Two secret teasers of my music video for Indian Ocean

I am really excited about the new music video I produced and directed for Indian Ocean. And it features Rajat who already published a newspaper article about us (Read it here) . Here are some of the teasers I made. A big shot out to my Co-Director Zain Matcheswalla and Cinematographer Vidyut Singh Jaswal.
These are still not final teasers but I just can't help share them in my chotu blog.

Basic concepts of Gravity, blackhole, wormhole

P.S: Just a change of mood.

Newton questioned why apple falls on the ground and deduced that smaller objects get attracted to larger heavier object. But he never explained why.

Einstein explained it as follows with a very simple illustration. Imagine space-time to be a  large white bedsheet (space-time fabric) and all the objects, our planets, suns be placed on that bedsheet.
Now if you place a heavy object on a bedsheet, it causes a depression and the lighter objects get attracted to it. So earth causes a depression and sun causes a bigger depression and earth gets attracted to the sun and spirals round it. We as humans are so light that we cause a depression that nobody cares about and we remain glued to the earth.

A blackhole is a very heavy object and huge depression in the bedsheet and anything that comes near it gets sucked in.

Now this space-time fabric will be infinite so spherical. A wormhole is a depression that goes from one end of the sphere to another end. So if you enter a worm hole you can reach the other end of the universe.

The importance of editing

Understanding editing is very important. In this post and future posts, I will try to point out to certain articles and editing techniques that I think is important for every director to know. Below is first 20 minutes of a great Documentary on Editing. Remember seeing it in WWI and great to see it again.

Dir-editor is a team that is responsible for shaping the film and telling the story most effectively.
See what Sally (Tarentino's editor) says in part 2 - it's an invisible art because the aim is to keep the viewer emotionally invested. If a dir knows editing well, she can plan her shots well and time them well. I think the process of seeing my own footage on the editing table has greatly helped me improve my directorial skills.

See my previous post: http://aratikadav123.blogspot.in/2010/11/edit.html  on criteria for evaluating a cut as suggested by Walter Murch.

Story-telling - best techniques are transparent

Continuing the mood of my previous blog posts, I just wanted to write this blog as these thoughts totally pre-occupied me on my drive from Mumbai to Nashik.

The subject of discussion here is film-making craft and story-telling - and how the craft should help the story-telling and not distract from it.

I saw a short film made by young enthusiasts and I felt though the short film was made with not so developed filmmaking techniques  (bad hand held camera, simplistic shots)  it was made with such purity of heart that I felt I really enjoyed it and it stayed with me.

Why did I feel that it was made with purity of heart ? Why didn't I feel any purity so in say the recent well-crafted films I saw. How can a badly crafted film show more purity than a well-crafted film by professionals ?

Somewhere when we look for refinement in story-telling techniques, we start seeing these techniques outside the context of story itself and it's likely that we stop paying attention to the central thought of the film and  gradually start betraying the film's story. For example - "wah kya camera gol gol ghoom raha hai. Wah wah".Maybe instead of thinking about the camera, the audience was supposed to feel sad for the woman's death. So these small distractions add up. Precision is important to create a transcendance with your films.

I rem a lecture in my film-making course on causal chain given by shyamal  - esp coz he gave the same lecture twice and I was bored to death. But in the process the thing that was drilled down my head was that a given scene follows another scene and leads to another scene. A very simple but profound teaching. That is there is a causal chain, and every scene is defined by what precedes it and what follows it. So I remember when I was shooting my short fiction "Reflections", there was a scene were a classmate of mine had a small role of being a barber and he is very hilarious inherently. So during the shoot, beyond the part that was written, he would do something hilarious to enhance the performance and everybody in the crew were lapping it up. And we thought we got a good take. But I asked him to give one more take where he just walks to the lead and says just what is necessary. And he was so disappointed and everyone in the crew said why we need another take esp coz we were shooting 16 mm and on a strict budget of cans. But at that point I was remembering the lecture,  and I knew the scene before and the scene after this one and a distraction of thought from emotions of the protagonist (esp for a 7 min film) to the side actor would have really affected the film. And on the final edit I felt I took a good call (now I must re-iterate that filmmaking being subjective, people might disagree with my call as well but for a dir it is very imp that he has least number of regrets on the edit table).

I think the best films I have seen so far have impressed me with their story  first (or the profoundness of central thought and the catharsis it caused in me by emotionally involving me) and much later do I notice the acting, editing, direction and music.

 Appreciation for the parts should come only after appreciation for the whole.


But the stage of filmmaking I am in - or some of my friends or colleagues are is sort of an adolescent stage where our enthusiasm can lead us to get attracted by techniques at the cost of story.  However, with time and experience, we could also settle and aspire to be filmmakers like Koreda where every nuance, every use of technique is originating from the story and enhancing the story. Only a trained director on second viewing can point of the techniques that he slyly used, the techniques so effective that they became transparent.



