Showreel

Trying to upload showreel to www.youtube.com/aratikadav.

Gulmohar (35 mm) 10 min film trailer feedback

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What all did you not like about the trailer - fonts, pacing ?
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Film Editing Resources

Kubrick was quoted as saying: "I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit."[3]
Edward Dmytryk stipulates seven "rules of cutting" that a good editor should follow:[4]
"Rule 1: Never make a cut without a positive reason."
"Rule 2: When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short."[5]
"Rule 3: Whenever possible cut 'in movement'."[6]
"Rule 4: The 'fresh' is preferable to the 'stale'."[7]
"Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action."[8]
"Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper 'matches'."[9]
"Rule 7: Substance first—then form."[10]
According to Walter Murch, when it comes to film editing, there are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are (in order of importance, most important first, with notional percentage values.):
Emotion (51%) — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?
Story (23%) — Does the cut advance the story?
Rhythm (10%) — Does the cut occur "at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'" (Murch, 18)?
Eye-trace (7%) — Does the cut pay respect to "the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame" (Murch, 18)?
Two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%) — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?
Three-dimensional space of action (4%) — Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the diegesis?
Murch assigned the notional percentage values to each of the criteria. "Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom."-Murch

Some good documentaries on editing:
 The Cutting Edge Magic of Movie Editing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJcQgQHR78Q

Some Good books:
1) The Technique of Film Editing- Karel Reisz and Gavin Miller- Focal Press 
2) In the blink of an eye - Walter Murch

Some of the good short films available on the net

Well since I have made 3 short films now, I have done considerable research on the short films available on the net that I have liked. This is like a central database. I might have forgotten a few but will keep updating.The list is in no particular order (the order in which they appear on my mind)

1) Miracle Fish
I really liked this oscar nominated film coz of the story. It took me by surprise at the end. It has a great staying power in your mind - good aftertaste.



2) Signs
Nothing profound but amazingly simple - amazing repeat value. Really well structured.



3) Spin
How a good story can be told in 8 minutes. Really good acting.


4) Father and Daughter
This is actually animated film but by far my favourite. Very very profound.


5) Ten minutes
Watch this movie for one of the best long takes. Warning- will really hurt your heart.



6) Harvey Krumpet
This is a 22 minute animated film - I really like the nuances here - and the book of fakts :). How to use an interesting device.


7) The black rider
The people who have watched dev-d would rem this. Mr Kashyap used its concept for one of the scenes but it the build up in this 10 min film is too good. And the old lady though racist is really sweet.


8)Instead of Abracadabra:
3 part short film - really amazing acting - really great nuances


9) The New Boy


10) The new Tenant - this won an oscar - really whacko


11)

To ber continued... got to go. Please help contri.

Some nights

Some nights the world dies,
And I see myself as a spec,
Sitting alone, lighted by a tiny lamp.
And as I call out to the world -
All I hear back is my echo.

And some nights I am surrounded by people,
Eating drinking making merry,
And with them I go go from one dance floor to another.
And as I hurry along I feel,
Life leaving me after every dance.

Some nights - normal nights -I try to remember -
The most beautiful memory of my life
And then wonder why
It doesn't come with smile anymore
And everytime I touch it with my finger,
I find
Dust settled all over it's floor.

And then there are some nights like tonight
when I wake up
And find the world quiet and violet
I look out of my window for a while
And try to make sense -
Of the velvet darkness outside
And as I wait... suddenly I see
At the far away distance -

My first morning light.

saurabh

saurabh logged into facebook after ages today - only to share the trailor of my movie uss paar.. sigh...i am touched...



Well I like the trailer. I see it every morning :).

Epilogue

Dorze: How are you now

Nima:

Dorze:

Nima's identity

Bua: Why din't you like it when she called you a milkman.
Nima: I am not a milkman.

Visiting 2005

One of the memories in my old blog - thinking what i was thinking then - http://iitk2us.blogspot.com/2005/12/suffering-quotient.html

so it is interesting

the concept of surprise dinner outings...

Yeshe to Nima

I do wish love was comfortable ...

The mermaid dream

Will it be just like the dreams
Where one becomes the water..
And laughs and plays and jumps...

Or will it be masked by the crude reality
Where the bodies restrict our flows
And the souls limit our depth ...

Or will it be some third thing
Not the dreams nor the real thing
Somewhere in between
Maybe I would be tied to a rope
The invisible one
And I will float all over
Discovering the possibilities in that radius....like
Touching the blue star fish
Collecting the pearls....
And once I have the pearls in my hands ...
I would let them slip
From between my fingers
To the bottom of the ocean
And not care ...
And then may be one day I would tickle the yellow stone
And it would silently laugh
But won't admit
The Embarassment of discovering how to laugh.

