Sync sound national award for Kannada movie 'Dollu' triggers row

BENGALURU: National award winning Kannada movie 'Dollu', which also won an award for Best Location Sound Recordist (for sync sound films only), stirred up a controversy with Oscar winning sound mixer Resul Pookutty and the movie's sound designer Nithin Lukose alleging that the award jury had erred as it was a "dubbed film, and not sync sound".
‘Dollu’ director: Could have been clerical error
While both Pookutty and Lukose took to Twitter and argued that the movie’s soundtrack was never a sync sound but a dubbed soundtrack, the producers and director clarified they never claimed their movie’s sound quality to be ‘sync sound’ at the time of applying for the national award.
The jury is yet to comment on the issue. Barely a few hours since the announcement of the 68th National Film awards, Pookutty tweeted, “The film that won the sync sound recording national awards is not even a sync sound film, it’s a dubbed film, confirms the sound designer of the film Nithin Lukose.” Echoing Pookutty’s words Lukose further tweeted, “I don’t know what happened behind the curtains of the National Award selections and its procedures. But I pity the judgement of the jury who could not differentiate between a dub and sync sound film, claiming to be the experts in the scenario!”
Sagar Puranik, director of the movie, said, “The audiographer entry at the awards requires nomination in three segments — location sound recordist, sound designer and re-recordist of the final mixed track. Accordingly, we nominated three engineers. The entry form did not have any specification whether the soundtrack was sync or dubbed track and hence we did not classify the work.” But, when the list of winners was announced, it stated ‘Location sound recordist (for sync sound films only), triggering the controversy. “We do not know what officials from the Directorate of Film Festivals, India had on their mind while announcing the result as ‘Location sound recordist (for sync sound films only).
DFF officials must clarify the inclusion of this clause in the award list. If they had not included these words in the list, there would not have been any controversy as we never claimed our film to be a sync recorded (live recorded) soundtrack. It could be due to a clerical error... We have reached out for clarification,” Puranik said. Recording the soundtrack was indeed an expensive affair and cost more than Rs 15 lakh only to record the sound of drums.