Addendum: Actually the environment in which a film is made is also very important. The forces coming together to make the film - the producer, the music director, the cinematographer, the editor etc also play an important role in it.

We live in exciting times !!!!

Cloud computing/ Grid computing which was my MTech thesis topic is now an everyday reality. Now you can leverage that to do anything you want - you just need to pay a rent like electricity rent and all the cost of maintaining 1000s of servers, dealing with complexity and nightmares of their security/availability is taken care by these cloud computing vendors. You can just concentrate on your code.
Heroku (based in US) and E2ENetworks (based in India) are good cloud computing beds for deploying your apps that you want to scale as number of users or connections to your server increase.


In my prev blog post I was talking about my secret s/w venture. And now that I have done enough coding and made enough progress I thought I could share it.

But the main reason for this post is to encourage - students and software engineers to harness the power of cloud computing and push them to give way to your dream start ups. It's much easier. This project was something I did alone in 6-7 months and it will take additional 2-3 months but I did it only on weekends or weeknights that too intermittently -only last 1 month I gave weekdays too. Also I had to learn the whole web stack (and languages like php, jquery, ajax, css, sql which are actually pretty simple). For people who need not learn all that - it is simpler and easier. Also I am a control freak and write everything from scratch and obsesses about having simplest design and not use drupal etc so I had to write and test code and it took me longer (amt of debugging time is always more than amount of coding time). It will take less for you.



Anyways really-  I wish next Zuckerberg or the killer software app is from India and I hope some young s/w engg or any guy who has a dream of making a killer site can make it. In the comments later I will also post all the websites that will help you learn and create things faster.

What does it take to make your film emotionally felt ?

Recently I saw two movies from two top directors. I call them top director because I see their film as text-books, something to learn from and and get inspired from. I know they will present their stories in ways I haven't seen. They will have mise-en-scenes that are unseen, not just in India but in the world. Atleast that's what I expect.

And well when I saw the film, I was mighty impressed by the world they created. It's always good to get a refresher on how to construct a scene. Their techniques and the density of the film world they created was something that I cannot imagine acheiving in my first 3 films atleast. The "karigari" was of the highest quality.
But after seeing their films and thinking about them, I got a little tensed. Tensed cause inspite of being such brilliantly crafted, I don't know why, I couldn't feel much. I couldn't take that journey with the characters, in their highs and lows. It felt like I was the spectator and a film was unfolding in front of me. It never felt for me that I was myself going through it. Their movie-making craft was not helping their story-telling.

A good contrary example (but rather random) that come to my mind from a scene in Indian cinema is that of Johnny Gaddar when Johny is sitting in front of Dharmendra and Dharmedra has found out that he is the one who killed their team-mate and Johnny shoots at him. He is doing a wrong thing but  I was with that guy. Even my instincts were - kill him. I was one with the character.

In the past too, in one of my films I have failed to make it emotionally felt. Did I not spend enough time in making people register what my character was feeling.Was the problem in the edit, my handling of actors or was the problem in the writing itself where the thoughts in my head didn't reach my paper ?
And how to avoid being in a dissatisfying situation like this ? A story not well-told is dissatisfying for everyone.
I thought this could only be attained by taking care of feeling/emotions in every phase of film-making. Think of "feelings" like a delicate rose petal that I have to take care and transfer it - from my soul, to my mind to my script, to my shots and finally in my edit (& music) and to my viewer's mind and soul.
So these are my recommendations - moreso to myself than to anyone else to help a film convey the emotions I set out to convey.

1) Feel it - If I don't feel to or I never felt it - it will not be born. So feel the threat of being caught, feel the joys of living a life - feel it on my mind, not just in my shots or plots, but feel it in my being.

2) Write about it in script. Make room for it, give instances, experiences to the character so that they can convey their personality traits, give them specificity, give them weirdness, give them nuances, give them scope of presenting spontaneous reactions. Cross check that you have indeed downloaded your thoughts into you script. 

2b) Make those nuances visible in your shot breakdown. Make room for them. Plan shots so that we orient viewers to receive it. (An example from King's speech last shot where the coach is in his room thinking about the King and the King standing, waving people, thinking about the coach - the shot breakdown was very subtly and nicely done and they made room to convey this thought on the script)

3) During shoot- Convey it to your actors. They should be sure and very clear of the story in the point in time of the film. Incase they are not then they will not convey what you envisioned or thought of. It should reflect in their face, their body language, in the vibe or energy they exude. Give actors pauses where he is thinking and stay with him. So much of acting is done in pauses.

4) In the edit, between a good shot and a great feeling, give importance to feelings. Because even a million dollar shot will be of no use if it cannot generate a feeling. So stress on feelings and emotions.

These are my thoughts. However, if someone has pointers on text, case study or subject matter that can help me increase the emotional footprint of my film then please let me know. In the coming months, I will take up some scenes/movies and see what made them tick emotionally. Any recos ?