(unfinished)

phuket

here i come !!!

was talking about that thing of life

with bro ...why are the most unattainable things the most coveted ?

memories

Nima: Who was she ?

Yeshe: ......Some memories are like bubbles... better leave them untouched.

Random day dreams...

"So you look familiar ...have we met earlier ?"

Imaginary answer: "No we haven't met. Not in the past. But may be you don't know me from the past... you know me from the future. Maybe we would meet again and again in a way that would make this familiarity of today justifiable...maybe we would fall in love - the real eternal kind...
.. Or maybe we would never meet in the future and instead spend random moments of our lives wondering why we found ourselves familiar today or ...again...
...maybe we have never met in the past and we will never meet in the future and no thought of eachother will ever cross our mind and then that would make this moment of our interaction so potent that it would require contemplation of all our past and future lives.........hmmmm.....or maybe we are not meeting even now...and it is just my dream..."


Real answer: "No"




-Arati

AD giri

Quote by one of my friends (who has subscribed to this blog):
"I dont think a single person joined WWI because they dreamed of one day
becoming an AD, or that they would get one day get to stick thermocol
balls on Shreyas Talpade."

To Yeshe

Yeshe when everything will be gone, what is it that you will hold on to?

Memories

Cocktails, Fast cars, High heels.
Orange cone, White softy ...

Faint Smile.

First look of my movie

What do you think of the design - Zenish Mehta did it for us!

india shopping

Now that i am in india - the onus of india shopping rests solely on my bro's shoulders. And this time apart from giving him a list of cereals and health foods i asked im to et anything interesting for me. And i think after a week's contemplation he answered:


i am not getting anything for u apart from wat u asked
i dont understand women's section
instead of stuff for u
i got another thing for saurabh - a nice tie
now u ask him to buy stuff for u


I could surely sense the frustration.

Direction and writing

After doing a course in direction and having struggled to create my unique moments/scripts I have realized that direction or conceiving shots is not that difficult- working with actors too - I mean it is difficult and requires efforts - sometimes a lot of efforts but it is not torturous to your soul. One can carry that out provided one doesnt complicate things. What is difficult and torturous is writing - writing uniquely. And I am experiencing it now.

Rain in Mumbai

And music in car.

Indo chinese

In the era and place where I grew up (nagpur in the 90s) there was just chinese. Only when I - years later - went to US and visited a real chinese restaurant - named Chengdu (not really an appetizing name on the first thought but it is named after a chinese city told my mandarian friends), there on having lots nad lots of steamed vegetables alongside pigs ears and chicken feat (not kidding really - i saw them), I realized that the chinese we eat is a improvised version to suite the spicy, oily indian palatte.Infact there was no manchurian there.
I remember two years later an Indian opened an Indo chinese restaurant - Inchin's we would call it and even on a snowy weekday Desi would be queued up to eat it.

Infact it is the BCCI near town side in mumbai where a chef improvised on chinese and made it more appetizing to Indian tastes. The recipes he made are actually displayed there. Maybe next time I should click the pictures.

What I love about the improvisation, apart from the great taste is though they improvised and made it spicy, they never added the indian spices like bay leaves or haldi or dhaniya powders. So though the chef improvised he had some basic moral code of conduct of not massacring it totally. That is the part I like :). Somehow.

..

"I almost wish - I hadn't
gone down the rabbit hole
-and yet - and yet
it is rather curious - you know
this sort of life!"

-Alice

Mail I sent to my bro- something around 6-7 years ago

World is basicaly interconnection of people. They are the ones who create the dynamics around you, influence you, get influenced by you.
I know by very nature you are very sesitive. I however want you to be strong , get least bothered by people who affect you in negative ways, without feeling the need to bash them up or give them some ulta jawaab. Remember being quiet is the best answer sometimes you can give to people. Also God always gives you chance to even the scores.
Having said this, I want you to say that never compromise on your ambitions, principles, ability to judge right and wrong. If you feel that by not doing or havingn xyz you are being uncool thoguh doing it wont give you ny significant pleasure then remember that that's how only college kids evaluate themselves and people. Be proud for being what you are. And you are really wonderful with that great sense of humour. Keep your yourself intact and just evolve from there.

Best weekend and best movie

Best weekend code:
while (1)
(
;
}


This weekend I and saurabh were at home and literally did nothing. Ofcourse we did goto gym, a small dinner outing tonight, and cooked at home etc but primarily we just did nothing watched movies. talked read books. And this weekend was better than any vacation anywhere else in the world.

