India’s leading sound designer and production mixer Resul Pookutty said here on Friday  that “camera only catches a picture, which is abstract, while sound generates the desired meaning in a film”

Addressing a master-class on ‘Aesthetics of Sound in Cinema’ at the ongoing 17th Mumbai International Film Festival- MIFF 2022 here, Pookutty  of Slumdog Millionaire  fame said: “Sound has the ability to define space and meaning. Camera only catches a picture, which is abstract, with sound its meaning gets defined. Sound generates the desired meaning in a film”.

Pookutty — who has recorded, edited, engineered and designed more than 90 films in a short span of his career, and won national and international recognition for his work –said:  “As a sound designer I select from umpteen numbers of sounds available with me and present a package to the audience, which becomes a holistic experience for them”.

Narrating his experience of the Oscar award winning film Slumdog Millionaire, Shri Pookutty said:  “Human brain processes sound in a certain way, which a sound designer must understand. I designed sound for Slumdog Millionaire on the basic idea of how a human brain processes sound? Accordingly we recorded the sound using multiple cameras and designed it”.

Talking about different forms of sounds used in filmmaking, the noted sound designer said: “In films we broadly use five different types of sounds which are: Production Sound, Foley sound, Ambience Sound, Designed Sound, and Music.”

Pookutty, who is the recipient of numerous awards and honours in the ones bestowed on him by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts-BAFTA and the Cinema Audio Society (CAS) – said: “While designing sound, we have to keep in mind, the context of story, vision of the director and socio-cultural aspects in which it is being set. I experienced this shoot of the film Rs The Good Road’”

Pookutty — who has been part of several award winning films like Roar-Tigers of Sunderbans, Unfreedom, India's Daughter and Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja – differentiated between a dialogue and speech “Spoken dialogue thrown into an acoustic environment, captured by a microphone with emotion becomes a speech. When we deal with a dialogue in a film, we are actually trying to create a speech, which will set an emotional connection with the audience”, he said.