Update:  After discussing with a colleague, just want to clarify that beingn emotionally felt is not a mandate for any film and people can make any film and enjoy it the way they want.  And that is not the area towards which I want to steer any discussion . It's just a blog on what I feel,  and what I want to achieve with my films.

Testing youtube embedding options

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Another nice music video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8YCSJpF4g4

Science

There is a common perception that science is impersonal, non-creative and objective. I think solving math problems require as much creativity as analytical thinking and just like art, music any scientific field is people driven and subject to fads, whims and fashions.

Newton, Einstein, Tesla are as much fashion icons and are as much big artists as Shakespeare or Matisse in their resp field. Infact when I see my ex-colleagues (computer engineers) I feel lot of the top lot are also very good thinkers, exceptional bloggers(writers) and their personality shows in the work they do. So they as computer engg do not mass-produce fixed sized boxes but produce software that have their personal fingerprints. 

I wonder if our education system is to be blamed for people to believe that only analytical people can do well in scientific fields. I have actually found that people who hold top jobs are exceptionally creative as well.

Editing Techniques in Scorcese Films

http://youtu.be/RZ7ZaS-IH14

Embedding of the video is disabled by request lest had shared the embedded version. 

Raising the bar - the "paisa vasool" aspiration of Bollywood

I read excerpts of this book that discusses the anthropology of gift giving: The Gift.

It had an interesting point which said that sometimes when you read a book, or watch a movie, you come across an experience or wisdom that is so profound that the amount of money you spent in buying the book/movie ticket seems infinitely smaller than the value you derive from it.
The author of the book feels that the book/movie/work of art operates in two economies - one market economy and other the gift economy. A gift is a thing that is bestowed on us - it is more than we paid for or asked for. Like a gift, some work of art - are beyond "sugar for sugar" or "salt for salt" mentality and they awaken our soul in a way that no price tag can be put on it.

There is a very strong line of thinking in Bollywood that speaks about Paisa Vasool (roughly translated "to get my money's worth"). Basically there is a section of people who make films with ingredients that they have concluded to be the one people want and if those ingredients are there - the audience gets it's money worth. These makers profess that their films are the ones the majority likes and unfortunately I also sense some inexplicable aggression from them towards any kind of meaningful cinema that anyone is attempting to make.

 I agree that even "Paisa vasool" with your work of art is a very high target however it is not the highest possible target or ambition you can have with it. Any movie that has survived more than a year were beyond paisa vasool.
I feel every filmmaker should also have an aspiration towards reaching a level of transcendence from time to time. It is a tough target and even great artists have failed to touch that target with their every work but atleast they strive to do so.

As an audience as well I feel I should not cap my expectations from a movie to get my 2 hours worth of entertainment but I should look for sparks in the film that will stay with me for a long time to come. I should be greedy and not just stop at "paisa vasool" but encourage my filmmakers to give me a gift too.

Nice music video

No budget and lots of brains.

Discovered an amazing photographer

Nastia Kaletkina

See some of her work here:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Nastia+Kaletkina&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=UMKHT9TyFMiGrAfA59jbCg&biw=1403&bih=740&sei=V8KHT-DdMMPqrQf4g_ChCw

The movies that we like

I have always seen some really good gems  that have come and got appreciated by people - be it Khosla Ka Ghosla, OLLO, Udaan, Delly Belly and many other ones and I have heard their makers say that their film-script was rejected by every production house in town.

And why so ? I was discussing this with Zain why a good script is rejected more than an ordinary mundane, rehashed script.
And there was very interesting point he mentioned that such films need to be really well-made, intelligently marketed to do well. Such requirements are not for films like housefull-2 who neednot even be a complete script to begin with. But inspite of that the producers know that the elements in such films: actors and the promise of brainless laughter is enough to get a substantial num of people in theatre. These films are not the first choice of people if a genuinely good film like 3-idiots with top actors is running but films like 3-idiots are few and far between and in the absence of anything good, these are the ones that run the most. So for a producer these are the safest bets.

Whereas for films like Khosla ka Ghosla - everything has to be good, story, acting, direction, edit and even then because it doesn't have big stars that draw the crowd, it will barely make enough money. It doesn't matter that over a period of time Khosla Ka Ghosla will outlive the housefull series in terms of entertainment. On paper, it is a risky proposition.

Attraction

Sometimes I wonder what attracts me...sometimes I get attracted to ideas, well-read persons, who I feel have better understanding of things, sometimes I get attracted to plain simple niceness -a good person, sometimes I get attracted to cuteness, like my puppy.
Attraction seems multi-faceted to me but it always grows for me. Like in one of Salman Rushdie books he says that Akbar is infinitely attracted to Jodha who is his imagination and the more Akbar loves her, more she comes alive. Jodha is so alive that she worries what will happen to her if Akbar dies...

