered to bring hot tea. When the dumbfounded assistants told him that it was film and temperature cannot be captured in it, the director reasoned that a fresh hot tea makes a very distinct sound which a cold tea cannot!! In an another instance during the shoot of Mughal E Azam, there is a scene where Emperor Akbar throws a huge number of pearls on the floor after a dance by madhubala (anarkali). At that time fake pearls were used to create the sound. The director K.Asif grimaced and said "Mazaa nahi aaya. The sound of real pearls hitting the marble stone is something else and this is not the same." So he ordered huge quantities from a place Basra in Iraq to create the scene. Film makers are mad (The whole paragraph is copy righted to the prof :D)

Talking of mad film makers, Ram Gopal varma is one guy who has great sound effects in his movies. He was the pioneer in live recording of various sound effects like cars tyres squeaking, fire crackling etc in telugu films. Before him, a traditional fight in a telugu film only had dishum dishum. After that we at least a got a better replacement in variations of “thuddd” and whiplash sounds when a hero grimaces and punches the villain. 

The subconscious effect 

In chasing sequences, breathing sound, the rustling of clothes and heartbeat sounds are frequently used when a person is shown running. This intensifies the feeling you would get and puts us in the situation of the victim and makes you feel as if you are being chased. 

In the movie Dark Knight the Batmobile's sound was achieved by recording big race boat engines. But what is interesting is that large animal roars and growls were also added to it to make it more effective. Something similar is done by the same guy Richard king, in the movie Inception. In the scene where Cobb and Adrianne sit at a coffee shop and the dream disintegrates around them, to create the sound effects he mixed the normal explosion sounds of the debris with moans of people, whale sounds and other animal sounds. The objective was to subconsciously create fear in the minds of the audience.  

One more amazing example. A young boy is looking at his braces in the mirror and suddenly the braces creep out of his mouth and start entangling him. To create the sound for this the sound designer recorded thin wires scraping across certain rough surfaces mixed with sand shuffling in a wooden box and as an undertone he added the sound of a dentist’s drill. His reasoning was that along with the background music and other sounds nobody will consciously realize the sound of the dentist’s drill but it will arouse the subconscious fear which is in all of us could have been embedded in as children as we see the drill coming towards our mouth.

Innovation 

In the movie Saving private Ryan there is no music throughout the whole beach landing section of the soldiers. Just through the raw sound of bullets zinging by in air and water, clanging on the helmet (and thudding on the forehead of course), the director managed to make us sick in the gut. The filmmakers found a weapons collector who owned original examples of all the personal weapons seen in the movie, and those weapons were used to make the sounds. Some people say they found themselves ducking from bullets and smelled gun powder while watching the movie in surround sound !!   

Guess his last words

What if you have no reference point to create Sound? For example, how do we know what a dinosaur sounded like? This is where you can have a lot of fun. In Jurassic Park the growl of the Dinosaur is actually a mix of several different animal growls and the grinding noise of a power saw. Click here to listen to it. You can clearly make out the power saw sound at the end. Similarly in Raiders of the Lost Ark in one of the opening scenes, Indiana Jones is fleeing a runaway boulder. That noise was actually the sound editor's Honda Civic rolling down his driveway!!

On an ending note, because we get so used to some sounds, silence and the anticipation of certain sounds are used to great effect in suspense movies. As Alfred Hitchcock puts it “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”