Amrit Pritam Achieves Great Success in Ghazni and Slumdog Millionaire!

Recently, an Assamese young and talented sound designer has received great acclaim in Bollywood film industry and his name was in several newspapers in Assam when I was visiting. Sound design is a new concept in Indian films or films in general. Every sound used in a movie, whether real or artificial, must sound authentic and must fit together. Amrit Pritam, originally of Jorhat, is an individual who has made a name for himself by working on a Bollywood blockbuster called Ghajni. Amrit also worked on the Oscar-nominated movie Slumdog Millionaire. I contacted Amrit after I read the news reports on him in the media in Assam and was able to gather quite a bit of information about him.

Amrit worked on Slumdog Millionaire on location as an Associate recordist. He also completed a few other films in the year of 2008, These films are  actor/director Saurabh Shuklais  “I’m 24", “Raat Gayee Baat Gayee”, “Havai Dada”, “President is Coming”, Ghajini and the Hindi version of Slumdog Millionaire. Ghajini is officially the first film where Amrit has worked as a sound designer.

Amrit has been doing sound editing for primarily sync sound films, Till now he has had experience in more than 45 films. In sync sound films, Amrit has been doing dialogue cleaning and editing, 5.1 Dolby Sound FX and ambience track laying, 5.1 premix and mainly sound design. Sound Design is very new concept in India. Till recently, during film making, technicians mainly depended on what sound they could record in real life. Now, with great advances in computers, technicians can actually design the sounds heard in film.  In the film Ghajini, Amrit and his team used almost 350 different sound tracks including Sound FX, designed sound, dialogue, Foley sound and music. In few words,  how can one create musical elements with the help of different sound effects and create some new situation.  That means how can one use less music and fill up different situations of the films with designed sound so as to have the right sound effect at the right time. For example, Amrit says that in Ghajini, he used a lot of metallic sounds. The main character in the film was hit by metallic rod causing him to lose his memory; so metal sound is prominently used in the film as theme. So all the metallic sounds in Ghajini were enhanced by using different plug ins and reverbs.  In Ghajini, one hears a very disturbing s metallic sound through out the film; it’s a result of sound design. In Ghajini, in many places Amrit used  designed sounds, which actually sound like a background score. Often the entire background music is sound designed by Amrit, not AR Rehman ‘s score.

Amrit also specializes in producing what is called SYNC SOUND.  Sync sound is the process, where with the help of sophisticated sound equipments likes multi track recorder, different boom mics and lapel mics, one can record the sound (dialogue, ambience, FX, etc.) on location itself along with visual so that each and every sound is recorded on location itself. Thus, during postproduction, one need dub the film again. Amrit says that the advantage of the sync sound is that one gets best performance of the actors as it was delivered on the location itself, as dubbing is a completely artificial process, where actors have to repeat the dialogue again with lips sync within the studio environment, So u can get better emotion on location recoding than in dubbing, But in case of sync sound, dialogue editing is really tough job, as the editors have to first clean the dialogue and have to use lots of dialogue cleaning software.

Within six years of moving to Mumbai, Amrit Pritam, son of Deva Prasad and Nalini Datta of Jorhat has achieved success that eludes others in their entire career. We wish this young and talented man great success in the future.