----------------------
Last week I saw the movie "The science of sleep" and am still not over it. I identify so much with the main guy. Loved the movie - loved everything about it. One of the best movies I have ever seen! Check the trailer out:

Short film ideas - my analysis

Related Post on list of good short films available on net: http://aratikadav123.blogspot.com/2010/11/some-of-good-short-films-available-on.html

----

Brilliant(and not emotional) short film ideas - contrary to popular belief - are not a flash of brilliance. They are infact two flashes of brilliance. The first flash comes to you - that is the setting - the set up. For the second flash which is the payoff or the end part - you have to torture yourself to death, fight with everyone, yourself, spend days looking at the fan, walk around your house, almost become a lunatic, give up, contemplate suicide and then it comes to you (but there is no guarantee, you might actually end up committing suicide). The pay off that you have come up is then something that only you could come up with and no one in the world while watching the film can predict.

Anyways the above statement is keeping in mind that you are an average human being. And you don't smoke weed. Not super intelligent or eccentric or anything. And that there would be people in audience who could be super intelligent or eccentric and you wish to keep them engaged till the last frame of your movie.

The satisfaction of film making is directly proportional to the torture at the scripting stage. And the learning too.

The truth is unless you have tried you wouldn't know what you are made of.

wisdom

everybody has moments they are ashamed of... :)

what a day :(

Came up with 3 cool ideas for my next short film for ww and saurabh rejected them midway during narration :(.

Too many plans

Spoils Saurabh's weekend. My kid editor who is not feeling well is still staying with us till monday I guess. Then Swati - my sweetest friend from iit - who now works in intel and whose hubby now has joining P&G in mumbai is coming to have dinner at my place. Since I with my sprained ankle couldn't handle all this I called my mother too. Well, Swarna - my school and engg friend is visiting from Nagpur so she is also coming. Also my two cousins who are both doctor are in mumbai so they will come on sunday.

Saurabh who was shocked at the sudden development of weekend has left for bangalore for some work - he will come back tonight nonetheless. So much so for his plans of lying on the couch and watching friends and reading Richard Dawkins :(.

3 D photography link central data base

Actually I read lots of stuff about 3 D but these two are simplest to begin with.

Basic: http://graphicssoft.about.com/library/uc/oransen/uc_stereo.htm,
http://www.thinkdigit.com/Digital-Cameras/How-to--Make-anaglyphic-photographs_2861.html

I will share my notes as I work more.

Also the software that I use is
http://www.stereoeye.jp/software/index_e.html I thought it was simple and the best software on the net. Ah! How I love japanese food and software. I am friends with this guy on facebook now. Really cool japanese dude.



The above links were for photographs. For me the biggest struggle was to know how to place the two cameras and all mathematics and everything aside to determine the distance and angle between the two cameras, I felt that simple common sense worked best. Basically try to notice how you see. If I look at an object at the centre of my forehead, my left eye is looking towards right and right eye is looking a little towards left to concentrate on the object in between. So place your cameras accordingly. If I am looking at a far ahead object, my eyes are parallel to each other. I use my own common sense to determine the distance. Few things require practice and self-inference - i need to try to formulate them.

Well now I think I should move on to some videos as well. Maybe begin with a stop motion claymation. Also some prior research on how to shoot movies in 3D. It is a little more complicated esp when the objects move towards and away from the frame and am still trying to grasp it:

http://www.the3drevolution.com/3dscreen.html
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-shoot-edit-3d-movie-271382/

how to upload youtube videos on 3D: http://informationmadness.com/cms/technology/tech-tips/1582-how-to-shoot-3d-video-using-two-cameras.html

A 3 min video - http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-shoot-edit-3d-movie-271382/

Still trying to fathom this.

Side effects of 3D experiments

Found on a website - also now i know it is true:

Warning: If you look at anaglyphs(3D pics) for too long, everything will appear in 3D (even a flat blank sheet of paper) when removing the bicoloured glasses from your nose. It is scary but not dangerous. Colour vision comes back to normal after a while.

Wait

Eyes
Still trees
Concrete.

Large number of people found murdered

And after a while when the detectives could not find out who the serial killer was they sent a smart detective. The smart detective tried to find out the profile and daily routine of the people who had died. One a music composer, one a ordinary student, one some old teacher. The smart detective noted everything about the dead people and fed it into a computer. The computer was this world's best data mining computer. It processed all the data for 77 hours and found out ONE common thing about all the dead people. They all had seen my unfinished movie without sound and music.

Grrrr!