I guess that's what happens when we get attracted to a person, we replicate a person and create a local copy - an image of the person in our mind. And that image as much belongs to that person as it belongs to our imagination.
As we think, try to fill in the gaps, our imagination starts overtaking and somewhere we get far removed from the reality of the person and start living with this jodha ...unreal but alive...

I guess like every other emotion, attraction too feeds on itself ...

Infinity

When the new leaf woke up,
The traveling wind nudged her and said, I will meet you in 12 months.
The leaf first confused, didn't believe him,
But then gradually she started waiting,
With twinkle in her eyes,
She waited every minute, every hour, ever day, for the wind to come.
And the rains came, the sun came, and the sun went.
But the leaf waited.
With the twinkle.
6 months passed.
On the 7th month,
The leaf grew old
and died.

It's the 12th month now.

***

A good article on how the movie trailer cutting has changed

A good article : http://www.salon.com/2012/03/27/the_movie_trailer_revolution/

Just a post where I have all the pictures of my dog that I took from my phone

Doesn't want to take bath - staging peaceful protest

Stealing onions from kitchen caught on my customized cctv i.e. my mobile phone

Peaceful protest against regular dog food

Playing with her fav toy - saurabh's shoes

wondering what Saurabh does every morning

Enjoying car rides

With my friends

with my mom

"Come - play chase with me" look

Evening walks - i like the view :)

"I want something - not sure what"- look

"I exactly know what I am getting"- look

My milestones ...

Well yes I am full-time filmmaker now, have forgotten my coding-giri somewhere esp after going to film school. But unlike lots of people, I never hated studies or software coding.
Also I have realized that I like to be busy all the time. Some sort of a disorder, my psychologist co-writer says. If I don't have work I start going crazy, restless and unhappy.

Oflate, actually in December, I thought of doing something around films but it needed an software infrastructure.
Now right now I can't tell in the public site as I have been warned that it is vital to be an early entrant and knowing my coding pace and irreregular time-schedule I cannot claim loyalty to my deadlines of this side-project.
So anyways I call this my 10 percent project as entire week I work on films, but in the evening , to stimulate myself, I do some coding.

This blog is to mark my milestones as it give me a high and also self-accountability:
- Dec Vacation - project was conceived, discussed in white board with Saurabh. He saw potential. I drew up the first draft of visuals and design.
- Jan, Feb, Mid-march - I worked on my feature's script (we had some nagging issues and I wanted to address that). All documents around 10percent  project were placed in a folder called dreamproject. I call it dream project coz this is beyond me and an individual. I feel this will enpower so many people if rightly, neatly done with the intent of helping people rather than making revenue.
-March - Revived interest. As film pitching and cold calling was increasingly depressing me, I wanted to do something in parallel so that there is a sense of progress too. Also our production house Tangelo started and I am incredibly proud of my team so I managed to have 2-3 hours per day of free time (esp from 8-10:30 till I goto bed).
- Birthday - My father transferred me some money (40K) as birthday gift. Since it is his extremely hard earned money, I didn't want to waste it in materialistic pursuits. So Anyways, with the help of 2K - I managed to buy some infrastructure around my "dreamproject". Started looking for a web programmer (I don't have much experience in php).
- My brother coaxed me to code myself - called me names - and finally I started coding.
So it's end of march and I have managed to have xamp and login using fb on my site. This is not even the tip of the ice-berg. I have hell lots of coding to do. But well atleast getting the "hello world" right is sort of like a big stumbling block right out of my way.

Anyways ...i am liking this filmmaker by the day and geek by night thing. Incidentally 4 years ago it was opposite. I guess as someone had said when I was explaining long back that "I like coding also but i want to make films also"- don't be sheepish about having two passions.
And somehow managing both things - software and films together has imparted me a sense of self-fulfilment.

Goa Times

Hell yes! I gotta lose weight!!

Aca-tale-spy

Chance running into a newsletter I had started at IITK - http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/aca/newsletter2004_5.pdf 

Had wrote a huge anti-google article. Also all the funny cartoons there were made by me :).

Random Dreams ....

Maintaining this post to update some of the things I keep fantasizing about. Public - coz hoping someone echoes my thoughts and contacts me to make any of these possible.. ....some scientific some social and some just pleasure....

1) Face detectors at major railway station-exits that matches online record of missing people.
2) Mass Teleportation instead of mass transportation
3) A museum of animals made of cottons each animal  doing their regular chore - going to market, eating, just woke up, reading paper...and the museum is in their natural habitat (this could be an installation too)
4) Music training and color theory available to all children
5) Every school library has library of art-work created by students....
6) Knowing before hand whom you could marry/not marry...
7) Could change your head to another head
8) Roads are colored - houses are grey. Roads are colored, houses are colored...
9) Babies sitting in waiting room watching where they will be born.....
10) India has a design culture...an adda like prithvi...
11) Indians choose the color of their building.
12) Every square has an art work
13) Mild Music - classicals playing on the traffic lights...

