Resul Pookutty on Slumdog

I thought doing the sound for the show that we shot in studio is going to be easy for me.
It’s a television show, everything is controlled, two people sitting and talking. It’s a film based on the show, the show is so huge and popular. They did not want to change anything about the format. That posed an incredible challenge as we cannot shoot a film the way you shoot television and he wanted to shoot everything live. That’s how they shoot the show in television. It’s in one take. Danny wanted to do it in a similar manner. There are nine video cameras running, at the same time there is live switching going on; there are other scenes in the movie between which the show is coming in –so its part of the whole film- so shooting live for the television, at the same time its being covered by film and digital cameras. So we had to record sound on television camera at one level and digital camera at another level.
It’s a Dolby digital film, needs to be recorded in 5.1 surround. In that situation, I had to do a television mix, mix for an editor, so I ended up having 17-18 tracks of recording, which is unheard of. I had to create a pulley system where I was swinging microphones, opening up computer screens, putting microphones there. We recorded the shoot of the television show in surround, something no one has done in the world.
On the first day, I was crying. I used to feel very frustrated. There was a lot going on -fighting with people in Dharavi, humungous amount of crowd control, fights on locations with team. It was a total chaos.

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Thanks, Praba.