Did a Saturday walk-through India’s iconic Prasad Labs in Chennai; and no, seriously, what did I see?

India’s first 70 mm screen, and currently the only one compatible with high-definition resolution colour-grading at Chennai’s landmark Prasad Labs. Pic/Mayank Shekhar

The first film review of Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai (DCH, 2001) came from Mani Ratnam, its cinematographer Ravi K Chandran told me once. 

Ravi was at Chennai’s Prasad Labs, colour-grading DCH. That’s how Ratnam saw the film; called and told Akhtar not to change a frame!

What’s colour-grading, exactly, I thought, when I heard this. It’s the enhancement of colours, starting with primaries (red, green blue), so the frames look more like film than life itself. The latter is what audiences wish to escape from, anyway!

Also, it’s the final process, executed by the colourist, approved by the cinematographer, before the film reaches your eyes. The ears part gets taken care of with the ‘audio mix’, merging background and foreground sounds of a film.

Which, for Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), was done at Prasad Labs, its general manager Jayalakshmi Vasant tells me, when I’m in front of India’s first 70 mm screen, where it happened — as she takes me around a nine-acre campus in the lungs of Chennai’s film industry aka Kollywood (from Kodambakkam neighbourhood). 

Frankly, I’m doing the opposite of what a film buff should —going from a classified........

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