The first sound the audience heard was the rush of a river. Then came visuals of the piercing call of birds, elephants trumpeting on the land, fast trials into the forest, crocodiles fighting beneath the surface, and the slow shift of greenery becoming a dry deciduous forest. The trailer of Cauvery: River of Life, a wildlife documentary by Sara, unfolded like a vivid conversation starter at ‘A Conversation on The Visual Magic of Wildlife’, on Saturday. Held alongside artist Kalyani Pramod’s solo exhibition ‘The Last Glimpse’, organised by Common Thread Studio, the talk brought together wildlife cinematographer Sara and wildlife photographer Jayanth Sharma for an evening that ventured beyond spectacular visual representations into the stories, ethics, and purpose behind creating them.
By the time the screen faded to black, the audience at Alliance Française of Madras had already been transported into the wilderness. When it comes to capturing wildlife, if photography is about waiting for a decisive moment, filmmaking demands patience and collaboration of another kind. Sara said, “Filmmaking is a long marathon. You have to keep on shooting, keep going and improving your stuff. And at the end of the day, you also hand over what you’ve done to somebody else. You can have fantastic shots. But at the end of the day, if they don’t put the film together well, the film doesn’t do well. So it’s a very collaborative process. Somebody used to tell me, ‘filmmaking is not a single flower, but it’s a bouquet’.”
The conversation soon moved beyond craft into conservation that they are trying to start with their work. “There is a big void between the common man and the scientific community,” argued Jayanth, in terms of making the common man understand wildlife better. As photographers, apart from knowing and empathising with the wildlife, he said, “We make our own visuals and stories, come back and show it to our friends and family circles. And thereby, we create influence. The real purpose is to bring back stories from the wilderness, from the places where most people would not go."
Following a run-down on some of the artistic photos clicked by Jayanth, questions from the audience shifted the evening towards social media, ethics, and artistic intent. Jayanth urged photographers to shift the focus away from equipment. “Stop talking about the mechanics of a shot and talk about the bird,” he said, adding that technical perfection means little without understanding the natural history behind the image. When asked how to make the wildlife films more engaging, Sara explained, “Most of the time, wildlife (films) are very information-oriented. They don’t really talk about emotion. If you can somehow keep on striving to make your film emotionally towards beauty or the story or the depth of the story, that’s when you start getting people engaged to do it. If you bring everything together — good footage, good narration, well-structured edits, good music, then that’s when it becomes a powerful medium.”
When the question of the takeover of Artificial Intelligence (AI) arose, both the speakers said that they consider AI as a mere overrated tool. Sara also added that he has been observing fatigue towards AI while Jayanth admitted that there is no escape from adopting AI in the works as we did previously during every technological change.
As the evening drew to a close, the audience had journeyed from the flowing waters of the Cauvery to Arctic ice fields, Central American rainforests and the depths of the various water bodies. Yet the takeaway remained rooted: creating compelling wildlife visuals lies not just in technical mastery, but in the conversation that a beautiful output can start about the subject.
