Mastering Bollywood Cinema with Adobe Premiere Pro: Spotlight on The 12th Failure, a True Story

Adobe Premiere Pro and surroundings video ecosystem Filmmakers around the world rely on a range of additional tools, plugins, and third-party integrations. No matter where they are based or their skill level, millions of video creators around the world in all sorts of geographies can rely on the power of Premiere Pro, the industry-leading video editor, and the many additional tools it integrates directly with. The resulting seamless end-to-end video workflow ensures that video creators can work faster, more efficiently, and more collaboratively to tell their stories exactly as they imagine them.

In this article, we take an exclusive look at the video editing process of 12th failurea Bollywood film that struck a chord with audiences and critics alike.

Mastering Cinema with Premiere Pro

Released in theaters in October 2023, 12th Fail quickly received unanimous critical acclaim. The film, based on the 2019 non-fiction book of the same name by Anurag Pathak, tells the story of a young man who had to cheat to pass his exams, and yet ended up taking the exam on toughest in the country, UPSC, to become an honest police officer.

12th Fail became the biggest surprise hit of the year, grossing more than $8.5 million to date, more than three times its budget. It is currently ranked at number 59 on the IMDb Top 250 Movies in the World rankings and has won over 20 awards.

While the film was edited with Premiere Pro, we sat down with Jaskunwar Kohli, its associate director, editor and co-writer, to learn about his unique workflow of editing 12th Fail.

How did you start your journey into the world of video editing?

I have been using Premiere Pro for over 18 years now. My whole foray into filmmaking started with Premiere Pro. When I was in boarding school, we would capture news events on camera and I was selected to become a journalist because apparently I am a good speaker. However, I was not good in front of the camera and ended up observing how the footage was edited.

I started thinking about how to get interesting effects by moving parts of clips around on the timeline, and I ended up staying in that department as an editor. By the time I was a senior, I was the head of the department and I already knew I would be making movies for the rest of my life.

Why did you choose Premiere Pro to edit 12th Fail?

The comfort I feel with Premiere Pro is simply unmatched. Premiere Pro doesn't feel like software to me, it feels more like a table with every possible stationery item I could possibly need laid out there and I feel like I can do it. Nothing That's why I asked our entire film production company to move to Premiere Pro for the 12th failure.

For example, I used a variety of blending and masking effects that allowed me to perform small-scale visual effects within the software itself, so I could show them to VVC. [Vidhu Vinod Chopra, the writer, director as well as editor of 12th Fail] without having to hire expensive visual effects companies. VVC also really appreciated being able to see the final effect on location, on the offline version.

The Premiere Pro timeline of 12th Fail, showing the complexity of editing the film.

How was your video editing workflow?

At first, we were overwhelmed by the volume of footage available for each scene in 12th Fail. For one scene in particular, the interview scene at the end of the film, there was 10 hours of footage, but the scene was only supposed to last about 10 minutes.

We decided to color-code the clips on the Premiere Pro timeline and use adjustment layers to organize the footage for each scene. This process allowed us to quickly find and assemble the best clips to tell the story, which helped us dig deeper and creatively explore each scene. I'm also absolutely in love with the ability to nest a sequence in Premiere Pro, which is especially useful for complex edits. Once the biggest hurdle of getting the right footage was overcome, creativity could flow without any problems.

Adjustment layers are actually supposed to be an umbrella that affects every clip below it, whatever effect you apply to it, but we used it for a very different purpose. Instead, we used it to mark and label to organize our images so that we could access any shot we needed in seconds.

The color coding also had logic. The brighter and more powerful the color, the more it aroused a strong emotional response in us. The lighter colors meant the clip was good, but not as good as the others, but definitely worth a look. And the uncolored clips would just be the good takes that would be available if nothing else worked.

As I had co-written the film with VVC, I knew very well VVC's clear intentions behind every scene and character graph. So I was able to use this method of organization to better convey that intent and best represent that graph, and it always worked for VVC. And when it didn't, he would tell me I was going in the wrong direction, he would push me in the right direction, and usually the next edit would benefit him.

VVC taught me that editing isn't about the quality of the cuts, it's about the storytelling. A good edit is when no one sees it, they're just lost in the story.

Jaskunwar Kohli and 12th Fails director/producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra with their famous FILMFARE Awards, one of the highest honors films can receive in India.

How has Premiere Pros’ extensive ecosystem helped your workflow?

I like that you can use other tools built right into the app. For example, you can clean up the audio in your video, right from within Premiere Pro, without having to leave the app.

Also, there were so many times during editing where I needed to do text and object tracking, complicated blending, sometimes severe warp stabilization, etc. etc. and if Premiere felt like it couldn't do it, I could just take the clip in Adobe After Effects here and there, and watch it update in Premiere Pro almost instantly. It sometimes looked like a trick, but it's all real!

In fact, the distortion stabilization in Premiere and After Effects is so good that the VFX company couldn't exactly replicate the stabilization in the online edit. So we took a DPX of the raw photo, applied the distortion in our software, and gave them a DPX back. That's how we got the final effect thanks to Adobe!

No matter what I can imagine or what new thought comes to mind, we can somehow achieve it in Premiere Pro. In fact, even VVC was often delighted with how quickly I was able to show him exactly what he wanted to see from within the software itself. The limitations were removed and we could try everything out right away.

Try the latest video editing features by updating your Premiere Pro App Today, and to further enhance your workflow, explore the many integrations available as part of the Adobe Video Ecosystem.