A Diaspora from India

Caught on Film

Las Vegas sure is lucky to have a feisty Mayor on Oscar Goodman, for he never misses a trick to keep city projects on the boil and ready for investors. Mayor Goodman has got Prudential Real Estate Investors from Parsippany in New Jersey, who own Neonopolis on Fremont Street, to meet with Rohit Joshi, a dynamic Las Vegas entrepreneur. We could soon be opening the bubbly to celebrate the opening of the metro`s latest retail center, which has bowling and cinema attractions as well. Neonopolis could also see some televised poker events. A quarter of a million square feet by way of space, underground parking, superb restaurants and a bar for neighbors on Fremont Street, are the main features which must have induced Joshi Associates to make a serious bid with a handsome deposit for Neonopolis. The potential is big enough for Mayor Goodman to have opposed past proposals to convert some of Neonopolis for office use. Strict adherence to zoning guidelines has always stood Las Vegas in good stead. Neonopolis was first conceived in 1997. Why has such attractive commercial realty taken so long to find suitors? The project history holds important lessons for real estate agents such as me, who have to advise clients from out-of-town on the best projects for their funds. It starts with clear titles for land use. Always read the fine print on this when a developer has plans but no physical built-up area in to which you can enter right away. Such disputes were the bane of Neonopolis even before ground breaking.Marketing is the second lesson that one can take home from the history of this project.

Developers allowed everyone to rent space without questions on how their proposed uses fit in with the big Neonopolis picture. One tenant even used space in the building for the homeless, which tells you something about how the property must have been priced! Bad news travels fast, and soon tenants were scurrying towards the exits! Neonopolis may have been a step ahead of its time because many prospective clients baulked at the thought of a gay bar in their environs.

All The Excitement About Jodha Akbar

"Jodha Akbar" a UTV venture, is the most awaited film of the year. which is based on a romance between the 16th century Muslim Mughal emperor Akbar, played by Hrithik Roshan, and a Hindu princess, Jodha Bai, played by Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai. Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, the movie will also be dubbed in Tamil and Telugu languages.

Former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan states that all the actors in the movie Jodha Akbar had worked very hard and had done the film with full passion. What if Jodha Akbar failed like Asoka? To this question Ash stated At certain times certain films do well certain films do not do that well. It`s a very tricky thing. On the other hand bollywood movie star Hrithik Roshan says he deliberately choose this movie , as acting out the difficult role of the Mongol emperor in the new historical romance Jodha Akbar gave him an opportunity to excel as an actor. It is only when it seems to threaten the value of my job would I be consciously giving it my best, he said. Well, let`s wait and watch how this movie fares at the box office.

The First full - Length Sound Film

March 14, 1931 was a historic day for Indian cinema. Ardeshir Irani of Imperial Movietone released Alam Ara, the first full-length Indian talkie film at the Majestic cinema in Bombay. This film very effectively broke the golden silent era and laid a milestone that marked the steeping into the new talkie era as well as rang the death knell to silent films. However, it was the Warner Bros who had only a few years earlier launched the sound era with Don Juan (1926) starring Mary Astor with synchronised musical score and sound effects and followed by Jazz Singer. But it was Lights of New York (1928) that was the first talkies film followed closely by Hitchcock’s Blackmail (Britain) and Rene Clair’s Sous Les Toits Paris (France). Meanwhile, India’s first synchronised film Melody of Love was by Madan Theatres in 1929. Lead players: Master Vithal, Miss Zubeida, Jilloo, Sushila, Prithviraj Kapoor, Elizer, Wazir Mohammad Khan, Jagdish Sethi, LV Prasad. Playwright from the Parsi Imperial Theatrical company, the play Alam Ara had already proved to be a popular success. The story is about the king of Kumarapur’s two queens, both of whom are childless.

A fakir’s prediction that the good queen Navbahar will bear a son comes true, eliciting the intense jealousy of the wicked queen Dilbahar. Dilbahar fancies Adil, chief of the army but the latter spurns hers. In retaliation she has him imprisoned. Adil’s wife dies giving birth to Alam Ara (Zubeida) who grows up in a gypsy camp. One night she goes tot he palace in search of her father, when a charm aroud her neck reveals her true identity. There she meets the young prince (Vithal) and they fall in love. In the end, Adil is released, Dilbahar punished and the lovers married. Inspired by Universal’s Showboat, Ardeshir Irani went about to produce Alam Ara. The film took months to make following the hazardous recording conditions, the distressing laboratory processing methods of that time and the secrecy surrounding the project. Says Irani , "There were no sound-proof stages , we preferred to to shoot indoors and at night. Since our studio is located near a railway track most of our shooting was done between the hours that the trains ceased operation. We worked with a single system Tamar recording equipment. There were also no booms. Microphones had to be hidden in incredible places to keep out of camera range." Irani and his assistant Rustom Bharucha picked up the rudiments of recording from Wilford Deming, an American engineer, who had come to India to assemble the equipment for them. Deming, the methods of film production had come as quite a shock.