The director and community

Whoever is fan of the paintball contest that happens at the end of community serial - read the struggles of it's creators - and also his theory of circles:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/mf_harmon/all/1

Below is reproduction of his proposed graph for every episode:

     1.  A character is in a zone of comfort

• 2.  But they want something
• 3.  They enter an unfamiliar situation
• 4.  Adapt to it
• 5.  Get what they wanted
• 6.  Pay a heavy price for it
• 7.  Then return to their familiar situation
• 8.  Having changed

In search for plants

...

I searched and asked lots of people for recos but seems like no one had any clue. Found this book - got the pdf version by the author himself.
Good and practical read for Indians.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_dgmMwooSjeMWY1ZmNjNTEtNTc5ZC00NDk0LWEzZjEtZmRhNGVlMTYxNzQy/edit?pli=1

Ghar se door Seattle mein

As I get a call that one of the closest friends leaves Seattle, talking to him, I get filled with nostalgia (sort of borrowed nostalgia). I guess there is always this age when you are single and crazy and you are lucky to meet people crazy enough with whom you get drunk, walk on the empty roads, celebrate birthday near a lake or throw surprise parties at a garage. They are the first people you call when you crash your car or drag to hospital if you have a broken back or discuss about your marriage plans or for whom you click pictures they can upload on shaadi.com. Suddenly I feel I am in my autumn years and wonder if all of us from the desi gang of "Ghar se door seattle mein" will ever be together again. What the heck - I even have the abandoned link of our super-flop blog:http://gharsedoor.blogspot.in/ with the older posts (http://gharsedoor.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2006-09-22T10%3A34%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=20&start=20&by-date=false) containing where we first met each other. P.S: How cheesy were we ?

Web Designing for non-web designers

Now - I am not a web designer. But actually web designing is not tough. When we wanted a simple site up -  I started talking to web designers and they started quoting outrageous rates.

The curse of being a software engg is that you know how much work it requires to do a thing (everyone takes advantage of information asymmetry). So I thought since I wanted to make a simple website and I had a day off, why not do it myself. It took me half a day(6 hours - but non-stop and full conc) to come up with something nice and decent (and lot of that half a day went in taming photoshop). And yes I have subscribed myself and every person I care with a online Adobe Photoshop course as nothing is frustrating to have an idea in the mind and not being able to do it. Even if you hire someone to do it - it is good to know the complexity.

So anyways I used Kompozer a source forge WYSWYG html developer (which actually purges out neat html codes that you can edit yourself if you want) and I was done with the html part in less than an hour including installation. A lot of time went in testing the website in various devices - ipad, phone, galaxytab, mac, small tablet (last thing I want is a broken site).

However, though I was gloating with my simple website (yes I am a big big fan of simple websites). Clutter free- tells you what you want, loads in 1 sec - doesn't waste people's time. But my teammates vehemently opposed a simple site. They wanted anim, they wanted php. Initially I told them - it's not democracy. Secretly I don't have the budget to fund that. But anyways till I have the budget, I could jazz this even more. Here are some links to cool website designs that might trigger your imagination.

http://www.instantshift.com/2010/05/05/77-latest-examples-of-creative-single-page-website-designs/
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/beautiful-enticing-designers-websites/
http://creativedesignmagazine.com/30-elegant-minimal-web-designs-for-web-design-inspiration.html

And here is the simple site I designed:

http://www.tangelo.in



Also for new website developers and domain registerers - do submit url of your sites to google and bing.

Revisit before every startup idea

1. Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)
2. For whom do we solve that problem? (target market)
3. How big is the opportunity? (market size)
4. What alternatives are out there? (competitive landscape)
5. Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator)
6. Why now? (market window)
7. How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)
8. How will we measure success/make money from this product? (metrics/revenue strategy)
9. What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements)
10. Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no-go)

Accidentally in love

Got a new pup - a beagle. When we found out about her, I was totally against getting one as I thought my film is my pet, but when we saw her, I and Saurabh immediately felt that we wanted her. Now, I am not that much of a dog person. Infact I hate lots of condescending dog owners whom I sometimes run into a petshop (btw pet shops are chors - another blog on that). But it has been one week, she is quite a handful but a superduper cute, sometimes naughty but mostly a loving puppy. Every evening I feel that I am really asking too much of myself, working, shooting, handling people and then after giving her a brisk run in my roof I feel dead. But the love she gives me so much compensates for it.  It's been a week and gradually a strong, beautiful relationship - of a friend, of a parent is blossoming and I am realizing what an amazing thing is happening in my life.

And see this video of Juno - they say a dog becomes like her owner after a while. Now ain't she smart ;)?