3 D photography

So I was in a way aimless once the diploma shoot was over. After I spent good amount of time torturing my editor and before pouncing on my sound and music guy I thought it is about time I indulge in something new. So I actually started writing 2 new scripts. But after a day or two, though the script was clear in my head I was mentally and emotionally unprepared to dive into it. After all I hadn't recovered from both my short fiction and diploma writing experience that had really drained me.
So well I thought of indulging into something fun. It began with howto write credit titles for my movie. Since Zenish was kind enough to introduce me to chalkboard animation I thought I could go with that. Since I wanted a good finish (diploma hai bhai) I thought I would ask Zenish himself to do it. And then while discussing the credits with him, I remembered how I initially wanted my diploma to be in 3D and how it never materialized because of lack of time for technical expertise and unavailability of my cinematographer.
And finally last few days I have been researching about 3D. To begin with I wanted to get my fundas straight with anaglyphs. And now that I got it straight, again thanks to zenish from whom i got a spare 3D goggles, I have started trying to atleast have still images with 3D.
After multiple experiments and trials and errors and visiting websites each with a remarkably different theory, I think after 2 days I am getting a little bit hang of it. I am still learning so maybe in next blogpost I will tell how to easily create 3D pics for dummies or something.
Meanwhile with my experiment, my house again transformed into a studio with sketch pen marks on the floors and my camera stand and various inanimate objects as models (something that my maid doesn't approves of :( ). The toughest was to shoot myself as 3D and I havent been succesful and I already made 8 tries. I guess I will do it tomorrow as I got to go and meet someone and help him write his horror script. It is shaping well and I hope he gets to make it soon.

Anyways here is my list of 3D pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/aratikadav/3D#
and here are my fav two 3D pics:




Ok I uploaded 3 but who is complaining.

Not always a good idea

to apply technological solutions to sociological problems.

Thialand Trip June 2010

Unspoken life

Just you and me
And the fleeting moment
known to
Just you and me.

China house

Had lunch at china house and also dessert and masala chai in their(hyatt's) coffee shop later..with saurabh and swarna...yumm food .. for a long time two of them talked about equities and investment banking, while i was busy trying to establish an eye contact with the crab that i thought i was set to eat...saurabh ordered a lamb dish - really spicy gravy but amazing taste..i could see his eyes shine at the sight...good to unwind after a long time and not worry about long lunches..good to see saurabh eyes shine after a long time..even if it is at the sight of a dead lamb.. ..my only worry was the calorie count - the whole world (and i am getting calls from across the globe about it) is telling me that i have gained weight (after seeing my shoot pics or my current avataar)... i know i know - i neglected and i am 29 years old now gosh - you expect me to have a 19 year old's figure or what...anyways - i have now joined gym - 7-8 am in the morning with a trainer who is menacing...at this age you have to work twice as hard to look half as good...

asim says gym is only 20% - food is 80% so now i will try to control my food . asim followed that and reduced 10 kilos in 3-4 months..he looks good now..anyways i have thought of controlling my food also- i decided that in the morning and then we went to this china house to eat lunch- what a bummer..anyways...i am worrying about my weight - means i am now in ground state of my being...

Monogamy, polygamy and various trends

Was discussing the book "The selfish gene" with saurabh and we felt that it is in human nature to try to spread out as much as possible. And we tried to fathom how society became monogamous - contrary to basic human instincts.

So well earlier we were all hunters and life was risky. The more the number of people in the tribe the more powerful it would be and hence everyone was free for all. And the society was polygamous and polyandrous.

But then we became agriculture based. In early days - the size of land was not a constraint but the number of people working for it was. So the religion in those times expected woman to rear children. So women would start having kids since the age of 15. And they got dedicated to one man and settled with him - rearing his children. The polyandry bit was dropped and society became polygamous. However increasingly the agriculture income was not sufficient enough to support multiple wives and her kids so some religions like hinduism and christianity started having monogamous family. Though majority of religions still endorsed polygamy. But however, till our parents and our gen we have became monogamous.

Well now again both men and women are economically independent and need not really rear children. This is another extreme of from where we started. But the need to not having children or being loyal (for the sake of economic needs) is turning the society back to polygamous and polyandrous - a little unofficially.

so

why do i have to die everytime before i produce the script!!!

And the most acceptable thing in the world

which i find really outrageous is to see real soldiers - real people with real families - die for an abstract concept called nation.

Genetically modified food

I don't wanna eat genetically modified food :(.

Life etc

Our own judgment of what is good for us and what is not is mostly flawed.

Wiped out in 3 years

So I always believed I was fairly popular in my engg college days. What will all that enthusiasm of IEEE comittees, Student Development Forum, DAnce competition and personality contests!

I met my brother's friend who was 3 years junior to me. When he was in first year, I was in final year. And I was too happy to meet a junior. I didn't know him but you are really not supposed to know someone so junior. But the first thing he asked on seeing me was:"So which college did you study in?"
We existed in same space and were part of the same committees and he had no idea who I was. I was so completely wiped out of memory of my college. That too in just 3 years :(.