Dejected and exasperated over seeing the lacklustre attitude of some of the theatres in the state, which undermines efforts of film crew, Jomon T. John, cinematographer of Ennu Ninte Moideen called for coordinated efforts on part of different organisations in the movie industry to put an end to this ‘messy’ trend.
“Despite charging around Rs 100-150 to watch a movie, the facilities offered by most of the movie theatres in the state are worse than that of the talkies of yesteryear", said Jomon.
“I watched my new movie Ennu Ninte Moideen from a theatre in Ernakulam a couple of days ago. The show was ‘houseful’, but I got shattered when the screening began,” he said.
“There is a scene in which a temple festival at the heroine’s ancestral home is shown. During the digital intermediary (DI) process of the film’s post-production works in Chennai, we instructed the colourist to use a golden filter to warm up the scene. If you take a close look, you can a see a golden tint on the heroine’s skin tone against the dark backdrop. But when I watched it on the screen, the golden tint appeared pale white! Who to complain to?”
This is not the first time Jomon faced this crisis: “The industry spends millions to shoot a film. But what can we do if theatre operators are unwilling to replace a mere projection bulb? In the movie Nee-Na, even the expressions and emotions of the characters, that I canned paying great attention to details, were marred by poor projection standards.”
Jomon said that this is not just the pain of the cinematographers: “Those who do sound mixing in movies say it pains when most of the effects they add to the soundtrack during the recording process go missing in the theatres. There are theatres that ‘adjust’ the sound system in accordance with the attendance for that particular show! For Hindi movies, DI is six-month long process. There the colour grading for artists’ skin tone and the background visuals is done by different colourists with extreme care. When our local industry has started to emulate such state-of-the-art techniques, our theatre operators are showing complete disregard to them.”
“When Ganesh Kumar was the Minister for Cinema, a grading system for theatres had been introduced, in which the classification was based on the facilities offered to the public apart from visual and sound quality. If it was implemented properly, people would have got a chance to choose the best theatre to watch a movie. To ensure that the cinema halls are offering the desired sound and visual quality to the audience, the cinema organisations need to come forward and initiate some healthy debates on the issue,” he added.