Shashwath Santosh

Both films were challenging to make because of the interesting workflow. We as students were supposed to make the sound designs before the film itself. I had never constructed visuals over the sound, instead, I had always done it vice versa. The sound design itself was entirely made from scratch with the SFX pool that the class assembled. For everyone’s second piece we had to use a fellow student’s sound design. Working with another student’s sound design was very creatively encouraging. It was fascinating because the imagery that was generated would end up being completely different from the one intended by the initial artist.

For my sound design, I had planned a plot and narrative as I recorded my sounds and while I edited the sound design. The film that I made with my sound design is ‘Teddy Mare’. But for the other film – ‘But why’ – planning was not as smooth. My creative intention was to generate visuals that shifted in its relevancy. I made some shots seem appropriate with the sound the audience herd while for some I left them very disconnected and even out of sync. This was a very interesting exercise because it resulted in a storyline that every member of the audience could interpret very differently. The intention of ‘Teddy Mare’ was to convey the importance of the phase of childhood in a person’s life.

The teddy bear is tortured in the film which symbolically alludes to any adulteration to one in their juvenility. As a result, there exists a void in the protagonist’s world view as symbolized by the black circles that mask the screen at the end of the film. The shots of the painters in the film affirm that any attempt to ‘cover-up’ the childhood trauma will only go in vain.