When reliance Media Works was given the task of restoring Mrinal Sen?s 1984 classic, Khandahar, which tells the story of a city-based photographer who falls in love with a heartbroken woman living in a ruined village, it got the film in a shambles. Among other things, it had bad splices, tearing, dirt, scratches, flickers, grains, noises, and image warps. To make matters worse, the film?s audio was impaired following years of deterioration.
Shemaroo faced a similar predicament while restoring Amitabh Bachchan?s Mahan, and had to depend on multiple sources including negatives, prints and video.
Restoration is a painstaking job and India?s rich library of films is getting frayed and needs to be first cleaned up, digitised and archived. A handful of players in India are getting into the thick of the restoration business, including Reliance MediaWorks, Shemaroo, Prime Focus, Pixion, Famous, and Efx Prasad.
With borders melting, there?s a lot of business from the world?s most successful film industry, Hollywood, as well. Reliance Media Works or Prime Focus, for instance, are already doing a fair bit of restoration work for Hollywood as well. For Prime Focus, its toughest assignment was restoring Ben Hur.
?Reliance MediaWorks has a unique blend of the best in class restoration tools and proprietary technologies, coupled with organically created talent pool that enables us to offer the optimum combination of scale, skills and solutions for all restoration needs across India, the US, the UK, Russia and Japan,? says Anil Arjun, CEO, Reliance MediaWorks.
Hiren Gada, director, Shemaroo, says being a part of the Indian film industry, it feels good to be able to do something to preserve the works and keep them in good shape. Shemaroo recently expanded its facility to take on more restoration work. ?With passage of time, the older body of work is deteriorating, and with storage conditions not optimal, it is aggravating the situation,? he points out. Gada says it?s imperative to take care of India?s best films because new platforms like HD TV, BlueRay and so forth are opening up. Shemaroo has picked up the rights of 250 Hindi films and has restored a slew of films like Anand, Chupke Chupke, Parinda, Silsila, Dil To Pagal Hai, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Mera Gaon Mera Desh, and so forth.
For Reliance MediaWorks, the Khandahar job was just the beginning?it?s now in the process of renovating 1,000 films as part of a National Film Archive of India initiative. For Khandahar, the Reliance MediaWorks team repaired the film reels and carried out a chemically cleaning process using an ultrasonic film cleaning system to remove the physical dirt and residue. The audio and images were processed through a series of automatic restoration modules and manually repaired by skilled restoration artists to clean up most of the problems. The film was digitally captured in 2K resolution, without any pre-processing, using a film scanner specially designed for scanning archival films, which preserved the resolution and arrangement without clipping or crushing the image of the original film. The restored files were colour graded under the guidance of veteran filmmaker Govind Nihalani.
Often, purists have problems with restored films. The story goes, perhaps not apocryphal, that Subrata Mitra didn?t like the restored version of Satyajit Ray?s Pather Panchali, complaining about the light and other things. ?It?s an issue,? admits Gada, ?and we usually involve the cinematographer in the restoration process because he knows the thought process, the use of light, and colour treatment.?
Prime Focus offers integrated restoration teams in London and Chandigarh. While the Prime Focus restoration team in the UK has served some of the largest film and television archives in the world for over two decades, the team in India offers two important advantages?capacity and cost effective solutions at a very high quality, says Rohan Desai, DI head and chief colourist. With the Indian film industry being one of the largest in the world, he adds it has a large number of skilled and experienced technicians and artists. ?This enables us to not only handle Bollywood projects, but also Hollywood and other international projects. Even technologically we have progressed a lot. While earlier it was only the dirt and tears that could be addressed, today with computerisation we can fix problems like colour fading, water marks, missing frames, scratches and stains, which persist after physical cleaning.?
But is restoration a viable business? ?It?s a combination of doing good work and getting some returns,? says Gada. ?There is a level of margin, which is not great, but there is a small commercial gain as of now.? Shemaroo is booked for the next few months. Reliance MediaWorks is obviously focused on this business because it has set up a 90,000 sq ft facility to digitally restore and process content for not only Indian films, but also Hollywood and other geographies.
Says Desai: ?Restoration is a growing market in India as the film industry dates back to the early 20th century. Many films dating back to the 1930s have not been maintained well and some have even been lost. As a result many filmmakers want their old films to have a fresh lease of life and are hence looking to restore their films.?
When K Asif?s 1960 hit Mughal-e-Azam, which was digitally restored, pigmented and released to audiences in November 2004, purists may have complained about the restoration, but theatres in Mumbai reported over 90% ticket sales in the first week and 80% in the second. There?s a whole new audience out there and production houses are waking up to the possibility of reintroducing a rich film heritage.
