The Documentary Diver Blog

India: Chennai, Mumbai & Kerala

2011-06-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

2010: The Rest of the Year

I never got the chance to post pics from two major filming trips that took place towards the end of 2010, again for the documentary series Culture X with Third Floor Pictures, Singapore. In September it was India, when I travelled on quick trips to Chennai, Mumbai and Kerala, then in November I went to Dubai on a fantastic series of shoots.

[I wanted to tell you, Carmencita, because it was by far the busiest year I’ve had, and I’m sorry I had to be away from home so much, and thanks to you and your drop-dead gorgeous mom for being so supportive all the time...well most of the time anyway].

INDIA
I guess I should start in India where we were tasked with three stories: the music and dance customs of funerals in Chennai; the famous dabbawallas of Mumbai (home-to-office food delivery dudes); and the houseboats of Kerala. (As mentioned in previous post, our stories had changed from hardcore blood and sacrifice taboo stories to more mainstream stuff thanks to Singapore censors -- no doubt our ratings would be affected negatively, but such is life here).

This was my first trip to India, and of course I was ecstatic to be going from one end to the other, though as usual, it was whirlwind-style with only 3 days in each location. Naturally, for the funeral story, its a bit tricky with such a tight timeline to tell this story, so we relied on re-enactments. The village had just a couple days earlier held a real funeral however, so that feeling kind of reverberated throughout the shoot.

The music-dance we featured was called Oppari, a genre exclusively for the deceased. We had arranged the shoot with folks of Oragadam village, about 2-hours drive outside of Chennai. I was the only non-Indian on our team, which included Malar as DOP (aka GANESAN MALARVANNAN), along with Godly (the legend) on sound, and local fixer/producer Sathish Chenna and his assistant producer Vinki. So it definitely felt odd when on just my first full day in India, I found myself surrounded by about 200 villagers, all who either came out to witness the shoot, or wanted to be involved. This often happens on these shoots-- before I have time to take anything in I just find myself immersed. This was rural India and I was completely surrounded, with people staring at me and expecting me to “direct” them. The guys explained it rather simply: everyone in Chennai is simply nuts about the movie industry and they all want to be involved. Everyone is an actor, they said. But it was scorching hot and I was blinded by the sun and the fact that I had landed in another world.

Luckily for me Malar had done this before and had actually pitched this story to our EP Oman in the first place so he quickly took control while I got my bearings—this was his home state after all. After a few minutes of just staring in awe, I had a mini Cohiba and just smiled to myself, absolutely loving life as this incredible scene unfolded before my eyes. Guilt washed over me as I thought of Niky...she would’ve loved this...then I figured it was time to do some work, so we started to get people organised. Malar had a vision of an opening shot that he had wanted for quite some time, so I let it happen. It became a comedy though. The first take was hilarious, with a bunch of dudes staring straight into the camera. I said to Malar “Make sure they know to not look at the camera.” He then turned to Sathish and said the same thing, who then started yelling to people to not look at the camera. Vinku also started yelling. Suddenly, a chorus of men who had chosen to stand next to us all started shouting out the same thing—a combination of Satish and Vinku’s assistants, and I think just random villagers. All started yelling orders in Tamil. The effect was that no one could hear or understand what these guys were yelling about, so no one paid any attention. I guess everyone’s a director here too...This went on for the rest of the shoot, and was thoroughly enjoyable to watch.

The whole thing was a bit too staged for my liking, but sometimes documentary filmmakers have no choice -- we have to tell the story within the allotted time, and can't wait around for another funeral, so we re-enact. The funniest thing was how “into it” some of our villagers were. The first part of the funeral takes place in the home yard, where the body is placed and where villagers gather to pay respects. Women gathered in a weeping circle and started singing and crying and praying. It was utterly insane and realistic. This one guy started throwing himself, weeping and sobbing on the “deceased”, which was played by this happy-go-lucky young dude. But what I learned was that part of the custom and role of the Oppari musicians and dancers is to provide this weeping and sobbing as part of the service. Its part of the belief that all sadness, whether real or feigned, should be let out and left behind, at this moment. Its expected that the Oppari performers cry and freak out at this point to help the family mourn, and get rid of this sadness. Then, from the time we left the homestead and started walking towards the cremation site, the tone changed dramatically.

Suddenly, but according to Oppari tradition, smiles and frantic, happy dancing and music broke out. Its opposite of what would be considered appropriate for a Western funeral. The dances are even highly sexual and even homosexual in their movements. Basically, they say this dancing is meant to cheer up the family, turn sadness into happiness. Really confusing and shocking if you are not clear about this philosophy. It is a bizarre tradition to witness though, I have to admit. We also filmed with a major folk-pop star and a traditional dance troupe, to give a broader view of the dance and music scene of Chennai in our story.

