Interview With Karan And Shaan | Kshay | Golden Podium

We had a golden chance to have an interview with Kshay fame Writer Director Karan Gour and Producer Shaan. They talked about the movie and how it was made...

Q1: How do you feel when you hear good words flowing in from all sections? Its impressive that Kshay earned its space in a month that saw Shanghai and Gangs Of Wasseypur releasing and Rowdy Rathore breaking BO records.

Karan: Its always great to hear good words from everywhere. Makes us feel accepted and not like outcasts. Makes us believe that there are more like us out there. Its almost like you trudged through a barren landscape for years and finally found civilization.

Shaan: We actually chose that date since we thought it’ll be quite iconic to release between Shanghai and Wasseypur. The fact that there wasn’t a very big release on the same day helped us get the date. The spread in the kind of films releasing in the same month just shows that we have audiences for every kind of cinema.

Q2: What were the resources you had when you started? How much training did you went through before taking the first take?

Karan: My training was just watching films. I think more than any film school, just general film watching is the best kind of training for any filmmaker. I think if you watch every film as a viewer with an open mind and not as an analyst, there’s so much to learn. When we started, we only had the script and a camera.

Q3: Which tools came handy, especially in editing video and composing background score?

Karan: I edited it first on Adobe's Premiere, which is the most glitchy editing software out there. I would have to render every time I did a cut to see how it looked as the software wouldn't allow me to see it within its own window smoothly. So because of things like that, it took about 3 months just to put the edit together. Then when it came time to color-correct, we found out that Premiere messes up gamma values in the ProRes footage. After that, it was two weeks of shifting our 900 or so cuts over to Final Cut Pro, which was just torture because it was a lot of work for absolutely no fault of ours. For music I used a sampler called Vienna Symphonic Library, which is a sampled recording of the various string instruments done by the Vienna Symphony. I use Fruity Loops for pretty much everything musical and then run everything for the master sound mix into Cubase.

Q4: First timers usually have issues with handling grainy footage and dubbing the dialogues. How did you overcome these issues?

Karan: Grain was something we never wanted to remove as it played into the narrative exceptionally well. We just didn't want that nasty splotchy digital grain that comes with digital footage. So every frame of the film is littered with a simulation of film grain, which is far smaller and a lot more dynamic in its movement. It sort of bombards the digital grain, especially in the blacks, to make the patches look smoother. Towards the end of the film, the grains get more and more, which just worked wonderfully with the climax so we never touched it. We had live sound for some of the dialogues which was usable, so some of those inside-the-house scenes were all live sound. The dubbing was primarily for everything outdoors and some indoors shots. The dub happened in our two-room apartment, with one room being used as the recording booth and the other as the control room with the computers and everything. It was a neat setup although a lot of sound from the outside would bleed into the microphone as this was a residential complex that our apartment was in. So after the dubbing, I took about 3 months of cleaning up the dub, synchronizing every word to the video, and adding reverb to the dialogues that made them fit into the environment you're seeing on screen. This last part is what most films that use dubbing never do. I feel it's a must because otherwise all dialogues either sound like their lines being spoken for an animated character or like they were voice-overs.

Q5: Most of the short film makers don't know how to connect with people from industry. Without showing your work, its difficult to get backing. How did you approach people for screenings?

Karan: I am not sure about the whole connecting part. We just approached PVR as they had that exhibiting platform called Director's Rare. They decided to let us play in that section without charging us any fees, so that worked out well for our screenings.

Q6: Kshay is done. What next?

Karan: Writing at the moment.

Team TRM wishes Karan and Shaan all the good wishes for their future endeavors. With Kshay as their base, expectations would be sky high.