A few secrets of Digital Post-Production

I have just finished post-production on a documentary.
Before I go further, let me explain this a bit. I'm a trained professional filmmaker, which in India meant that I was based in a big filmmaking centre (Mumbai in my case), where I did have access to quality technicans and hardware for most of my working life. When we were based in East Africa, my wife had acquired a DV set-up based on Apple computers and Final Cut Pro. A few hiccups aside, the set up worked smoothly.
Then, a couple of years back, I shifted base to my native town of Meerut in UP. When I had documentaries to make here, the option was to go to my known territory- the big centres of film production. The budgets on the projects at hand did not allow for my staying in a big city and paying for the editing, so I really had no option but to find post-production options in Meerut.
There is a reasonable amount of video production in Meerut, as in most smaller towns I assume. The biggest guys are the wedding people, in their off season they rent out their equipment, are your best friends, but at that time its a no-go zone. The wedding crowd mostly edits on Adobe Premiere Pro, though Sony Vegas and Grass Valley Edius are also around. There maybe a few Final Cut Pros somewhere, but I haven't met them.
There are cable TV Channels that do local programming, they work with Sony Vegas mostly.
There is a local film school that has Apple Macs and Final Cut Pro, but they do not have the time to let outsiders edit.
So I went back to my friends, Gaurav and Snigdh Bhatnagar of the local Arena Animation franchise. Yes, they were ready to help but their machines were all busy with their own productions, but they said they would organise something.
The 'something' turned out to be two of their recent students armed with laptops loaded with Adobe Premiere Pro.
We began in earnest, organising the footage into bins. Interestingly, we did this using VLC player with the clips still on the desktop. This was because the footage had been shot on MTS,a Sony patented AVCHD format that currently no non-linear edit systems appear to read. We were using older, pirated versions of Adobe Premiere Pro, so all the footage had to be converted to MPEG-4 before editing.
The first step going into the editing was to convert the footage without losing much visual and audio quality. This was an adventure as all kinds of format convertors turn up on the internet, but the free ones would kill almost all picture quality. Finally, we settled down to a video format convertor and used it bit by bit, as it just took so much time to convert.
The edit itself was an absolute nightmare as due to the smaller RAM of the consumer level laptop you could not playback what you had edited. You could playback only the last two shots before the machine 'hung'. Then you waited, let the machine sort itself  or sometimes re-start it before moving further with the edit. by which you'd lost the rhythm of the whole thing.
Reminded me of film editing days, when you marked on the Moviola or Steenbeck, went back to the editing table and did the physical 'cut'. And then returned to the Moviola or Steenbeck to play and check your cut. If it meant a change, ahhh, a long story began.
It was a broadly parallel process in the days of video tape, where you couldn't go back and change a cut without dislocating all the cuts that were further up.
After all that non-linear edit systems, especially our smoothly running Final Cut Pro were like a dream. You could cut in a few seconds, move on with your thought process and sense of rhythm intact.
But here I was, at the end of 2015 struggling with a system where I couldn't see more than a few cuts at a time.
Somehow, we reached a 'cut', using all my patience and skills as a teacher of filmmaking.
Now, just have to see how audiences react to it all.