For weeks together tickets were sold out and blackmarket vendors had a field day." Meanwhile, the success of Alam Ara led to a rush of other films into production. Producers enticed actors from the stage as voice was the chief criterion and not all actors of the silent era could adapt to sound. Three weeks after Alam Ara, Madan Theatres' released Jamai Sashti (Bengali), followed by Alam Ara; Shirin Farhad (Urdu) which was a spectacular success, featured the most popular singing pair, Jahan Ara Kajjan and Master Nissar, was recorded on RCA photophone sound system and contained three times as many songs as Alam Ara; Kalidas (Tamil, 1931), Bhakta Prahlad (Telugu, 1931), Ayodhyecha Raja (Marathi, 1932), Narasimha Mehta (Gujarati, 1932), Dhruva Kumar (Kannada, 1934). However, the arrival of sound in spite of being welcome in several quarters had serious implications for the whole industry and its appendages. The talkies era silenced a whole generation of artists, film-makers and technicians. Many studios unable to switch over to sound closed down; Anglo-Indians who did not speak fluent Hindi or Urdu were the worst hit. Those who could not sing were also hit as there was no playback and direct recording meant artistes had to sing their own songs.

Apparantly the very early attempts to make motion pictures audible was the device used by Edison in 1913 which employed the phonograph record for the source of sound. Though this method worked satisfactorily, the only hitch was the sound reproduction was not enough to fill a theatre. Also the reproduced tone did not sound natural enough to give the proper illusion. (However, it was the vacuum tube which came later and amplified even the most inaudible whisper.) In Cinema Vision, Ram Mohan quotes veteran film technician Krishna Gopal, "Problems? Of course we had problems--thousands of them--no one knew how to handle the sound equipment. We did not know how to deal with echoes inside the studios. The cameras had no blimps ad their noise drowned out the dialogues. We tried all we could to muffle the camera noise. We wrapped the camera in blankets, put insulating shields around it. Nothing seemed to work. We couldn't hear a word the actors spoke inside the studio." When the shoot was moved outdoors, the quality of sound improved "but one cannot shoot an entire film outdoors. Even in a historical, the characters have to go home sometimes." Long takes from a single point became a necessity because of the many unsolved problems of combining photography with sound. Actors had to huddle around a hidden, low-fidelity microphone, often resulting in self-conscious performances. Picturisation of songs too were done in a single shot. Trial and error resulted in mush wastage of raw stock and many films had to be abandoned. However, there was the other side to it too. The box-office returns were so fabulous that they came to be known as mortgage-lifters, enabling those cinema houses that had shut down during the Depression to reopen. Also, it gave a temporary respite from pressing foreign competition. Foreign films now suffered a reversal . English dialogue limited the audience to European and a small number of English-speaking Indians.

Bollywood Joins VFX Animation Fray

The Indian film industry, collectively known as Bollywood, is no longer just song and dance. Indian artists in the visual effects and computer generated imagery realm put their creativity on display Tuesday in the Content Theater during Globalizing Bollywood Indian Animation and VFX Films Eye the Global Stage. The demonstration put the world on notice that lavish effects can be produced on the subcontinent too. In a country of more than 1 billion people Bollywood is a machine producing far more feature films each year than Hollywood. However, complex animated and VFX fare had been avoided due to a lack of tools and talent. But that`s changing.

The Indian audience is going global said Keitan Yadav COO of Red Chillies VFX a visual effects post production company. They`ve been so exposed to Hollywood films that visual effects become the selling point of the film. As an example Ocher Studios Executive Producer Kartik Gangadharan showed footage from Sultan the Warrior. Currently in production Sultan is the largest CG animated movie to date in India budgeted at $10 million. The film is using well known Indian actors and complex motion capture techniques in the Polar Express.

VFX and CG artist is a hot job in India. We have people who want to get into this industry but right now the schools in India are not training the kids the way they should be Gangadharan said. Someone who comes out of a school in Europe or America is as good as a senior artist back in India. Theres a very big area for schools to come and open shops in India. Yadav said India got a late start entering the CG heavy filmmaking business. We should go global with the production have technicians from all over the world come in to give exposure as to how they did filmmaking works and learn from them, Yadav said.

India Animated Freefonix Cinnamon Entertainment

London - India has long been known as an outsourcing hub for call centres and computer support. Now a BBC children`s series will cement its position as a global centre for animators. With a 10 million budget, India-animated Freefonix is one of the BBC`s biggest ever projects. The futuristic tale of mismatched musicians was two years in the making across three continents and involved more than 200 people. The Bollywood-BBC tie-up is the first of many, according to the series U.K. based producers Cinnamon Entertainment. Managing director Anthony Bouchier says more readily available funding and skilled animation teams are drawing TV show-makers to India. We saw that there were opportunities not only to outsource but to actually get investment for animation out of India. In the U.K. there is a major problem with animation for children because the broadcasters do not have sufficient budgets to finance animation, so it all has to come from private sources, he says. Mr. Bouchier believes that the 40-episode series launching on Friday, is the first of its kind for the 7-11 age group. The BBC are involved in some very exciting projects and the majority of those are financed out of India. India is coming to the rescue of BBC animation. Cinnamon is part of a new breed of media companies specialising in making the most of tax breaks and subsidies available in various countries. Created by Magnus Fiennes, brother of Joseph and Ralph, Freefonix was financed with funding from sources including Indian private equity investment, The Isle of Man Film Fund and the BBC.

The scripts were written in the U.S. and the U.K., the voices were recorded in the U.K., the music and general production work was done in the U.K. and the Isle of Man and then a team in Paris modelled the characters and backgrounds. The whole thing was then sent to Thiruvananthapuram, where it was animated. The final post-production was done in Ireland. Freefonix is testament to the way the production process for animation projects has been revolutionised by the internet, which allows teams in various countries to swap files instantly and to communicate on videolink services such as Skype.