For Your Ears Only: Sounds, Mic, Action!

In 1913, for the viewing pleasure of all eyes in the country came India’s first full-length silent movie, 'Raja Harishchandra'. This came about after an inspired Dadasaheb Phalke went to London and learned the craft of filmmaking from British filmmaker Cecil Hepworth. Now, to the delight of our ears, one hundred and ten years later, the pioneering Malayalam movie industry has made the world’s first ‘visually silent’ movie — 'Blindfold'.

The film's on-road promotional campaign at the Thrissur Pooram festival. Source: @binoykaramen on Twitter

In 2017, at Kerala’s Thusharagiri waterfalls, Binoy Karamen, the creative director of Blindfold, had a chance encounter with a tribal man who had lost his vision due to cataract. Along with this inspirational interaction, a video of an old ‘virtual barber shop’ that used binaural sounds to give the feel of a real haircut, helped form the film’s basic structure. Binoy spent a little more than a decade conceptualising and researching this unique project.

Having had its first movie itself strongly centred on a social theme, the Malayalam movie industry is no stranger to taking taboo social topics head-on and bringing them to the big screen. While conducting research for Blindfold, Binoy interacted with Kerala’s blind lottery sellers, understanding the hurdles they face in their daily lives such as the robbery attempts and travelling long distances sans assistance. All this moulded the movie’s central character Rajan and informed Surya Gaythri’s script for the movie. Rajan is a blind lottery seller who goes about his business in Kozhikode and happens to witness a murder. The police then reluctantly agree to take up his account of the event and his narration becomes the audience’s ear into the movie’s plot, thus forming a fifty-minute thrilling murder mystery with a blind Rajan as its primary witness.

To achieve better empathy with the subject at hand, the team even blindfolded themselves at a beach!

With the visuals absent and sound taking centre stage, the soundscape of the movie became crucial. The sound design by Ajil Kurian, the music by Krishnan Unni, and Steev Benjamin’s background score — all form the soundscape that is the lynchpin of this film. The sound effects were created from recordings of real locations like beaches and markets and then processed to help communicate the scene’s objects, emotions, and meaning.

Blindfold is armed with Dolby Atmos technology, giving its all-important audio a stellar quality. Unlike a typical movie, which has three audio layers, most of the scenes in Blindfold have eighty-five to one hundred audio layers! This comprehensive and high-quality audio set helps communicate subtle yet enriching aspects of the scene while the characters go about their conversations.

Binoy’s expertise in digital filmmaking, photography, designing, and music production and Shyjal Ahmed’s production experience in the Malayalam movie industry came together melodiously to compose this industry-first audio cinema. Cinema started from simple animated visuals, went on to become talkies with synchronised audio, and with visual technology of the 3D format, it (quite literally) went beyond the canvas of the big screen. Blindfold, and the team that has tirelessly worked on it, has gone against this progression, challenged cinema’s status quo, and produced not a visual spectacle but rather a unique auditory achievement. A harmonious composition of creativity and technical prowess, combined with a thrilling story and a character very much rooted in reality, await cinema-goers in India and across the world.