The Favorite Season Is Back

Once again winter is back.
No clouds up in the sky.
Sun rays always falls in a slanted angle.
Climate is excellent.
Temperature comes down.
At night the sky is so clear beautiful.
Stars are brighter.
A moon lit night adds to the beauty.

Winter is my most favorite season and December is my most favorite month. During winter, when the slanted sun rays falls on the earth and when the sky is pretty clear, the beauty of the nature is tenfold. We feel more energetic during this season. But in places where winter is extreme, the case may be different, I don't know how and life will be difficult. If we watch the trees and plants during this season, you may notice that the leaves shine more brightly in the slanted sun light and everything looks more beautiful.

Traveling during winter is so exciting for me. The trips I made to hill stations like Ooty and Kodaikanal during winter are unforgettable. In Wayanad, most of the mornings of winter will be foggy, and sun appears out of the fog only after 9am or 10 am in the morning. Sun sets during winter are magnificent to watch.

By December 90% of harvesting the paddy will be over and we can see the hay spread all over the land. It is a wonderful experience to sleep underneath the hay in open ground during the cold and snowy nights with fire set up nearby. During the harvest season, paddy grains will be separated from the hay during nights and the courtyard will be full of hay, where we get a chance to sleep underneath the hay and it is almost like a festival, a period of prosperity. Cities and individual houses will be decorated with stars to welcome Christmas.

Do movies make you really thrilled?

Is it the story or the camera tricks behind an action movie thrills you or a horror movie horrifies you?

If you watch a fighting scene or a chasing scene in a movie, some times you may find out that the camera man struggles a lot to chase the fighting subjects or struggling to find a perfect place for the camera to be placed and shoot the scene or the camera shakes a lot making it difficult to understand what is really happening and make us imagine that some thing really great is happening. The action scene will be a composed of so many tiny shots of length of a fraction of a second from different angles. But the movie ‘Matrix’ has done a good job in this respect. The fighting scenes are composed perfectly. It is not just the fast sequence of narrow angled shots of minute lengths that add to the excitement of the shot, but the real action; even though there may be a lot of camera tricks behind the scene. The action should thrill you, not the difficulty in shooting such a scene.

Let us take the case of a breath taking horror movie. The usual trick is that a horrified man or women walking through a dark location alone, and the camera angle gets narrower, so that the only subject we can see on the screen is the man or women, and some things suddenly appears on the scene, like an ugly horrifying face or hand that attacks the subject. The camera technique makes us believe that even the subject also has a limited viewing angle. The usual thump rules are like, the scene will be always dark (so that strange horrifying things can be created suddenly from nowhere), the angle covered by the camera will be very narrow, and so that what ever comes into the frame will be something suddenly created from nowhere, the subject does the exact opposite thing that we would do if we were the subject, which gives the horrifying matters or strange creatures more chance to horrify the subject.

The fact is that it is very difficult to make a perfect horror scene without the help of the darkness, narrow angle etc. Same is the case with an action scene; it is very difficult to make a fighting scene or a bomb blast scene or a chasing scene at a wide angle camera shot where everything is clear and perfect.

My definition of a perfect action scene shot is that the one who watches the movie should never get a feeling that the camera man is involved in the scene struggling to shoot the scene. A horror movie should be able to horrify you without the cheap tricks of darkness and lack of visibility and narrow viewing angle.