P.S:
Advice for new first time dog owner:
- Be patient - invest time in first 4 months - you and your dog will reap the joys for remaining 15-20 years.
- I adopted marker training: http://leerburg.com/markers.htm - used nope (with sharp sound), yes with a friendly sound and after that rewarding a good behavior . In a week she learned sit, down, come, she understands the gestures for going to her bed, tries to pee and poo on paper (am still not 100% successful).
- You don't need full days but you surely need to give her 10-15 mins in morning and 10-15 mins in eve. I share the duty with my husband. It's advisable to teach her fetch command. That tires her without troubling you. I try to really tire her in the morn before I have to go for long hours of work. This puts her to sleep.
-

The simple pleasures

Well we all have our own journeys that lead us to making films or doing the job we wanted to do. Mine was simple - the joy of doing so. The obsession in shooting oneself, editing overnight and seeing if its looking right.

And sometimes when you are struggling to make the film, and you start breaking your head over it, meeting 5000 people, getting planning and schedule in place, our favourite Michel Gondry gives a gentle reminder.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/12/michel-gondry-remade-taxi-driver-adorably.html

The video there is good at so many levels. Primarily because it reminds one of the amount of joy a video gives to its creators.

Smooth stop motion - Hello World

So we spent the afternoon doing a cool stop motion.

The goal was simple - make a cup rotate but make it smooth - it should look like a video and not series of photographs.


 And in the process get all the software requirements in place (Remote camera clicking, animatorDV (with webcam - still ND), FCP settings etc).
I had some colorful sheets for BG. They were expensive and all the ideas that we had required them to be cut into pieces which I was vehemently against.
As a solution I found some clay. 3 years ago Zenish had given me some colored clay to play with. I still had it. So we thought we could use those to make letters. I made the W, the doughnut shaped Os and the purple D. Ofcourse it is not hard to guess that the black coffee was made by Zain and the coffee cup was actually Zenish's :).

In programming language - the first program one writes is printing "hello world". So well -this is our hello world in stop motion.

P.S 1: You require the remote clicking to make the animation totally jerk-free. If anyone who has lost their Cannon CD and wants to make use of it's suit use this link's video (cannon doesnot allow u to download from its site, u need to have an original dvd): http://www.nextwavedv.com/canon-eos-utility-download-and-install-for-mac/
Here is the link to the update site at cannon: http://software.canon-europe.com/software/0029171.asp 
We couldn't find the animatorDV (nor could I successfully find the webcam).

P.S: Also we made sure we use royalty free music from here: http://publicdomain2ten.com/. The music is by Duke Ellington, “Louisiana”

Algorithm for Clothes Management - how to fit everything in 3 shelves

Prologue:
Someone once told me that there was a study that said - the way we arrange our data in our computer is exactly the way we arrange our clothes in our cupboard. My arrangements can be described by one word - haphazard.

The Story:

Any average or non average woman knows that it is impossible to fit ones clothes in 3 shelves. Look at the categories of dresses we have - shirts, t-shirts, home clothes, jeans, office pants, sports wear, salwar suits (Indian), sarees, skirts, frocks/dresses, extreme formals, extreme maintenance (shaadi type clothes), micro dresses (in hope that we will be slim enough to wear them someday) socks, scarves/stoles/shawls, belts etc etc.

Also: I hate giving away clothes. I have clothes from 10 years ago that I feel difficult to part with because of emotional reasons. Some bought from my first salary, other bought by my dad and was very expensive at that time, one my brother got from his trip to Bangalore, one saurabh got for me after winning a sodexo pass in a quiz contest, one was a lucky shirt for exams, one my mom bought - very old fashioned and I hated it but she absolutely loved it so well i got emotional..and so on. There is a story behind every cloth. But lately (under the influence of my mother and maybe alcohol) I have given away some of my clothes to a poor man with four daughters - reasoning that they will use them and probably will take good care of them (my clothes sentiments were exactly like Andy's toys in Toy story-3)

Last week we moved into a new place.

So I and Saurabh thought instead of constantly negotiating the closet space (which is almost akin to fighting for armrest space in a movie theatre) - lets divide the closet space exactly by half. I could anyways use the guest bedroom's closet to fit in all my clothes. This was an unfair demarcation because contrary to me, my husband is a man of fewer means. He has three kind of clothes - office clothes, casual clothes, gym clothes all in single digit cardinality. (his computer's are stateless, he has no data files, no pictures, no favourite movies. Hard disk crashing has no emotional impact on him - infact he has no harddisk). For him clothes are just clothes and not an abstract entity like sister's love or wife's tears.

But I went along with it as - I had the whole guest bedroom wardrobe for myself. (I didn't want to put all my clothes in the guest bedroom as I used the master bath and there was 5 min inconvenience in taking clothes from one room to another)

After giving him all the shelves and using up some of mine for other things like bedsheets, towels, socks - my share was around 3 shelves.

Problem:
It was very obvious that I couldn't fit all my clothes in 3 shelves.

 But then I realized when I looked at my cupboard (mini-musuem) - that actually 80% of times, I only wore 20% of my clothes. (almost like 80% of time we use 20% of sites, or access 20% of files in our computer). 20% of my clothes could have been fitted in those 3 shelves easily.

