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Charge of the binary brigade

A still from Quest for a Legend. Click for bigger pic!

Shoma Chatterji

Seventy-five per cent of India's first experiment with digital filming is complete. And the remaining bit is being shot across the world, in Los Angeles. The film is to be ready for release by November in the US.

The film, Quest for a Legend, is made by Research Engineers Pvt Ltd, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Research Engineers Inc, an American firm.

The film is being produced by Amrit K Das, chairman and CEO of the company, and the film is being directed by Biplab Chatterjee, a noted Bengali film villain.

The film is based on Sanjivani Legend, a story by Kelly Groenveld, Santanu Das and Sharmi Das.

According to the story, the sanjivani is a special plant that produces a life-saving drug believed to cure cancer. As the narrative unfolds, we discover an American widower arriving in Calcutta to fetch this magic plant to cure his six-year-old son of cancer. For a guide, he has a dusky Indian beauty. She leads him to Jaldapara, in north Bengal, where he meets a doctor who has extracted a life-saving drug from this herb.

But then the foreigner is accused of using the herb to extract toxic chemicals for biological warfare on behalf of an unnamed international organisation. And so he refuses to help the American...

Going by sneak shots of the film screened at a press conference in Calcutta, it is Oriental exotica made for Occidental consumption. Besides steamy smooching scenes, there's also a Santhali song-and-dance sequences to add rustic flavour. The lush green landscape and wildlife of north Bengal has been used to good effect too.

Produced under the banner of Ruby Pictures, the film stars newcomers Geoffrey Broderick and Anusha Singh in the romantic lead. They get able support from Pallavi Chatterjee, Arjun Chakravorty and others.

Cinematography is by Soumyendu Roy, but the film is a little too sharp in focus, a little too pronounced in terms of brightness, contrast and colour.

"Celluloid has its own form, its own language and its own chemistry. It offers the camerman greater scope for experimentation than digital shooting ever will," said Roy, who learnt the technology late in his career.

But Das, eager to push the new technology, is quick to object.

"We can diffuse the sharpness through hi-tech software and create output that looks exactly like celluloid reproductions," he says. Currently, the technology is expensive because of the cost of transferring to film. But the final product is more durable than film, is cost-effective in the long run and can be reproduced umpteen number of times without loss, Das pointed out.

Research Engineers Inc, the American company behind the whole effort, makes and distributes software products for the engineering and entertainment industry across the world.

"We have already established a working relationship with studios like Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal, etc in connection with the animated version of Mighty Kong and Kong 2000," Das said.

But does fine connections make Quest for a Legend a great film? With only 75 per cent of it complete, guess it's still a little early to tell.