“The Perfect SCORE : Understanding and Acing the world of Digital Entertainment ”: Webinar on ‘Production and Music Production’

“The Perfect SCORE : Understanding and Acing the world of Digital Entertainment”: Webinar on ‘Production and Music Production’ with Ms. Radhika Lavu and Mr. Shakthikanth Karthick (G.O.D web series) at Annapurna College of Film and Media, Hyderabad

The conversation with Ms. Radhika and Mr. Karthik discussed about producer-musician dynamics, regional cinema sensibilities, and creative inspirations from Hollywood and essentially touched upon the universality of music production and how one need to balance that with quirkiness, understanding of the roots and add flavour to specific composition.

Ms. Radhika set the tone for the discussion by commenting the current dynamic’s related to vernacular markets. She said that regional language markets (in content business) are gaining momentum and Hindi market is already and adequately discovered. Experimentation is much larger in regional space, referring to examples like Bucket List (in Marathi) to Baahubali (in South India). Although language looks like a barrier, good content always transcends. Post Baahubali, the expanse, reach, budgets, teams are getting bigger for regional content, riding upon the OTT platform proliferation. There are also many sub-cultures in a specific language market itself and exploration of regional sub cultures (not only major cultures) is becoming an imperative. 

Realistic stories that are cinematically rich, often raw and gritty in their approach/treatment, experimental (non-formulaic) in structure and many times autobiographical in genre, finds great traction with OTT players.

“How do you make a character non-redundant, more relevant and progressively clear (mull) in a 400 minute series?” is indeed challenging for writers in her production project. Talking about the exact character development and associated characterisation (of epic characters like D.N Reddy, Pratap Reeddy, Venu Reddy, Swapna Reddy, Chalapthi, Saroja and etc), Ms. Radhika said that “it is not about the duration and screen time but about the whole impact in the overall narrative flow”. Accordingly, the entry and exit decisions of characters were well thought through by the entire creative team. This also influenced and affected the decisions related to character arc, character complexity and character development for subsequent episodes and season(s) as well.

When asked to detail the collaboration with OTT platform player (ZEE5), Ms. Radhika mentioned that there were very changes to the submitted bound script and no translations hiccups from script to screen (as captured in the ‘first cut’) occurred, calling for very few minor suggestions from ZEE5. Thankfully for her, the platform trusted in her process and believed in her judgement (choices related to violence, characterization and other creative decision) and overall executive production acumen. “Give respect to what you have written (Script) and shoot exactly what you scripted” is her producing mantra.

Reflecting on the seventy days of shooting schedule(s) and about three months window for post-production schedules, she mentioned that there was no precedent or benchmark before G.O.D. The content industry in Hyderabad was used to filmed entertainment and not to the tighter deadlines of web series production. In her case, the post production of G.O.D was akin to undertaking post production activities for three major films in Telugu Film Industry (TFI). She leveraged and benefitted from split/distributed work teams, parallel work flows and other time management hacks

When a crew needs to repack equipment in one location (load out), and travel to another location where they can unload & rebuild (load in), it’s referred to as a company move in producing parlance. As one can imagine, this can be a lengthy process, especially on big shoots like G.O.D which was spread across many locations Anegundi, Hospet, Hampi, Bellary, Hyderabad and etc. Giving a detailed description of the line producing challenges, Ms. Radhika spoke about the effective time management tactics in the gruelling seventy day period, often using crew of 130 plus people on select days. Picturing against logistical challenges, in harsh weather conditions, long working hours, extended work timings and multiple locations, she thanked and praised her technical crew and talent. This was possible because of the importance accorded to pre-production, which itself took ---six to seven months in a robust manner.

There are a few cities in the world that you can recognise because they’ve been filmed so frequently and lovingly, Hyderabad is surely one of them. It also has the distinction of having charmed both commercial filmmakers and those of more arty persuasions and Ms. Radhika opines that Hyderabad has lot to offer in terms of undiscovered locations and it surprises her every time

Effortlessly, reflecting on his filmography in the recent past, Mr. Karthik is at his candid and confrontational best and has the following to share with budding filmmakers:

Talking about the famous Rakasi Loya song, Mr. Karthik mentioned that they made Saroja as the central character, for she is there in all pivotal moments of the series and is an emotional anchor of the family. This amplified the impact and the saxophone dominated song has simple tune and it did not disturbed the narrative flow as at the same time, conveyed the central and unified theme of the whole web series.  Do check out the powerful and engaging song at the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E1wsDkzrrU

Referencing to the cult classics like ‘There Will Be Blood’, ‘Drive’, ‘In Mood For Love’, ‘God Father’, ‘Blade Runner’ and many other famous movies he said that he discovered the exceptional positive impact of orchestral movie soundtracks in regards to the stimulation of his creativity, as a lot of these songs helped him to get inspired in an amazingly refreshing way.

“Balancing between experimentation and audience connect is always not easy and music composition is all about control.” Rather than doing out of box ideas and inspired projects, the musical score in web series must necessarily be rooted in cultural nuances, specificity (rootedness/atmospherics) and geographical landscape.

The fight is always between unknown creative and known commercial forces, as an artist. Underplaying and underlining the moments as a musician is his style and work ethos and according to him, music must provoke emotions and create an amazingly epic feeling that precisely fits the action on the screen. According to Mr. Karthik, the state of Andhra Pradesh has loads of cultural references and geographical settings that provision many ingenious opportunities for musicians. 

Music for Films is wholly different than for web series, for it offers more opportunities to artists. Films inherently and innately have more need for dramatic music, unlike web series that offers more space for silences. Not all moments in web series need to be dramatized in a uniform mode and music can enhance the effect through different spaces and diverse creative choices (psychedelic, fusion and etc.).

?Researching (for music) would likely amount to well-intentioned but a misguided one at that, for it limit the possibilities and creative boundaries. Mr. Karthik derided the conventional view by saying that “never locks yourself into fixation” (when it comes to creation of beats and tunes). 

Making a solid case for artistic simplicity, he ended the session with famous quote of Hans Zimmer. “I've spent my life trying to make things simpler. Because I find ultimately that complicated doesn't reach the heart.” Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, more so in music industry and that indeed is music to my ears

The conversation additionally touched upon specific technical facets of ‘ Production Management’ relating to that of ‘Recce/Tech Scouting’, ‘Location Management’, ‘Production Schedules’ and select issues in music composition, director-music director collaborations and collaborative nature of film making.

Speaker Bio:

Ms. Radhika Lavu is an established film producer with over 12 years of experience in the field. She promotes a production house under the banner Ellanar Films. Her recent accomplishment is Gods of Dharmapuri (GOD), a Telugu web series streaming on Zee5 digital platform, which she produced.

Mr. Shakthi Kanth is music composer for several hit Telugu movies since 2012. Providing foot-tapping music to the Telugu cinema viewers, Shakhti Kanth was nominated for Filmfare Award for Best Music Director - Telugu for his work in Fidaa which was released in 2017. His other works would include Satya 2 (2013), Nela Ticket (2018) and Happy Wedding (2018).

--- Note: Views are personal and wish to make it abundantly clear that the knowledge being shared by the expert(s) is for informational and educational purposes only. The questions are designed for students to listen to personal experience(s). The blog is written to capture those experience(s).