Aural fixation

Baradwaj Rangan spends an afternoon discussing sound with the team of ‘Jigarthanda’, which uses Dolby Atmos technology.

Before we go any further, we need to listen to a Creation story, the Dolby version. In the beginning, man created the screen and the sights. And then he said, Let there be sound. And there was, at first, mono – a single speaker, in the middle of the theatre, behind the screen. Then we moved to Stereo, with a dedicated channel for dialogue, and two additional speakers to the left and the right, which created a better spread of sound. Then came Dolby Surround– as the name suggests, the sound surrounded us.

With the next upgrade, called 5.1, the theatre was split into two “sound zones,” if you will. If a helicopter travelled from right to left on screen, its sound was first heard from the speakers in the right half of the theatre, and then it moved to the speakers on the left. For the first time, there was movement of sound across the audience. Then came 7.1, with even more definition, as the theatre was now split into four zones – the sound travelled from the speakers on the left side to the speakers on the back wall (left) to the speakers on the back wall(right) to the speakers on the right side.

And now, there’s Dolby Atmos, which was first experienced in the Pixar animated feature Brave, in 2012. This isn’t about channels anymore, but about sound emanating from specific speakers. The sound of the helicopter isn’t just in the left side of the theatre or the right side – it’s now heard in Speaker 1, then Speaker 2, then Speaker 3… And for the first time, there are speakers above the audience. So the helicopter can also be heard over your head. Or think rain. With earlier technologies, we used to hear the sound of rain from the sides of the theatre. Now, because the “rain sound” can be restricted to the overhead speakers, we can hear the rain fall over us, the way it does in life. Karthik Subbaraj, the director of Pizza (the first south Indian movie mixed in 7.1), has used this technology in his second film, Jigarthanda, which he described as a gangster movie that unfolds in Madurai.

I met Subbaraj, last week, with his team – sound designers Vishnu Govind and Sreesankar, sound mixer Rajakrishnan, and Dolby consultant Dwarak Warrier. S Venkatraghavan, Cinema Sales Manager – South at Dolby Laboratories, was also present. We sat in a “mix theatre,” before a large screen and an L-shaped console with a million buttons. Speakers jutted out from the walls. Imagine a theatre with no seats. This is where these “sound guys” do the things they do to make the silent visuals come to life. This is where the wind begins to sound like wind, the rain like rain, a gunshot like a gunshot. They also work on the dialogue tracks, raising and lowering volumes according to how close to the camera a character is in relation to others. Subbaraj told me that many scenes in Jigarthanda were shot in old-style houses in Madurai, which had high ceilings. So, after the shooting was completed (not during, because of the noise levels on the sets), the sound guys went to those locations and captured the ambient sound – for instance, the street sounds heard from inside the house – and also got an idea of how voices would sound, with echoes or reverberations, when spoken from various corners of a room. They then used this knowledge while tweaking the dialogue tracks.

Warrier said, “Apart from dialogue-mixing, most of our film makers don’t give enough thought to the possibilities of sound in storytelling at the scripting stage or during the filming process, and in most cases, what you get to hear in the theatre could be the ‘first draft’ as far as the ‘sound track’ is concerned. The sound guys need to be consulted during the scripting stage itself.” That’s what Subbaraj did. He wrote a draft of the script with the plot and the characters and then handed it to the sound guys. They looked at the script and suggested that the film be mixed in Dolby Atmos. Rajakrishnan told me, “If you know the movie is going to be mixed in Atmos, you can add more elements to give more detailing.”

Rajakrishnan designed the sound for Thalaivaa, which was the first Tamil movie that was mixed in Dolby Atmos. That wasn’t a “native” mix, though – in the sense that the sound mixing wasn’t done from scratch in this technology. The sound was converted to Dolby Atmos after the final mix was done, much like how a film is shot in 2D and later converted to 3D. Villa, the sequel to Pizza, was the first film in Tamil to be natively mixed in Dolby Atmos. Now, there’s Jigarthanda. After the inputs from the sound guys, Subbaraj “tweaked the script.” He said, “If I’m convinced, if it’s not going to change or spoil the script, then I’ll add these elements.”

One scene in the original script had a single-take shot that begins in a motel and ends as a character walks into a restroom. Vishnu Govind told me, “In a long, unbroken shot like that, we can show the passage of sound.” And so the script was rewritten. Now the character begins walking from the kitchen of a restaurant, goes through a theatre and then ends up in the theatre’s restroom. Sounds from all these locations ended up in the mix. The sound guys also suggested that the scene would be enhanced by rain, so that was worked in too. I asked them how this was different from the tracking shot that opened Guna, where the camera takes in – without a cut – the sights and sounds around a Hyderabad whorehouse. Venkatraghavan said, “Earlier, with a film like Guna, you could just fade in and fade out the sound [in accordance with the movement of the camera]. Now, when this character is walking through the passage in the theatre, you’ll hear a song from the film that’s playing inside on just one of the speakers around you.”

Some of these inputs influenced the props in the film. For a scene that involved a motorcycle, the sound guys suggested that instead of using a modern-day Pulsar, an eighties-style Kawasaki RTZ would give a more “interesting” sound. And some of the inputs happened during the mixing, after the film was shot. In another scene set in a theatre, the sound guys suggested using different fans for different speakers – so on one speaker, you have a fan that runs smoothly, on another speaker you have a fan that’s making a noise. “There’s a portion where all the fans are switched off,” Rajakrishnan said. And you hear, from each speaker, the distinct sound of a particular fan coming to a stop. “You can never get this kind of effect in 5.1.”

I asked them if the viewer was going to be able to absorb all this information. Warrier said, “The first time you see the film, the sound is not supposed to take you out of it. But at a subconscious level, you will absorb all these inputs.” That is, of course, how cinema is supposed to work in theory – as a confluence of invisible effects. But technicians, inevitably, see films differently – everything, to them, is visible. Rajakrishnan told me how thrilling it was to watch 300: Rise of an Empire. “The first 20 minutes of the film was a literal demonstration of what Dolby Atmos is capable of.” Subbaraj recalled watching Three Monkeys (the Turkish film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan) in a festival. “It’s an intimate family drama. The film has no music at all, except over the end credits. Otherwise, it’s just the sound effects. I could see how they enhanced the emotional quotient of the film.”

I asked him if the increasing awareness of what sound can do might reduce the dependence on background music to shape the viewer’s response. He said that after the sound guys were done with the mixing for that kitchen-theatre-restroom scene, they sent the audio files to the music director Santhosh Narayanan. When Subbaraj and Narayanan saw the scene with the sound, they decided to leave the scene without any background music. “So yes,” he said. “The dependence on background music will decrease as directors use real sound to project emotion.” Rajakrishnan said, “But even with the score, you can add a number of tracks. You can have more clarity – not just left speaker and right speaker. If it’s a song, it can be everywhere.”

I asked Subbaraj if he’d go for Dolby Atmos if he made a smaller movie, say a rom-com, next. He said he would, because the impact is greater. But then, so is the work. “Initially, I thought Jigarthanda would not involve as much work as Pizza, because that was a horror film. We wanted to scare the audience with the effects. This is just an action-drama. But slowly I found that there was much more work to be done here. Pizza was an indoor movie, but here there were many live locations and we even shot candid in some places. We needed to recreate all that ambience.” Rajakrishnan said that he took 15 days to do the sound mixing for Pizza, whereas Jigarthanda took a month. I told him I hoped he got paid more. He laughed.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Posted in: Cinema: Tamil