Film & Screen
Reshoots are ordinary film-making, not a distress signal
Additional photography has become shorthand for a troubled production. In practice it is a scheduled, budgeted and often planned…
Reshma Qureshi
Music writer, Hot Gupshup
Reshma writes about records and production, and defends the album as a form.
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15 articles
Film & Screen
Documentary gets written in the edit because nobody could write it in advance
A documentary team shoots without knowing what the story is. The structure is discovered afterwards, from material that was…
Music
What a music supervisor does, and why one song in one scene costs what it costs
Putting an existing record into a film is a legal transaction with two separate owners, a negotiation, and a deadline. The taste is…
Music
Song introductions got shorter, and the incentive that shortened them is measurable
The long instrumental opening did not go out of fashion by accident. It stopped being affordable once the first thirty seconds…
Music
A live album is a recording of a live event, which is not the same thing
Concert records sit somewhere between documentary and studio production, and where any particular one sits is almost never stated…
Music
Reverb decides where the listener thinks they are standing
Every record places you somewhere. The tool that does it is the least discussed and most consequential decision in a mix.
Music
A song has two owners and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in music
The composition and the recording are separate pieces of property with separate owners, separate income and separate rules. Almost…
Music
Why a chorus lands: repetition, contrast and the register you were not using
Choruses work through a small number of mechanisms that can be described precisely. Knowing them makes the good ones more…
Film & Screen
A film's standing keeps moving for decades, and each generation rewrites it for different reasons
The response a film gets on arrival is the least stable thing about it. What sticks is decided later, by people who were not there.
Film & Screen
Comfort viewing is not laziness, and what people return to is remarkably consistent
Almost everyone has a small set of things they rewatch instead of starting something new. The pattern behind those choices is more…
Music
An old song returns because something gave it a second doorway, not because taste came back around
Records from decades ago resurface constantly, and the pattern is not random. Each revival has a specific route, and the routes are…
Music
Playlists replaced the radio programmer, and discovery started behaving differently as a result
For most listeners, something else now decides what comes next. The shift changed not only what gets heard but what kind of record…
Music
The record became the advertisement and the room became the event
For most working musicians, the relationship between recordings and performance has inverted. That inversion changes what records…
Film & Screen
The moment when everyone watched the same thing at once is now rare and engineered
Shared cultural events used to be a side effect of how distribution worked. They now have to be manufactured deliberately, and the…
Music
The album outlived the technology that invented it, and the audience is why
Nothing about current distribution requires music to arrive in groups of ten or twelve. It still does, and the reasons are about…