Lakshya - Filming in India

ARRI NEWS, APRIL 2004

The typical mainstream Bollywood film has vibrant and saturated colors, night exteriors have a blue key light and a yellow fill light. The character’s are usually way over the top super heroes, back-up dancers suddenly materialize and start singing, and every film has a happy end.

DIL CHAHTA HAI, director Farhan Akthar’s first film, was a milestone in India because it had its roots in traditional Bollywood Cinema but was more reality based, which he wanted to continue in his second film LAKSHYA. This film’s fictitious story follows the experiences and the coming of age of the main character Karan Shergill (played by Hritik Roshan) and has the Kargil war of 1999 between India and Pakistan as backdrop. The three-hours narrative feature was shot in Hindi with a budget of US$ 7,000,000 in 146 shooting days and is now going through the Digital Intermediate Process at Prasad Labs in Mumbai, India.

LAKSHYA was shot entirely on location in India – in the Himalayas in and around Leh, Ladakh at 11,500 ft to 18,000 ft (where the highest crane shot ever done for a narrative feature film at 17,796ft above sea level was carried out), New Delhi, at the IMA (Indian Military Academy) in Deradhun and on sets in Film City in Bombay. Los Angeles based cinematorapher Christopher Popp remembers the challenges of this partially extreme shooting quite well:

LAKSHYA is done in the 35 mm anamorphic (2.40:1 aspect ratio) format, which is the standard aspect ratio for all Bollywood films. I love this aspect ratio since it allows you to do complex compositions and capture intimate moments with two characters in a tight close-up in one frame. You can also control layers of focus on different planes, and it allows you to spread the action across the frame and have wide vistas. Our main camera, which for 85 % of the film was a single camera which I operated myself, was an ARRIFLEX 535B with Hawk anamorphic prime lenses, 35 mm to 135 mm, and an Angenieux Zoom 50 mm – 500 mm which we got from Prasad Labs in Mumbai. Whenever we needed matching coverage, we brought in additional cameras – usually 35IIIs and 435s with Hawk lenses from Ravi Prasad Unit in Chennai.

A good portion of the film is supposed to happen in Kargil and the Drass area in Jammu- Kashmir close to the Line of Control (LoC), a 450 mile line that is supposed to indicate the boundary between the part of Kashmir controlled by India and the part controlled by Pakistan. Since there were still shelling and terrorist attacks going on in that region, the production decided to shoot that part of the film in and around Leh at 11,500 ft at the eastern side of Jammu-Kashmir close to China. The only way to get equipment in was by roads and passes that lead through the Himalaya.

We spent 4 month up there and had to shoot major night exterior battle scenes as well as a lot of day exterior and interior scenes. Detailed pre-planning was essential to shoot in a place like this, especially when trucks with equipment and generators needed two weeks to arrive from Bombay.

I was trying to shoot the day exteriors in backlight, 3/4 backlight or sidelight, to give the mountains some texture. I used SunPATH sun-tracking software, a compass and clinometer in order to calculate where the sun would be at a certain time and we then broke down sequences to shoot specific angles at certain times of day. The idea of wide shots and vistas was not only to show how beautiful Ladakh was, but to also make it a character in the film and to put our characters into the environment with a sense of scale.

During shooting we had everything that you can imagine, ranging from temperatures of 115° F with extreme humidity and dust storms back in Delhi to living and working at high altitudes with thunderstorms, snow and hail – sometimes all in one day. Most of our locations in Ladakh were all windy and extremely dusty. One of the bigger challenges though, was to set up a 24’ Giraffe crane, 12 812 muslins, and several cameras to shoot one of the most important scenes above the Tanglangla Pass at 17,796 ft above sea level at 10° F. Of course, just getting the equipment up there was a challenge. Then sudden gusts of wind came in and threatened to topple the crane. We also had to be done by a certain time, since we were losing the light. An interesting fact about this shoot is that we beat our own record which we had set up in Warila by doing the possibly highest crane shot ever done for a narrative feature film at approx. 17,300 ft. With this shot, we broke our own record a week later by almost 500 feet.

Another important scene takes place at a sheer cliff that our heroes have to climb to surprise the intruders on the peak. The scene was broken down into segments. One, where our heroes arrive at the bottom of the cliff and look up in awe, which we shot in Ladakh, and some dramatic climbing action where we had to see our heroes clearly on the wall. It would have been impossible to shoot that segment for real in Ladakh. A cliff face that measured approximately 100’ 8 55’ was built on scaffolding and dressed with painted fiberglass panels in Film City in Mumbai. The cliff face had two side panels and a front panel on the ground. All the panels were painted blue to work as blue screens. The cliff and a mountain range were added in the CG realm.

Before shooting commenced, it was important for me to find out what the different labs’ results looked like.We decided to have the negative, dailies and the release prints done by Prasad Labs in Mumbai. During production, an ARRILASER was installed at Prasad Labs in Mumbai and the decision then was made to do a DI (digital intermediate) for the color correction and release prints in April 2004 – a very important decision for the look of the film.

For LAKSHYA, I used 4 different Kodak film stocks: 5277, 5284, 5246 and 5218. Each emulsion has a different inherent look, which I used in combination with different lighting styles to visually represent our hero’s journey. The low contrast and desaturated look stands for our hero’s indecisiveness. Once he made up his mind about life, I switched to 5284 which has a little bit more contrast and saturation. When war breaks out, I switched to 5246 rated at 250 ASA for day exteriors and interiors and 5218 rated at 500 ASA for night interiors and exteriors. The overall quality of the imagery in the film goes from a soft appearance to a little sharper, to really sharp and snappy and then back to a softer tone. So does the lighting, which progresses from an extremely soft diffused lighting, over a more directional lighting to a really contrasty, harsh lighting style and then back.

The three-hours narrative feature film will be released in India, Asia, Europe and in selected theaters in the US on June 18th.

A native of West Germany, became interested in photography at the age of eight when he observed his father developing a black and white picture in the lab of the family photo store. After studying photography, he trained as a camera operator and 1st AC at German TV’s (ZDF) Department of Education. Christopher then worked as an additional cinematographer and operator on documentaries in Egypt, Libya, Kenya, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, France, Canada and the United States. He has also worked on features, TV features, and TV series in Germany. He shot the Time Lapse sequence for the Canadian-German co-production THE MUSIC OF KURT WEILL: SEPTEMBER SONGS, which won an International Emmy award for Best Performing Arts Picture in 1996 and a Gemini award for Best Photography in 1997. He was also the additional cinematographer on WAR SYMPHONIES: SHOSTAKOVICH‚ another Canadian-German co-production which won an International Emmy award for Best Arts Documentary in 1999 and a Golden Prague for Best Photography in 1998.

In 1996 came to Los Angeles to study cinematography at UCLA. The following year he was accepted into the cinematography program at the renowned Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies at the American Film Institute (AFI).

For the cinematography of his thesis film Shadows‚ he received the Gregg Toland Heritage Award from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in February 2000.

More studios on the same lines, to attract international ventures, are being worked upon.