There’s tonnes more I could write about...like from Mumbai, where we shot in the famous slums and trains, but I’ll try to keep it short. The most intense moment was simply realising that I was strolling with a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim through a Mumbai slum in the rain at night. Holy music ringing from temples and mosques as we walked...Malar shrugged when I mentioned this... That’s Mumbai he said, like it was nothing special. To me it was magic.

Our last stop was Kerala, the dream of many backpackers, and with good reason. Its a fantastic place. The backwaters are cool and still clean, though becoming very busy with larger hotels popping up. Naturally we had access to villages where few tourists would want to go, and into the homes of the local boat captains. I noticed how the water rises right up into their backyards, and I insisted on a shot showing how these folks live and work on the water, with a river literally on their doorstep. That night we shot possibly the most beautiful sunset I will ever see.

TECHNICAL MUMBO JUMBO
Once again, I was director-writer on these shoots, and as always, I took the liberty of taking production stills as well. This would be my last shoot working with the Panasonic HVX200 (which has since been upgraded by my boss Oman to the Panny 101? I think). It’s a great camera that we almost killed back in Africa (by flooding an underwater housing), but has since served us well. Stills were shot with a Nikon D300, which we’ve also upgraded to a Canon 5DMk2. Its hard to take still photography seriously when you are focused on a documentary shoot, but without a camera, you inevitably have those moments when the cameraman is off on his own, and you’ve got time and incredible scenes unfolding before your eyes...

Dubai is next.

For posterity this was my 2010 in review:

Feb: Cambodia (recce trip for Bandits series)
Mar: Bali, Indonesia (shoot for Scuba Diver AA magazine)
May: Jakarta, Indonesia (garbage dump dwellers for Channel News Asia)
May-June: Halmahera, Indonesia (tourism board shoot)
July-Aug: Jogjakarta, Indonesia (Culture X)
Aug: Toronto, Canada (Bro’s wedding)
Sept: Chennai, Mumbai & Kerala, India (Culture X)
Nov: Dubai & Ras al-Khaimah, UAE (Culture X)
Nov-Dec: Manado, Indonesia (Scuba Diver AA contest judging)
Dec: Bali, Indonesia again! (Holiday at last!)

...emissions are through the roof...one day I’ll pay for these sins...

Yogyakarta, Indonesia, July 2010

2010-08-26T20:26:00.000-07:00

Just returned from my first shoot of the year with Culture X season 3 - Silk Routes, by Third Floor Pictures. Our small team including Raja Arevas (DoP), April Lee (Producer), Amin (Soundman, I can’t remember his last name!), and me (Director/Writer) headed out from Singapore to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. There we met with our local fixer Hernan Halim.

This was my fourth trip to Indonesia this year, all for work! This time though we weren’t going underwater (nor to the garbage dump for ASIA EXPOSED) - instead we were getting into some deeply cultural stories. The tricky thing this year is that apparently we were a bit too edgy last year for Singapore censors (what with stories like the blood from Philippines’ crucifixions and black magic from African witch doctors) so we have to tame it down now. My stories for this trip were keris-making (a.k.a. “Kris”, the legendary dagger) and a traditional massage therapy reserved for post-natal women. Didn’t quite have the romance of last year’s stories so we had to dig deep to find the real “X” factor that has made this series such a hit with local audiences.

The Kris story held the most potential for excitement, since it is (or once was considered) a weapon. From what we learned, nowadays Indonesians (and Malaysians) get the kris for good fortune, to mark the coming of age of a young man (or woman), and for specific ceremonial purposes like a wedding. We started the shoot by visiting a tradesman, who coordinates a small team and sells decent blades at reasonable prices. He was generally a businessman, but also a collector. He shows us one piece that was 500 years old that he was selling for 1000 US. He said it was made of “meteorite,” which is a material usually reserved only for the Kris’ of Sultans.

The next day we met with the “Empu” - the legendary maker of Kris‘ descendant from the Majapahit kingdom itself. I asked the Empu how long this practice has been in his family. He said that men in his lineage have been making Kris daggers for 17 generations, about 1500 years, and he showed us a family tree where all 17 were identified by name. It was simply astounding.

The quality of his work was clear, and as a craftsman he was obviously more involved in all the crucial steps of the process. When we first arrived he was already heating the iron, and with his assistant (who incidentally has been assisting the Empu family since he was a small boy). These traditional Kris are forged from iron, which is hammered into a long bar, then cut in half. A thin bar of pure nickel is then inserted between the iron, and the process of hammering starts again. Empu confirmed that when making a Kris for the Sultan, which he has done with his father, a very rare metal derived from meteors is traditionally used.

Raja Arevas worked some amazing angles as DoP. Occasionally, I snuck in a few still photographs over his shoulder. We had time enough to shoot slow motion video as well as slow shutter to great effect. For me the greatest visual moment was when the kris was given its final coating. Glowing red, Empu dipped the blade into a bamboo shaft filled with oil, which immediately started to boil over. As Empu pulled the blade out of the bamboo, the Kris caught fire - a moment forever burned into my memory.

