The sound of Daayen ya Baayen – Gissy Michael (Sound Designer)
In the first discussion that Bela had with me she was decided on doing
sync sound. The film was going to be shot in the hills so locations
were going to be silent, she was taking local artistes and most of
them non actors so it seemed impossible getting them all to Bombay to
dub, since there are no studios in the hills. The film is full of
dialogues, has many characters, both men and women, from very old to
kids. These were more than enough reasons to get the sound on location
itself. But in later discussions doing sync sound didn't seem that
obvious to us for no location is as silent as it seems, there are
noisy crickets, noisy dogs, noisy wind, noisy trucks etc which are out
of one's control, and with the tight budget it was impossible to hire
silent camera and other silent equipment, so like in most cases the
budget constraints took the decision for us, that of dubbing the film.
so when the final cut was ready we went back to the hills equipped
with a contraption, created by my fellow sound recordist vipin (thanks
to his unending experiments with computers), which could substitute
all the machines in a dubbing room. We looked for relatively silent
locations (away from roads, away from the forest),when we left Bombay
we weren't sure whether we were going to find a suitable place to dub
in all the different locations that we were to go. Actors lived faraway
from each other, some of them worked in the day, some of them in the
night(it was ramleela time) some others were too old or sick to
travel, etc. But wherever we went luckily we found a place that was
suitable for us and made our own sound booth with all the mattresses,
blankets, pillows, cushions and anything that was available.
Once we started the actual dubbing there were other problems, the
actors weren't used to seeing themselves on TV, hearing their own
voice through the head phone and then repeating their lines. Soon we
had to abandon the normal way of dubbing. Some of the actors managed to
repeat their lines after hearing themselves through the headphone when
the TV was off, for some others Bela made them repeat the lines after
her.She played different tricks with different actors to get the
correct voice and expression out. Sometimes we did the recording
outside of a room to get the right feel especially with kids. At the end
of it all we have clean tracks and sometimes better performance.
So now you can hear all the dialogues clearly and fall of your
chairs laughing.