Re-Writing a script

When writing the first draft of a script, it is for me a quick process of doing the right kind of preparatory work(writing the scene outline, the character sketches etc).  With a first draft in hand, you proclaim that you've written a script, but its actually a first draft of a script.
Then you kind of leave it for a while, maybe get reactions to it from other people if you're brave enough. (Really, the early stages of writing seem to require enormous courage-to overcome your fear of other people's reactions- or is it simply the fear of rejection?).
Anyway, at some point the reactions have sunk in and you need to now change your script to incorporate all of them. Where do you begin?
I've have usually been lost at this stage of the script. I hold on to my first drafts as long as I can, maybe hoping that I won't have to re-write them.
Somewhere, reality bites: you will have to do the re-write, you owe it to the idea, to the characters and story that you want to tell. If you aren't motivated enough to want to spend time re-writing, why will audiences care about these characters and their story?
As you may have guessed, I'm in the midst of a re-write and am only recounting my struggles with the process. Scott Myers, an American who writes a wonderful scriptwriting blog GO INTO THE STORY, has lots to say about re-writing. So if you're trying to re-write your script, please follow his sage advice, not mine.
I come to re-writing from a background of documentary filmmaking, where I often shoot without a detailed script, then do a first version in the edit, which is mostly pretty 'rotten'. Then using the reactions to the first version, I take into consideration all reactions, no matter how negative they feel at the time. Slowly, I build up a second and often 'good enough' version. We fine-tune that with the client and hey you've got a documentary.
So I am following the same process here in re-writing, no one really has issues with the first draft, but I kind of know that something here needs more attention, or a character needs a bit more in their backstory. I've made my notes and now need to implement them in the re-write.
The only change is that I am now doing my re-write with dialogues in Hindi. Having lived in East Africa I used to write everything in English. Then I was introduced to the whole world of writing Hindi in the Latin script, mainly by young people over the phone (SMS and other messages). Now I feel confident enough of the process to try it on a full script- descriptions in English but dialogues in Hindi.
Now, on with the re-write.

A Lost Documentary: Santhara

While writing the last post on my diploma film GHERAO, I remembered a time when the sole film print of GHERAO was lost. FTII wouldn't make a new print unless I was prepared to buy it, which at that point was too much money for a struggling filmmaker like me. Technically, FTII 'lent' the filmmaker a print of his diploma against a deposit, which was returned when you returned the diploma film. So you borrowed your film whenever you needed to screen it. But now, with print 'lost' you couldn't borrow it anymore, couldn't show it to prospective clients/producers.

All that got sorted when the print was found at the NFDC later, and matters went back to normal.

All those memories led to my 'lost documentary'.

It was 1991 when a friend asked if I wanted to do any documentaries with a background of the Jain religion and culture, as he was part of a group starting a new TV Channel on that segment. As it happened, the next day the newspapers (still a source of 'news' in those days) had a small item about a Jain gentleman who was going into the state called 'Santhara'. Legally in India 'Santhara' means a person depriving himself of food (fasting) until death. Socially its a very different thing as you can only go for ' Santhara' if your family and your religious guru approves. Which means you can't compare 'Santhara' with suicide, they are very different things.

I asked my friend if I could do a documentary on this, and got a go-ahead. I found the family and the person, met them and go their approval too. The gentleman was over eighty years old, had had his third heart attack and was expected to survive perhaps a day or two. I interviewed the family, their doctor, the gentleman himself and their religious guru (a young Jain nun).

My old friend Ashwini Kaul did the camerawork, my wife edited the film, my old friend Chand did the voice-over. The completion of the documentary kept getting delayed for odd technical reasons. It was completed the day the gentleman passed away, almost like he didn't want the documentary to turn him into a hero.

The documentary was seen by a the family, the producers and a few other people. My friend and the financiers had some kind of a fall out, down to video-tapes exchanging hands. In the process, both assumed the other had a tape of the documentary. I had no copy as a VHS had been promised but never given to me.

I moved on to other jobs, where I did get a few queries from people about the documentary, which I passed on to my friend.

Years later I was head hunted by a company for a TV Channel job, went for the interview and it was with the people who had produced this documentary. In the interview we ended up only trying to figure out where the documentary could be and unfortunately came to no conclusions.

I went overseas shortly afterwards, concluding clearly that this was a 'lost' documentary.

I do talk about it to friends, but it remains one of those niggling lossses that irritates me no end.

Again one of those 'ifs' and 'buts' of life.

A Time to Write

After a long time, I'm settling down to write.

Writing is one of those things- when you do it regularly you have the time for it, when you get a break in the routine, then you can't seem to find the time.

This year I made a resolution- I must try and write a blog post a week. Its good practice, helps you trace where your time and your mind went in the year.

You could say the year is still new, so I can very well afford to make these proclaimations. The proof is in the writing.

