At the 56th edition of the International Film Festival of India, Telugu superstar Nagarjuna detailed the excruciating challenges faced by the team while undertaking the painstaking 4K restoration process for Ram Gopal Varma's Shiva.
During a special session hosted by Annapurna Studios' Chief Technology Officer CV Rao, Nagarjuna expressed his adoration for the final output, calling it “stunning.”
"The remastered version of Shiva is stunning. I see so many films coming to life with this. I was talking to Ramesh Sippy sir, and told him that I'd love to hear the sound of the coin in Sholay in a new way! Since this is the 50th year of Annapurna Studio, we thought what better film to do this than Shiva, which remains a cult classic," said Nagarjuna at IFFI, where the new version of the film was screened," the actor said in a press statement.
Interestingly, the restoration was planned before 2019, despite knowing it wouldn’t be easy. Among the hurdles faced were rapidly deteriorating negatives, a lack of labs to process and maintain them at the correct temperature, and to clean them every few months.
"That's when we realised we needed to digitise and secure the film properly," said Rao. "When we finally went back to inspect the picture negatives, they were so sticky we couldn't even unroll them. We had to run them through four to five rounds of ultrasonic cleaning just to make them dry and rollable for scanning."
Despite achieving a 4K scan, Nagarjuna and his team were disappointed to see "scratches, dust and torn frames." Eliminating these took eight to ten months. Moreover, they found the audio and two reels of the sound negative to be "completely damaged." They looked on YouTube to see if they could find any retrievable, but everything they found was unfit to be incorporated into a theatrical restoration.
"Fortunately, our distribution team at Annapurna Studios helped us track down prints across Telugu states, approaching passionate exhibitors who still stored old film prints despite the space and conditions required. After reaching nearly 20 such exhibitors, the team found two surviving reels that allowed us to recover the missing audio!" recalled Rao.
