My Bloglogue - April fools day 2005.

Kamal recently mentioned in a press conference that he might be considering digital movie making. He mentioned that he saved some money by sending a digital copy of the movie Mumbai express to the censor board for review. However he also mentioned that during production digital filming and saving money is not a major issue today. When producers invests so much money in all other aspects of movie making, the cost of the film will seem to very much manageable. But still he says the reason he will going for digital would for the technology.

Today Digitally many things can be achieved in a quicker and better way. On good sense, if a pioneer does it, Industry would follow and it is going to help many small movie makers. They would be blessed, because cost of DV tape is about $2.00, while 1000 feet of film is “n” times more. Though they don’t, technically or theoretically a DV is reusable. There are also many methods today that would covert a movie made on DV to 35 mm Film.

I heard from few people that about 50% of the theaters in Madras are slowly gearing themselves for screening digital movies directly. I am sure Hyderabad and Mumbai will have much more. [In Banglore Movies made out of non kannda 0's and 1's shall be banned, aka Banglore will screen only Kannada Digital movies]

“Way to go” because the conversion cost in still high [for about a minute of footage it is about $50-$100 or more], if theaters could play the digital version directly, we can eliminate this conversion process. The bad side, for the VCD bootleggers’ one step easy, a control C and Control V would do it. But
Hey! Any way the Cockroaches cannot be eradicated from this earth. We can only spray them out and keep them under control.

Staying on this topic, has any one seen a program called MayajAlam on KTV? A different cinema program that discuss and explains digital graphics techniques used in Tamil Film with spot examples. A CG director or programmer is interviewed and he explains different techniques used in a particular movie. Few weeks ago they showed how Little John the movie was made. Frankly it is an ass breaking job and I was amazed by the knowledge these guys have on vector and other computer based graphics.
Last week they took “Thirumalai” where Action King Arjun fights with multiple people, however we would never guess that most of them were virtual actors. There were placed on the shot using a post production computer. The director mentioned that different action sequences were shot on a blue screen background, with predetermined coordinates. Later using computer they mixed the both by placing them virtually around the main hero. Arjun performance deserves claps for his coordinated motion; I have seen this in Jet Lee movies and Arjun comes very near. We can clearly feel the perfection that Arjun and his production crew have achieved. This was very interesting and amazing to see Tamil films moving this direction.

Of Course we also over dose of this CG, some movies have over kill CG usage, but in all good sense it is matter of time that Kodambakkam churns out movies like Matrix. Yeah! Get ready to face Multiple copies of Vijaykanth or a dual clone of villain Pasupathy saying “eeeeiiiiii enna”

Today Hollywood and other TV production units in USA outsource serious CG work to India, a good trend and for youngsters they can choose a different path in Computer science, Hey! We churn out 1000 movies a year in India Yes! the job security is covered there for you.

The Hall of Fame Blogger from Chennai Kiruba tried to pull an April fool stunt. I guessed it yesterday, yes! I have proof for my thoughts I took time to post about it in this feed back column that contained about 200+ entries. Yes he has 200+ fans including me. As soon as I saw that that he was going to quit his Blog I was kind of sure. He should have added someone sued me etc, but he did it the other way which “let the Cat out of the Blog” oops Bag.

My April fool stunt – tell your boss that “you will work the whole day without internet” yeah! He might be fooled. Have a great weekend and keeping singing “Ganapathy babaa Ganapathy babaa” for the Indians to win the first one day.