SOUND DESIGNER KUNAL RAJAN INTERVIEW

“I hail from Pondicherry and have a Bachelor’s Degree in Sound. I’m really not sure about how the passion began. Sound designing has always fascinated me. The way sound navigates within the theater excites me. I wanted to be someone, who could do that.  With Hollywood as my ambition, I moved to America 10 years back. I started with short films and a few festival movies. With time and experiences, I started getting bigger movies and now I’m working on a lot of Hollywood projects.”
 

Introducing Kunal Rajan, the passionate, young Sound Designer of Uttama Villain… Also having been a part of Vishwaroopam, the techie from Pondy has enjoyed long companies of Ulaganayagan Kamal Haasan and no wonder he has a lot to talk.
 

On the Hollywood front, Rajan is eagerly looking forward to the big October release of his next work, Jem and the Holograms, directed by Jon M Chu, the man who helmed G.I.Joe Retaliation, Step Up 3D and Step Up 2: The Streets.

Whatever you hear in the theater… Most of the Indian movies are dubbed nowadays. Beginning from merging the dialogues to adding sounds like, footsteps, gunshots, vehicles, ambience noise and everything else is done in the studio.
 

Simultaneously, the composer would work on the BGM. Once that’s done, we mix everything and deliver it.

Once we are ready with the dialogues, sound effects and music, we take those to the mixing engineer, who in this case was Craig Mann. He checks the sound levels of each track and mixes them according to the directors’ requirements.

(laughs) Must I say how sound his knowledge is? He is very knowledgeable in every aspect of filmmaking. But what I like the most about him is, he always comes here (to USA) and be with us during the whole process. He always comes with the full plan and with clarity on what he wants and how things have to be. At the same time, he lets us work our way. He’s also very specific when he wants certain things changed.
 

There are also instances where, he’d suggest us do something in a certain way, but we’d tell him the issues that might arise if we do thus. But he’d come up with an unbelievable technical solution for that too and it’d turn out to be brilliant. Kamal has solutions for all kinds of problems. It’s so easy to work with him.    
  

Another good thing about him is that he gives us time to work on the project and doesn’t hurry us.

Uttama Villain and Vishwaroopam are two very different kinds of movies. The former will have very subtle, realistic design, considering it is a drama and its story takes precedence than the technical departments. 

Assuming they are lovers and that the mood is happy, we’d give some breeze, kids playing and birds chirping sounds. But, if it’s a break up or a sad scene, I cannot add the same sounds here, as they’d spoil the mood of the sequence. I’d have to go with a totally different set of effects.

As an audience, you shouldn’t be able to notice our work. If you start noticing our work much, that means we aren’t doing a good job. Our job is to be invisible and it is very crucial that we remain that way. 

There’s one thing I really want to see happen, which is standardization of theaters and calibration of speakers in all theaters. You watch a film in one theater and watch it again in another theater a few days later, the experience will be totally different. They keep the sound levels high in few theaters and low in few other theaters.
 

For example, for a Hollywood film, I mix it at certain level of volume and inform the theaters to maintain it at that level while projecting. But while mixing for an Indian film, I have to work with a wide range of volumes, because here theaters don't practice a common standard. Each one projects movies with different levels of sound. That was my fear for Uttama Villain too.

It’s a bit less, but I can live with that. After all, our job is to be invisible.