Many Small Pictures Make a Big Picture: Kalyani Priyadarshan (Transcript)

Full text of actress Kalyani Priyadarshan’s talk at TEDxMahindraÉcoleCentrale

TRANSCRIPT:

Okay. So to start off, let me give you guys some context.

I’m an actor and I come from a film background. Basically my father is a film director and my mother is an actor. So I basically grew up on sets.

I probably knew the workings of a film set even before I could spell the word ‘film’. And coming back home from school, I used to see my father sitting around with his assistants, constantly arguing about how a scene should go.

A typical summer vacation for me was in a set with about 50 people constantly running around and a cameraman always yelling, ‘Hurry up! The light is going to go!’

So I grew up knowing the value of each and every person on that set. I knew how important all of their hard work was, in order for that final result to look good. It takes many, many, many, small pictures in order to make that big picture.

In fact, and I probably knew this even before I knew how to count, it takes 24 small pictures, 24 frames in a reel, to actually just give you one second of a film that you’re seeing on screen.

Now it wasn’t until a lot later on that I realized that this controlled chaos that I was constantly seeing, it wasn’t something that other people had access to. In fact, it wasn’t something that a lot of people were aware of – especially who weren’t a part of the industry.

And as a kid I always wondered: ‘Why? If this process is so important to the final result, then why is it kept hidden from the limelight?’