But then how to choose that 20% from the variety of choices available to me. How many dresses, how many skirts, how many jeans etc etc.

So I thought I could let my own usage pattern decide that. And I came up with the following algorithm to select the top 20% of my most frequently used clothes.

Algorithm:
1) To begin with - my 3 shelves were empty. I would fetch the clothes from another room.
2) Whenever I wore something. I told my maid - after they dry not to put them in the closet of guest bedroom but in one of the 3 empty shelves of master bedroom.
3) Whenever I didn't want to wear what was available in those 3 shelves I would go and fetch it.
4)  In a week's time I realized that I had lesser need to go and fetch my clothes - as I had my comfortable choices of my favorite categories already in those three shelves.
5) Again if the shelves were over flowing - all I had to do was take the bottommost clothes and put it back in the guest cupboard (used this as a close approximation of least frequently used strategy).

This is a simple algorithm we use anyways for memory and cache management  of data. In my daily-cloth-retreival task it reduced my 5 mins of trip and crib. That came to 2 hours per month.

And I still have one shelf empty :) !


P.S: I am watching Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Bollywood film) so I am right now only thinking of first world problems.

Fiction writers -

"Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.

But fiction writers as a species also tend to be terribly self-conscious. Even by U.S. standards. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out their fly, whether there's maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, lurkers and starers. "


http://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319

....

"....For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood or desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder..... "- F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I will make my heroines look like this

http://www.nowness.com/day/2011/4/30/hyeres-2011-erwin-blumenfeld-films

see the vid

why movies will always cost if we continue to use traditional sources of distribution ?!

Earlier movie-making was expensive. So people made lesser movies or rather lesser people made movies. Hence the marketing cost was lower as we had lesser issues of differentiating our movies with other's movies. Or lesser work to establish our brand equity to attract eyeballs. Also you needed to be part of the system to make the movies.

Now since the digital technology has become cheaper, and more portable, people can use videos to shoot guerilla take new non-actors and substantially bring down the cost of making a film.
However the cost of making movie has gone low not just for you but for 1000 others. So they all will make movies. So now the problem is finding an avenue to showcase the film.

Now with low cost films, we neednot stick to traditional medium of distribution.  So the question is - are we ready for non-traditional mediums of movie distribution ? Online, DVD, TV ? But the original problem of having an initial critical mass is still there.

MATISSE and ME

When I was 10 years old I copied a painting and stuck (with fevicol) on the walls of our living room - much to everyone's horror. As I grew up, I later found out that I had reproduced one of the million reproductions of Matisse below.

I was later reintroduced to Matisse by Fareeda when I picked up a book that contained all Matisse paintings in the WWI library. I had taken that book and reissued it weeks after weeks looking at his paintings. The library guys later made it a reference book (wtf) and I had all my plans to steal it before I left college. I still haven't been able to buy that book (out of stock in amazon :( ) or for that matter steal it :).

Matisse had family business of textile industry. He grew up amidst bright colors. His earlier work had all the details of the contemporary painter but later he started making detail free clutter free images. Esp. after his tryst with death after a cancer operation, he became bolder with his art forms hardly cared about the critics and developed his inimitable style. He took the post impressionistic style of painting to another level and we still use his paintings, bright colors, color combinations and style in our day to day life.

Ipod and Matisse

Infact good example is ipod ads and various ipod colors themselves. Here on the left  is an image of ipod advertisement and on the right is one of the Matisse works (the read dot is his heart).
The olympic logos 2012 and 2016 Rio ones are inspired by matisse paintings.

On left are matisse paintings  (circle of Life and the Snail) and on right are olympic logos of 2016 and 2012.

Incidentally Matisse paintings were not well-received by critics. But he found his patron in a wealthy Russian textile magnet who bought most of his paintings. He had told matisse: "These people don't respect you, but the future is all yours".
Lots of contemporary prints, color combinations in textile industry are inspired by Matisse's choice of colors in his paintings.

Colors: For matisse colors were emotions and he felt that colors should be depicted in a harmony. They should be used the way notes are used in music - create a visual orchestra. He was called a "Fauve" - a wild beast as he used extremely bright colors and not used the color from the real world. For him his paintings were his emotional response of a real-life visual. His choice of colors were lavish- brighter and shinier than any colors seen before his time. He always worked with a color wheel  - started off with Yellow Blue and moved around the wheel - choosing simple  combinations all right opposite each other or combination of 3 that forms isosceles traingle to more complex ones. Anyone who knows basic color theory today knows that these opposite colors (in right proportion)  cancel eachother in a way that their net effect on the eyes is of "grey". The grey color is soothing to the eyes and hence eyes can stay on them for longer. Hence all the matisse paintings had that stay. He himself said that sometimes to balance the painting totally he would externally use "white and black" that would balance his colors if they themselves did't balance each other. Matisse also used lots of secondary and tertiary colors apart from primary colors.

