Monday 2 March 2015

Short Film Trajectory #7: A Marriage and a Poster

In celluloid world the merging of picture and sound is called a marriage. The product is called a married print. It was to grade the film and get the married print that D Jeet left for Mumbai (the only place in the country where it is done) last month.

Ga and i went to the same school in Kozhikode. She was a year or two senior to me in school but we had chess in common. Yes. When i was in school i used to play chess and participate in tournaments. So did Ga. We had no contact after school till i messaged her on facebook asking her if she could act in my short film. She agreed to my surprise. It was a pleasant experience for me to meet someone after so many years and learn that i could actually speak with that person. It is impossible for me to have conversations with most people from my school.

Ga and i spoke of cinema, politics, gender, sexuality and our pathetic lives. She lived in Bhubaneswar then and i made extensive plans for a trip there which as usual never worked out. Among all those talks was a joke that she cracked on us students and our films. That it all sounded like a big relationship issue. Sometimes she heard aalayam ask me if a certain wall (on the set) was committed. If a wall wasn't committed we could add more props to it or remove some etc. A non committed wall basically meant that never before had we exposed that area in the film. Later she heard us talk of married print. It was the epitome of our illicit affair with cinema. I am, however of the opinion that it is a rather poor nomenclature. It brings the institution of marriage into cinema. Makes it sound as if two things/people getting together is always in marriage.

Ga, after going back whatsapped me a picture she had made in memory of the experience of shoot. Recently while scanning through the images in my phone i saw that again and thought it would make for a good design for our poster. It was diegetic too, in a way. There was a scene in which Ga's character/the protagonist did that on a canvas. Also, it was the actress herself who made it making it a representation of what the film or its experience meant to her. This was the picture Ga made.

Ga's picture.

Yesterday i went to Rana, our professor of Art Direction and asked if he could help me make a poster for the short film. He agreed. Since the picture Ga sent was a low resolution one we decided to do it once again on a paper and click a good quality photograph of it. We couldn't scan it because the paint was wet. I went to the still photography department and asked Manna to click a picture for me. He clicked this

Copy of a copy of a copy: Manna's click.

Five times removed from reality, the picture again went back to Rana and he made the poster we wanted. I put the crew in alphabetical order and the cast in reverse order of sex. Reverse order of sex is what i call things in which the 'second sex' or women come first. ;-)

So here is the poster. Now the screening in Main Theatre and then i can be content about the grave i dug myself for me.


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