Sampath Alwar is the sound designer of Sudheer Verma’s thriller Keshava , where silence dominates. He had already worked on Highway , which doesn’t have much background music and there is one more film Ajju (Thoda language) which doesn’t have any music at all. It has been shot on a tribal community in a forest. Ask Sampath apart from silence and clarity how effective is sync sound, he quips, “Emotionally it communicates a lot. A normal person when in trouble, doesn’t think much about other things. Generally in our films, the music that goes with dialogues is jarring. The music should be in tandem with your emotion.”
A protégé of Resul Pookutty and Nakul Kamte, Sampath Alwar began his career as a sync sound recordist and became a sound designer. He talks about why sync sound which was prevalent in the black and white era, is being skipped after a while. “Those days we had good sync sound and all artistes come to the studio and we had a controlled location. After 80s when the camera came out of studio it became difficult to control the location. The artistes came out and people would gather to see them shoot and it became difficult to manage. Bollywood, Kannada and Malayalam industries are using sync sound and recently Pelli Choopulu followed suit. When an artiste is acting in front of the camera, his dialogue delivery is very different. You can give all those qualities through sync sound, it is possible anywhere except in high traffic zones.”
Sampath won awards for Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR) which is known as dubbing in India and also for being the best sound effects editor. He also worked on the documentary India’s Daughter . He retained the voice of just two people talking on the show through ADR. Explaing further this technique, Sampath adds, “Off screen, we have lot of television footage. We had to recreate it. In the documentary, we know what the actor is talking about but behind him there are lot of people sitting in the restaurant. They too are talking and we should record it on ADR or dub it properly. To get to know what they are talking, we plant a lip reader who gives us the information. They give us a note and we recreate it in dubbing. I got an award for that post production in dubbing.”
Sampath says the only career option earlier for sound designers was film, radio and television but now there is lot more. “Now beyond all these, there are Games. You can’t imagine how big it is, the Ph2 Ph3 Ph4…it is a boom and lot of jobs for sound designers are available.”