Color wheel RGB

One of my fav matisse painting

Patterns: Matisse was well travelled and took influences from various traditional art forms - he  was greatly influenced by Russian folk-art forms and  Islamic art forms (spending time in Morocco).

 He also started having interest in human figures and the space they are set in.

Matisse loved the  bright clutter of overtly furnished rooms, patterns in the room created a parallel complete world in each of his paintings.                                                   
Also gradually he started forsaking the idea of 3-dimensionality and treated his painting like flattened space replete with decorative objects.

Matisse Scissors

In my house I have two replicas of matisse paintings. Apart from that I have reproduced two of his paintings. One I have given to my brother and other is with me.

Reproduction with Asim

Reproduction with me

Implications in production design:
Matisse paintings have a richness of their own. And they come from choice of colors, color combinations and patterns used within the painting. We can use them as reference while choosing and designing our production design elements. Use tested combinations and gradually learn to start expementing on our own.
The other thing is the "matisse finish" on walls. A block of red wall will always look jarring to the eyes but if the finish is  like that of Matisse's walls - it is captured beautifully on camera (for example in above painting - the red of the floor has a different finish - he uses multiple adjoining colors to have that finish).
I sometime call it the "choona finish" that they have in walls.
However to have our films look like Matisse if we need to have massive production design and other controls on the environment we are shooting in. Sometimes this translates into higher budget.  So if we are going too indie - we cannot use that 100% control but we can still choose some of the elements like costume colors etc that helps us give our products a "little better than reality" finish (that is if one wants).
Below are some of the  frames of the 3 short films I have made and one can clearly see the matisse influence I had. Amongst all our biggest challenge was Uss Paar as we didn't have the control on the color of the station. But we tried to play with yellow(essentially brown) blue.

Shiva is the ultimate yellow blue God

An extra detailing on curtain and the candles adds details to the frame

The red (instead of white) boat on greenish water looks better

The classical red green frame. Added blue to decrease red

The yellow uniform - imagine if it was blue

Notice the matisse finish on the walls and Tina's dress color. Also a block of red just to offset too much green on the frame

We had specific colors for sarees too but couldn't manage them in timehowever a little color in the form of balloons adds the playfullness.

Purple and red hue to make the place look sensual

Inspite of being a painter, his last work was a chapel where he did lots of  glasswork and it is in Venice. I went to Venice and didn't know about the chapel  and hence didn't visit it. So you know how much angry with myself I am! Here is the glass work - "Tree of life" by matisse.

Matisse was an atheist but he still made the chapel for his nurse who had turned a nun. 

He had once famously said - "I believe in God only when I do my work !" 

Henri Matisse

Academics versus real life

I think our educational system stresses a lot on individual success. Pitching each person against another. The whole ranking system rewards individuals. Most of the time even preps for exams are done individually. This orients us differently as compared to what is required  at the real world. The real world favors team players more. It is important that team wins. Personal goals are subset of team goals.  Except sports period nothing else in school gives basic teaching of working in a group.

Just a thought off my head.

Top moment of the day

I was contacted by a publisher who wants to add my IIT thesis on computational grids (which was published in an IEEE journal)  in his book :)


Addendum:
So my film Uss Paar was shown at Ahmedabad too!! And the great feeling is that so many messages in my facebook inbox after that from the students!!! Some people asking about film and others about "wrestling woods" (they misspelled whistling woods) :).

2046

I just have huge respect for directors who manage to create mood successfully. For me - WKW will remain the master of mood creators with his original frames and beautiful moments. Grandeur and beauty. The power of cinema. Infact whatever I know of mood creation I have learnt from him. He is my guru. It's a shame they dont cover him in film school classes. Anyone who has seen Reflections  (my 16 mm short fiction) would easily tell my WKW influence.

Amongst his various films, I have really enjoyed 2046. Also watching this movie was my first meeting with WKW. And somewhere I feel a strange deep connect with his movies. Lots of my current colleagues don't seem to agree with me when I go absolutely ga-ga over WKW stuff. Since his movies are not very obviously plot driven, lots of people face difficulties in engaging in them. 2046 and "In the Mood for Love" should be seen together to understand them. Infact if I ever do a screening of reference movies with my cinematographer before we dive into shot breakdown - one of WKW's movies is always on the list regardless of the subject  :).

I clearly remember  2008/or early 2009 where almost for an entire week, I was in full trance because i had seen 2046. I haven't seen it since then because my inability to get out of it and reengage in the real world was frustrating me. I had locked myself in home and just kept playing this movie all week. (I was also doing the shot breakdown of my film Reflections in that week.) I was just heart broken that I might never be able to make a movie like this and this had pushed me in some sort of depression. Even my zombie husband would wonder what's wrong with me. So I had to shun it.

But today, just as one remembers an old friend, I randomly remembered this movie again.

Here is it's horrible quality trailer that i got on youtube. Still the trailer worth watching. This movie is my ultimate inspiration.