Side A Side B premieres at the New York Indian Film Festival
“For the people of Assam and all of the North East, this is huge. It’s a moment for us to celebrate,” Guwahati-based musician Rahul Rajkhowa
“This is the first time someone has taken a lead character and actor from here and has represented music in its purest, organic, raw acoustic form – just the way we like it in the North East and we shot the musical live. Usually, films set in the North East take mainland Indian actors and make them look oriental… Priyanka in Mary Kom, for example. So this is a huge leap forward,” Rahul who plays activist-musician Aiban “Joel” Gogoi in the film, explained.
“We are super excited for the world to discover the hidden beauty of Cherrapunji, Dawki and Shillong on screen,” he added.
The other lead of the film, singer Shivranjani Singh (who has sung songs in Kya Kool Hai Hum and Great Grand Masti) is nervous because the film required her to step outside her comfort zone. She had taken guitar classes to prep for the role. “I learnt as much as I could in three months. I just know the basic chords. The character in the film is a newbie with the guitar. The film has a cute teenish-acoustic rock vibe but very different from the kind of music I am into. So that was the acting bit for me,” said the pop singer who just released a single – a party track called ‘Trip Abhi Baki Hai.’
“I wanted to make a real world musical… where we see regular young musicians MAKE their music – or make it up as they feel something – and discover their songs as a medium of expression than something that has been scripted, processed and recorded at a studio,” filmmaker Sudhish Kamath recounted. “It was important to capture the organic nature of music-making in its rawest, truest, purest form. So while musicals usually go from script to lyrics to music, we developed it the other way. First music, then lyrics and then finally, the talking portions of the script. It seems to have paid off because the early buzz is very encouraging, kind and flattering.”
Sudeep Swaroop, the music director who had scored for X-Past is Present, had dropped into wish the filmmaker on his birthday last year when Kamath pitched him the idea of making a minimalist real world musical in the tradition of Once, Begin Again and Inside Llewyn Davis. He strummed out eight tunes on his guitar based on eight situations over the next half hour, which the director recorded on his iPhone. And within the next two months, they got the lyrics done and recorded ten songs in a studio for the actors to prep.
“I already had a completed song I had developed with lyricist Nikita Agarwal called Chup Chup Ke, which we decided on Day 1, would be the song for the climax. It’s a really special song and very close to my heart,” the composer who had recently scored for Mona Darling, said on the eve of the premiere. “The immensely talented singer-actors did a fabulous job learning the songs quickly and made them their own. It was a pleasure working with them.”
“A musical talks through its songs. As part of the narrative and the dialogue, the songs are text, not subtext,” Raja Sen, songwriter, recalled the challenge of writing for the film when his buddy Kamath first discussed the film with him. “Side A Side B gave me the chance to try and channel my inner 14-year-old Bryan Adams fan and to find voices for the mushy and naïve Joel and the smart, increasingly confident Shivi. Love works best when it rhymes,” the film critic and writer added.
The next person to get on board the Side A Side B train was FTII-grad cinematographer Karthik Ganesh (Aurangzeb, Powder, Bombariya). Kamath started his pitch with “I don’t know if you would be comfortable shooting a film with an iPhone….” and the DoP said “Yes. Let’s do it.” Just for the adventure of it.
“Even with the obvious limitations with respect to the latitude while shooting on a phone camera, we went ahead with the choice for one simple reason – the phone, as a camera, is invisible – both in the eyes of our populace and as an eye for the filmmaker,” he observed. “Being inconspicuous is such a boon while shooting in India and the fact that we were shooting the major part of the film in a train, in very closed confines made space a very precious commodity. The phone camera really excelled here. The small size, the wide angle of the view and the huge depth of field it provided ensured that the ‘space’ the camera took was next to nothing. That enabled us to even have two camera setup in approximately 36 square feet of space,” the lensman revealed.
Dipankar “Jojo” Chaki, a veteran of around 300 films, remembered the day they discussed the challenge. “I was asked by my director to record a singer-songwriter musical inside a moving train. I said: That’s impossible. No one had ever done such a thing. The problem was the noise and the train’s noise floor is so high. Also, all the edit cuts would sound different and would need to be smoothened,” he laid down the task in front of him. “Sudhish was sure we had to do it this way. So we did with various mics and apogee conversion. After post-production and cleaning out some of the noise, we were all pleased to hear the music. The two actors and the DoP and the director holding phones had occupied the entire lower berth. I had to sit on the upper berth to record. What a mad production,” he laughed.
After the film was shot between July 4 and 9 (most of it during a train journey between 7 and 9), editor and old collaborator Vijay Venkataramanan (who had also worked with Kamath on Good Night Good Morning and X – Past is Present) was given the impossible task of converting rushes without time-codes (because of the nature of the mobile phone shoot) and variable frame rates into a stable working timeline. “I told him to credit me as the clusterf*ck unf*cker for sorting out the rushes. Side A Side B was envisioned as a split screen movie. As an editor, I personally dislike using split screens. The biggest challenge was to maintain split screens and still draw attention to performance nuances that the actors brought, without confusing the audience as to where they should be looking,” Venkatramanan explained.
“To do that, I animated a lot of zooms and reframed shots in the edit to almost call out to the audience and asking them to look at a particular part of the scene. And this had to be done without making it look amateurish. A challenging film to edit, considering intentional lack of coverage and usage of long takes. Thankfully, due to good writing and strong performances, the long takes hold,” he added, quite relieved at the response.
Film critic Steve Kopian of Unseen Films, who managed to catch the film in the middle of the Tribeca madness wrote: “I am at a loss for words. This is one of those rare films where I don't want to attempt to review it, I simply want to press a copy into everyone's hand and say see this it is something special… I need to actually see this film a couple dozen more times to really be able to really write about it. This film is a masterpiece and needs major consideration and not something that is tossed off to make a deadline.”
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