‘The fear of not able to watch Karnan led me to think of an alternative,’ says G Chokkalingam, the pioneer of digital re-releases in Tamil Nadu

Restoring the original film from the print format to the digital format was the real challenge that faced G Chokkalingam.

G Chokkalingam

When the digital format was introduced, theatres started continuously screening only those films that were in the digital format. It was the fear of old films fading away from the big screen that set Chokkalingam on the path to digitising Karnan.

“The fear of not being able to watch Karnan, and people forgetting Sivaji Ganesan led me to think of ways to bring some alternative,” he added.

It was then that he started to analyse the pros and cons of the digital format. G Chokkalingam discovered that there were favourable aspects to the digital format. For example, the publicity costs were much less.

However, with Karnan, things were more difficult as it had a film of 35mm – that resulted in only one-third of the movie being visible on screen. This required cinemascope conversion – a lot of resizing and compressing had to be done.

He started the restoration process with the tenth reel and decided to do a test-run of the same onscreen without the sounds. Chockalingam says that he was both lucky and unlucky that he started to test with that particular footage because it was the only part whose negatives weren’t damaged as much.

Retrieving the sounds of the film was another big challenge, he said. There seemed to be no way of splitting the dialogues and the sound that came with mono sound. He even travelled to Hyderabad and Mumbai in search of some solution but in vain.

This left Chokkalingam with the only option of recreating the original sound entirely. It was then that he met sound engineer H M Subramanya of Sangeetha Studios.

“’Why do you go through so much for re-releasing this film?’ he asked me. I told him that I was determined to re-release Karnan because I fear people will forget the greatness of the movie. Besides, the negatives also are wearing off day-by-day,” Chokkalingam said.

The film distributor added that Subramanya told him there was a possibility of recreating the sounds but this required a good music director and the taking down of notes of the sounds that came in every single frame. Playing the same sounds with the same instruments was what was needed, Chokkalingam recalled Subramanya as saying.

They roped in Iniyavan, a good friend of Chokkalingam and a music director.

“I paid Rs 50000 for doing the music of the three-minute reel. Then there was a separate team that did the sound effects,” he added.

After correcting the sound aspects of the three-minute reel, they decided to test-run the same onscreen.

“I have reached somewhere,” Chokkalingam recalled thinking after watching the reel onscreen.

G Chokkalingam was not alone. He was also supported, immensely, by people working at the Qube. His friend S Balachandran helped him with the finances.

The film distributor added that he always had confidence in his product but was not sure if theatres would agree to screen the digitised version of Karnan.

His fears were partially allayed when Ramkumar Ganesan, son of Sivaji Ganesan, watched the three-minute digitised version of Karnan and agreed to screen the whole movie in Shanti Theatre in Chennai.

Chokkalingam, who also got the movie rights from Raj TV, started the work on digitising the rest of the movie. But he was in for a shock as rest of the sound and picture negatives were completely damaged.

It took almost a year and Rs 40 lakh investment for the rest of the restoration process to be completed.

For example, the shehnai music that was there in one of the songs in the movie had to be recreated. For this, the son of the musician who had originally played the instrument sound in the movie was roped in to play it again to give authenticity.

Publicity was one thing that G Chokkalingam was determined to focus on; making the posters for the release was also difficult as stills from those times barely existed. He then made sure that frames from the negatives were taken, blown up and posters were made out of these. Pavan Kumar from Sindhu Graphix helped him in the process.

Chokkalingam also made sure that the trailer and audio launch was done in Sathyam Cinemas – one of Chennai’s prominent theatres.

“I didn’t want to take this movie forward in a simple manner,” he said.

Finally, after three years, Karnan was re-released on March 16, 2012. The success of this re-release lies in the fact that it was released in 72 screens across Tamil Nadu. Advance booking was made available both online and at the theatre. And there was tremendous response with housefull shows for several weeks. For example, Sathyam Cinemas ran the film for 150 days.

The 150th day poster for the digital re-release

G Chokkalingam still wants to re-release more old movies in digital format but the prospect of investment and whether they will yield profits are among the doubts that plague the pioneer of digital re-releases in Tamil Nadu.