| Ray as Costume Designer |
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The Diamond-King is flanked by Goopy and Bagha wearing royal clothes. Only the colour scheme is planned here, not the details.
( ‘The Kingdom of Diamonds' ) |
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Ray’s artistic involvement also extended to post-production, where he would design slides, posters, booklets, titles, billboards and publicity materials.
Satyajit Ray sketched out each frame of a film before shooting it. There are sixty-nine thick red cloth-bound volumes on his thirty-seven films. These are known as Kherokhatas (red notebooks). |
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When Satyajit Ray turned to filmmaking, leaving his job at an ad agency, the designer in him found new challenges to work with. He ended up sketching the scenes of his films, like Eisenstein or Hitchcock, but in a more detailed and intimate manner. Ostensibly, this was out of necessity —his low-budget films had little room for playing with expensive film stock, and he had to plan on taking only one or two shots for every scene. But there was obviously another, more compelling reason — the artist within craved to conceive and create each frame before shooting it. |
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Hand of the jacket for Bimala
( The Home and The World ) |
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Soldiers of the bad king of Halla.
( The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha ) |
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Diplomats coming to the kingdom of Halla from various corners of the world. Ray's rather casual and easy flow of lines is noteworthy.
( The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha ) |
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The sketches were meant to be used by Ray himself and his cinematographer, art director and editor. They were not meant for exhibition as works of art.
However, the artist within Ray manifests himself in these sketches in one form or another. For black and white films, Ray sketched scenes in India ink. For his colour films, Ray used pencils, pastel crayons, and watercolors. He designed the sketches of the costumes for both the major and minor characters of his films. |
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Royal robe for the Diamond-King. |
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The most notable of the costumes that he designed included those for his children’s films Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopi and Bagha) and Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds). |
With painstaking care he sketched out the dresses of the folk heroes Goopy and Bagha, the King of Shundi, the ministers of the Kingdom of Diamonds, the Chief Minister, the magician, the guards, and a sycophant. And he did not forget to design even the special slippers that his folk heroes wore! |
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