Indian Cinema Re'Colorised'....!!!

The Art of Indian Cinema has always been truly depicting the greatest hard work that was invested by all the Crew either directly or indireclty. One Film of its kind is Mughal-e-Azam, the all time blockbuster that reinvented the new way of making an Indian Cinema. The movie has a great reputation in success both financially and technically. The Cost of the movie is 15 million rupees that according to today’s times make it into 2 billion rupees, which makes it as the costliest movie ever made. The battle sequence between Salim and Akbar involved a large crew consisting 2000 camels, 5000 horses and many soldiers who were hired from the Indian Army and also with a special permission from the Indian Ministry of Defense to shoot them in Jaipur.Does'nt this sound like a Hollywood movie?

The History

The film is directed by K Asif, who always had this great passion of making movie with a script like Mughal-e-Azam way back in 1944.At that time he could convince a financer Shiraz Ali, with a lead role played by a prominent person, who unfortunately died of a Heart Attack and the film went incomplete with the financer moving to Pakistan in 1947.Film reshoots again in 1951 with a new financer Shapoorji pallonji and in 1960, the movie was released and has out placed all the records of Indian Cinema. The Original Mughal-e-Azam is 85% B/W and 15 % colour. Infact if we go back to our past, the Technicolor for a motion picture in India was started in 1957.Inspired by this idea, the Director always wanted to have this movie in color which wasn’t fulfilled totally because making a colour film in those days was highly expensive. So Asif satisfied himself with bits of the movie converting into colour.
Later in 2002, the film producer Shapoorji pallonji gave his movie to the Indian Academy of Arts and Animation to execute Colourisation Technique. To say, this is not a new technique, this has already been introduced in many of the Hollywood movies.

The Technology

The Colorization works have started in 2002 for a 35mm film format. Now what is this 35mm? We might have heard it many times but really don’t know what exactly it is? Or either hasn’t showed an interest on it. A 35mm is basically the length if each frame in a film reels. These reels are projected in a 35mm Projector. Now, coming back to the colorization part, the main process of making a movie into a colour involves 3 stages.

Restoration

In this Process, the reel of the movie is collected and is digitally transformed. Before making any corrections, a copy of the Original is taken and work will be undertaken on it. This reel is scanned thoroughly and all sorts of corrections such as Contrast corrections, Scratch removals, pin hole removals, fungus correction, adjusting the braked Frames. This work is done by a Team of specialists in Restoration using 3TB (1 Terabyte=1000 GB) of data. Now this Film print is sent for colorization.

Colorization

This is the Main Process and requires a lot of Patience. A Team of people who have their expertise in Color Modulation involve in this work. The process starts about the discussion and documentation about the colors to be used, a small research work on the Ancient times so that the output should look almost real and the shadowing concepts. Once the colors were decided the actual work starts, the designers have to work in a special software tool (like the Adobe Photoshop), which can render the effect of colorization. Now, all the above things sound really simple but I can get the closer view on it, the designers have to take each frame of the film, 24 frames of a any motion picture will make 1 sec of the Actual video which we look in the movie. Now, think again, Mughal-e-Azam has 3,000,000 frames and each frame should be colorized individually and the toughest part is that all the frames should be in sync with each other in terms of colors. Now the colouring of frame involves the facial textures, the background colours, the colours of the side artists facial and their costumes, main artists costumes, if we can recollect the huge sets of Mughal-e-azam, each pillar has certain design’s, which also need to be colored. And this is a time consuming process, it took 1-½ years to actually colour the Mughal-e-Azam b/w version. Now I call this as the Heights of Patience. All these work for the movie is done by the Indian Academy of Arts and Animation and its truly commendable.

Post Production

After all the Colorizing work, the print is converted to a wide screen format and is recorded in a new negative.

The Music

After all the work on enhancing the picture, now it’s digitalizing the Music of the Movie. The Music for the movies like Mughal-e-Azam is the soul. The Music Director of the movie, Naushad was so keen on the film’s music as the song “Pyar Kiya to Darna Kya” was rewritten 105 times by the lyricist shakeel badayuni and the song “Ae Mohabbat Zindabad”, sung by Mohd Rafi with a 100 singers in chorus and 120 musicians playing the classical instruments at a time. Ismail Darbar had done the Music for the digitalized version. Now, music digitalization is nothing but the conversion old music, which is in monotype to a Stereotype Surround version, to say technically converting it to Dolby 6.1 surround sound.

Every one of us might be having many questions as to what is monotype music and stereotype music? What is Dolby 6.1? I, probably I have the answer to these questions. The Monotype music is nothing but giving the music of all instruments in a single output, i.e, speaker. So this is the mixed sound of all the instruments at once and the disadvantage in having such type of music is that we can’t differentiate the different instruments in it. On the other hand, stereotype music is getting the output of different instruments differently. The clarity will be more when compared to monotype. The Surround factor, many of us will be knowing about this, still this is an excellent feature which gives the output of the sound same at any corner of the room and Dolby is the company which provides such system .The 6.1 gives the number of speakers and the sub woofers like 6 stereotype speakers and one sub-woofer and so is called Dolby Digital 6.1 surround.

Coming back to the business, Music digitalizing, the voices of all the artists are tracked separately with special software(used by many Music directors and is not revealed) and all the noise, which we generally hear in all the Old movies, are removed. Instead a special Background music is given to suit the current Scene. And when it comes to the Songs, all the instruments were reused again. They are recorded digitally and the voices, which are tracked separately, are added to the music. This actually gives the feel of the Original music re-played again digitally.

So, Just to color 1 sec of a movie takes so much of hard work, imagine the whole movie Now, if we watch the colored version in a theatre near by, we would probably never expect all these happening and would never appreciate them either. The point, which I want to make through this post, is that all Digitally transformed movies like Mughal-e-Azam, Naya Daur and many films, which are going to get colored are a greater piece of Hard work and needs to be appreciated but not to be criticized.

Note-This Post is started and targeted to the people who hate the transformation of Old movies to color. I accept that the films are the masterpieces in their own ways but certain amount of credit should be given to the digital version.

Mahesh Bhatt was against coloring Mughal-e-Azam- “It's like painting the Red Fort in acrylic emulsion”.