Before we go any further, we need to listen to a creation story, the Dolby version. In the beginning, man created the screen and the sights. And then he said, ‘let there be sound’. And there was, at first, mono — a single speaker, in the middle of the theatre, behind the screen. Then came Stereo, with a dedicated channel for dialogue and two additional speakers to the left and the right, which created a better spread of sound. Then came Dolby Surround — now, the sound surrounded us.
With the next upgrade, called 5.1, the theatre was split into two ‘sound zones’, if you will. If a helicopter flew from right to left on the screen, its sound was first heard in the right half of the theatre, and then in the left. For the first time, sound moved across the audience. Then came 7.1, bringing more definition, as the theatre was now split into four zones — with sound travelling from the left to the back wall and then to the right side.
And now, there’s Dolby Atmos, first experienced in the Pixar animated feature Brave in 2012. This isn’t about channels anymore, but about sound emanating from specific speakers. The sound of the helicopter isn’t just on the left or right of the theatre — it is now heard on Speaker 1, Speaker 2, Speaker 3, and so on... And for the first time, there are speakers above the audience. So you can hear the helicopter over your head. Or rain. Earlier, we would hear the sound of rain from either side of us. Now, the “rain sound” can be restricted to the overhead speakers and we get to hear it fall over us, the way it does in life. Karthik Subbaraj, the director of Pizza (the first south Indian movie mixed in 7.1), has now used Dolby Atmos in his second film Jigarthanda , a gangster movie based in Madurai.
I met Subbaraj last week with his team — sound designers Vishnu Govind and Sreesankar, sound mixer Rajakrishnan, and Dolby consultant Dwarak Warrier. S. Venkatraghavan, Cinema Sales Manager - South at Dolby Laboratories, was also present. We sat in a ‘mix theatre’, before a large screen and an L-shaped console with a million buttons. Speakers jutted out from the walls. Imagine a theatre with no seats. This is where these sound guys do the things they do to make the silent scenes come to life. This is where the wind begins to sound like wind and a gunshot like a gunshot. This is also where they work on dialogue tracks, raising and lowering volumes, according to how close or far to the viewer a character is. Subbaraj told me that many scenes in Jigarthanda were shot in old-style houses in Madurai with high ceilings. So, after the shooting was completed (not during , because of the noise levels on the sets), the sound guys went to these locations and captured the ambient sound – for instance, street noises – and also understood how voices would sound when spoken from various corners of a room. They used this knowledge to tweak the dialogue tracks.
Said Warrier, “Most filmmakers don’t give enough thought to the possibilities of sound in storytelling. In most cases, what you hear in the theatre could be the ‘first draft’ as far as sound is concerned. The sound guys need to be consulted at the scripting stage itself.”
That’s what Subbaraj did. He wrote a draft and handed it to the sound guys. They suggested that the film be mixed in Dolby Atmos. Rajakrishnan told me, “If you know the movie is going to be mixed in Atmos, you can add more elements for more detailing.” Rajakrishnan designed the sound for Thalaivaa , the first Tamil movie mixed in Dolby Atmos. In Jigarthanda, Subbaraj “tweaked the script” after the inputs from the sound guys. One scene had a single-take shot that begins in a motel and ends in a restroom. Vishnu Govind said, “In a long, unbroken shot like that we can show the passage of sound.” So the script was rewritten. Now the character begins walking from the kitchen of a restaurant, goes through a theatre and then ends up in the theatre’s restroom. Sounds from these locations were added to the mix. The sound guys suggested that the scene would be enhanced by rain, so that was added too. I asked how different this was from the tracking shot that opened Guna, taken around a Hyderabad whorehouse without any cuts. Venkatraghavan said, “Earlier, with a film like Guna , you could just fade in and fade out the sound (as the camera moved). Now, when the character walks through the theatre, you’ll hear a song from the film playing inside on just one of the speakers around you.”
Some of these inputs influenced the props in Jigarthanda . For a scene using a motorcycle, a modern-day Pulsar was replaced by an 80s-style Kawasaki RTZ for a more “interesting” sound. In another scene, they used different fans for different speakers – so that one speaker has a fan that runs smoothly while another has a fan that makes a noise. And you hear, from each speaker, the distinct sound of a particular fan coming to a stop. “You can never get this kind of effect in 5.1.”
When I ask if the viewer would be able to absorb all this information, Warrier said, “The first time you see the film, the sound is not supposed to take you out of it. But at a subconscious level, you will absorb all these inputs.” That is, of course, how cinema is supposed to work in theory – as a confluence of invisible effects. Can this increasing awareness of what sound can do reduce the dependence on background music to shape viewer response? Clearly, yes, because when the audio files of the kitchen-theatre-restroom scene was sent to music director Santhosh Narayanan, both he and Subbaraj decided to leave out background music.
And would Subbaraj opt for Dolby Atmos even for a smaller movie, say a rom-com? He said he would, because the impact is greater. But then, so is the work. “Initially, I thought Jigarthanda would not involve as much work as Pizza . But slowly I found that there was much more work to be done here; there were many live locations and we even shot candid in some places. We needed to recreate all that ambience.” According to Rajakrishnan, it took 15 days to do the sound mixing for Pizza , whereas Jigarthanda took a month. When I told him I hoped he got paid more for it, he laughed.