So let's begin for the first blog post of the year.

GHERAO

My Diploma Film at FTII, made in 1984.

Technically, its my Post-Diploma Film as I already had a Diploma Film made as a part of my Diploma in Film Editing. That was a documentary called 'A FILM ABOUT COMPUTERS', but the year was 1982 and computers weren't talking points yet (Pre- PC days).

I got hold hold of a DVD copy of GHERAO recently. A friend got it smuggled out of FTII, no one really knows if any film print or video copy exist there anymore.

This copy is incomplete- the first reel is missing from a three reel film. So it's really a copy that can be viewed by people who already know the story.

The reason GHERAO was known a bit in 1984 was that it was one of the early student films to have a known Mumbai actor in it- Dr Sreeram Lagoo. For reasons that remain unknown to me to date, I wrote a script that was pretty uncastable by student film standards. Typically, as students we do films about young people and cast our friends, this one needed an elderly college principal as the central character.

Dr Lagoo, as a Puneite and a bilingual actor (Marathi and Hindi), used to come to Pune to do plays. I went to see after a show at Bal Gandharwa Theatre one Saturday, he asked me to meet him with the script the next day. So I went on a Sunday morning to his family home, he agreed to read the script and called me the next Sunday to meet him.

When I met him next week, he simply said when do you want to shoot, he gave me four days, one for outdoors and two for the indoors, plus a morning at Pune Station for the climax. I was thrilled, only that I didn't have a crew! Unlike the regular courses, this Post Diploma Course had only Directors, so we had to find our crew. Luckily FTII is always full of recent alumni who are avoiding being termed unemployed by sitting under the wisdom tree. So I got my old friends Niranjan Thade to do the camerawork and Sanjeev Punj to do the sound. My then fiancee, now long suffering wife, Sonal, was also around to edit and generally help with the production.

Casting the other actors was a problem, but finally Pune theatre actors stepped in and helped out. I think the opportunity to act alongside a legend and star like Dr Lagoo was the attraction.

The production was uneventful except that I learned how to direct different actors differently. The story in my mind was how Dr Lagoo would only work out the physicality of the role in the rehearsal and perform full on in the first take. This would rattle the other actors who assumed he would act as he had done in the rehearsals. After the first few shots, I took the others aside and told them to just watch Dr Lagoo in the first take, I would call it NG (No Good) and claim a technical problem. Then in the second take Dr Lagoo would act like the first one, but the others would pick up the tempo.

Incidentally, Ketan Mehta was shooting his film HOLI on the FTII campus in those days. Based on Mahesh Enkulchwar's play, the subject of HOLI was very near to GHERAO. To add to that there was a student strike at FTII in the middle of our production. And I got engaged shortly after completing shooting, so eventful times.

In those days we used to shoot with the Arri 3 cameras in 35mm, which made a royal racket at the time of shooting, but you dubbed the dialogues so all would be well eventually. I was given dates from October31-November 2 by Dr Lagoo for dubbing. As it happened October 31, 1984, was the date when our then Prime Minister was assassinated, throwing the country into turmoil. Dr Lagoo couldn't travel to Pune to dub.

We began looking at alternate dates for dubbing, but there was a crackdown on students due to another of our failed strikes. I had to finish the film by the end of December 1984, couldn't get Dr Lagoo's dates to dub within that. Reasoning that a finished film is better than no film at all, I finished GHERAO with camera noise in it.

Before that dear old Rajat Dholakia managed to compose background music for the film.

But the film remained a sort of half way house between complete and incomplete. A few friends and well wishers appreciated the film, but it wasn't really ready for prime-time. Would it have changed anything if it had been allowed to be finished? I don't know, its one of those 'ifs' of my life.

Now, watching the film after a long time (close to thirty years later), I can see its strengths- the storyline and my adaptation to the screen make a gripping narrative. Bits of shot taking and cutting are as good as any other film, even in black and white, non colour corrected video downgraded to DVD. Makes me proud of my work even today.

Isn't that an achievement?