Halmahera, Spice Islands, Indonesia May 23 - June 7

2010-08-06T20:43:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I was part of a group tasked with identifying, mapping, photographing and filming (that's me) the underwater sites of west Halmahera, in eastern Indonesia's Spice Islands. I wrote about the experience in Scuba Diver AustralAsia's video column, because I decided to shoot with the Canon 5D MkII, which is an unusual choice when shooting video. There were some tricky aspects to shooting video with a DSLR camera, but the large sensor, sweet lenses, and just the way the camera renders colours underwater left me very happy with my choice.

Special thanks to the Tourism Department of Halmahera, Grace and John Kingdon for bringing me into this project, Hendrik Limbat for all his hard work, as well as Canon Pte Ltd Singapore for equipment support and David Cheung from ScubaCam Singapore for his brilliant assistance throughout. Also thanks to John Thet from Asian Geographic Magazines for his kind and patient support for all my hair-brained schemes.

We dived many islands over the 17-day period, including the remote Guraici Archipelago, Siko and Sibu islands, and many others. The thing about travelling to the Spice Islands for diving is that you can't help but have the highest expectations. This is after all the heart of the Coral Triangle, where the ocean achieves its masterpiece in the form of marine biodiversity. But tourism is not well-developed, so few sites have been mapped. Usually when you dive a place, thousands have been there before you, and the guides working at the resorts nearby know the best places to take you, drop you in, lead you to, and which places to avoid. Exploratory diving, that is, diving in places that are virtually unknown and unmapped, is an exercise in patience. The diving was sometimes spectacular and other times disappointing. There were areas that appeared covered in rubble, either from the massive die-off from the El Ninho in '97, or more recent episodes of warming. Some areas we suspected of being bombed. But looking back, I saw blacktip sharks and turtles almost every day, and our team encountered rare macro life, including an unconfirmed blue ring octopus and a confirmed epaulette or walking shark. We had one encounter with a manta ray (a bit disappointing) and we saw two small dolphin pods as we sailed. It was great fun and I think we got some good material, but I'm hopeful that the next trip out will yield a site that can rival those to the south.

UW Photographs from Bali, Indonesia

2010-07-09T02:42:00.000-07:00

On very short notice my magazine Scuba Diver AustralAsia needed coverage of Bali, so we decided to keep it in-house for the shortest possible turn-around. Images and article would have to be ready within 10 days of press time! Off I went to Bali! It was great, treated like royalty by the Werner Lau resorts, Siddhartha and Alma Anda. I dived about four times a day with my Nikon D300, shooting wide and macro depending on advice. I dived mainly in the Tulamben area, doing the wreck twice, but also the house reefs of the resorts. The experience was, as you can imagine, just awesome, as the ladies (Niky and Carmencita) came along with me! Carmen loved the private pool and I think Niky enjoyed just being in Bali rather than Singapore.

I did have serious issues with the D300. Even though I updated the firmware just before the trip, the same problem I was having prior crept up again, where the battery indicator light blinks and shuts down the whole system. I even had the thing lock up on me for no apparent reason, although that is not altogether uncommon for me, as I've experienced the same randomness with Canons and Sonys before. Eventually I realised that if I just turn the camera off and on, put it in the housing, and leave it on for the whole dive, things would be fine. This worked for me but did drain the battery lots so I had to be charging all the time when home.

As always I tried to get a bit experimental with the images to varying success. In particular I tried to do different things with backgrounds, including over and under exposing, or just trying to use the reef more than usual. I think it worked for the cardinalfish above, but not so much for the sweetlips (the yellow striped one). I was really after fish portraits as its something I haven't done much of, so there was lots to learn. I sat and waited for these sweetlips to land in the right spot. Its counter-intuitive, but I saw that this fish was doing circles around a little coral structure, and noticed that part of the reef structure was beautiful, with purples and reds. So I framed the background nicely and waited for the uncooperative fish. He did about 4 passes in 10 minutes, each time producing one mistake after the other. Either I tripped the shutter too late or the damn thing curled out of frame at the last moment, or out of focus...frustrated I gave up and had to be happy with this shot, which doesn't really show the background I wanted at all!

I got lucky with this blue-spotted stingray. My guide found him hiding under a rocky bit, which happened to have the perfect window for my camera to poke through. Cautiously, so as not to startle the animal or scratch my lens port, I got as close as I could, angled the strobe and fired. The first shot was framed and lighted perfectly, except for a green hue coming from the natural light from another window on the opposite side of the animal. Try as I might, I couldn't balance the colours properly, or overwhelm the weird green light with my strobe. Instead, I just tried to get even closer. You still see the green light behind the eyes of the animal, illuminating its back. But such an amazing fish I just never tire of shooting them.

Just getting started...

2010-07-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

Bear with me as I start this blog...