<Will be uploading the short short-ly>

behind the scenes

still feel a good short is hard to make in 48 hours unless you have a good script ready beforehand.

my project was a dramedy in itself. i found out about the event (and registered) 11 days before.
 
what was my plan? no plan. being in delhi, i decided to book a flight to mumbai. shoot in my hotel with my dslr (non-sync) and submit. at least it would be better than not taking part. but i was afraid, all i could think was me fitting the given elements to set ideas (limited by my plan) like a guy kidnapped locked in a room, or a guy wakes up with amnesia, or haunted hotel room. and i would hate to act in my own film. then i learnt the option to shoot in your city with a representative in the host city. bingo. even if i find no one i had my sister to support me in some way if i stayed home. i begged her to help me 6-8 hours on saturday for the shoot. i could now plan exterior on beautiful locations, india gate etc, that i know. next few days were all spent celebrating diwali, but i  did post ads online. as a start. the response was phenomenal but my heart was not ready for such a team. based on my experience at film school, to meet such a demanding deadline, you need a crew which is equally committed to the project and has 100% faith in you. i took a decision of doing it all alone.

now what came about, is something i never expected. this was the first time i was going to shoot in delhi. finding equipment would be impossible here, i never knew.
no lights, no sound recorders, no slates etc to rent. all the rental houses refused to cater to such a small requirement. according to some a 750w tungsten light is not even manufactured. i had my dslr and 2 lenses. i had a (very) cheap tripod & mic. but lights? the mood is all about lights. if i get film noir or horror. without lights i would be dead. spent so much time but i could not find. no point getting 2kw lights, i could never set the mood with those fire like powerful lamps.

but now a bigger problem loomed. it was the last day and i had still found no representative in mumbai. had my whole family help me in this and my dad found a friend whose friend's colleague was in mumbai and could help. i explained everything to them friday morning, hours before kickoff. meanwhile all this while, all these days i was working my day job at full speed. sleep was being sacrificed for days now.

and i was in office when i got the call "sir we have got drama". and then i had to make the call if i should continue my equipment hunting or just let it be. i gave up on equipment, let it be a challenge. i went home and setup my dslr codec video plugin for final cut pro. and i was minutes away from the start. i got the other call, "here are the elements:.." i thanked the guy. kept the phone. and slept. that very second i realized what pressure had built in my mind, with my own self, criticizing many decisions i had taken (as i talked above). but now, the fear of unknown was gone. the "what ifs" were limited now. and my body, i guess, stopped producing adrenaline. i decided to sleep. i woke up 9:30pm and started working on the idea. genre. drama. honestly i did not like it. it is too vague in my opinion. i could not even name any except godfather that is pure drama. i searched "imdb top drama" and found the answer. it does not need to be a pure drama. it means "action" in greek. i was dying to have fun, all these days were so tense. dramedy (drama comedy), i decided. even the audience could use a laugh or two if i am successful.

now i felt drama in a single person film is not possible. i carelessly called all my friends and 2 responded. my true friends, i realized. i was worried they had no interest in such fields let alone experience and i was going to ask them to act and without even having any idea on the plate yet. anyways we planned to start at 9. i was thrilled. i had a guy to download the film in mumbai and deposit, i had my sis for support (not the best idea i tell you, you get into brother-sister arguments at the smallest of things on set) and now i had 2 friends to act. i woke up all night, came with a crazy idea (real gamble i tell you) and started arranging props from within the house and 24x7 convenience stores. and then tragedy. at around 8am it started raining crazy out of the blue in delhi. my exterior plans were ruined, my actors reached my home at noon, the daylight was too weak making interiors boring (setting a high iso on camera adds so much noise). i replanned my shots and started. my dslr now had a hot spot (common issue) but it was too late for me to do anything and i continued. the mic & tripod were terrible. i had to just continue.
now not only my friends had trouble delivering lines, they were also getting bored with multiple takes across different angles. the boom would float in the wrong direction, i was frustrated, but i was lucky to have these guys doing a great job on their first attempt ever. i could not complete my shots by 8pm but i had drawn a line as my friends had personal commitments and i did not want to exploit their gratitude.

i sat down to have first meal in over 28 hours. and the editing begun. 2 hours in. midnight, boom. sparking outside and the whole colony's power failed. the power backup was there? you would say. no, due to the surge it got busted too. thank god my laptop has a backup of 6 hours. i was racing aginst time, with mosquitoes biting the hell out of me. at one point i wanted to take a "crying break". 5:10am the battery gave up and i packed my stuff, told my parents i am going to my (day job) office, which will not take my filmmaking interests kindly. my parents asked me to wait , made frantic calls to the team already working on fixing power. they made a stop-gap arrangement of powering few phases and in our house we only had one socket in a corner that worked. my mom got me some juice which made me lose it (i just wanted to concentrate) and i spilled the juice on- the laptop, the camera sd cards, card reader, the documentation. i was shaking. but everything worked fine by god's grace. it was 7:30am and i had not worked on my horrible sound, i had to upload it by 9am. my actors were not consistent with dialogue that made picture editing really cumbersome. at 8am i had to stop video edit and call it locked picture. i just had to. 90 minutes for the sound i had, i played safe and tried to make sure at the correct levels the voice should be easy to make out and leave it at that. no point in trying to balance room tones among cuts. the audience forgives that, sometimes it even creates expansion of physical space making you feel you are watching as the camera does. true untrue, these were the theories i convinced myself with. i had no title no credit and no time. i titled it, the first thing that came to my mind and put one slate as credits. the export took 1 hour, it was a 2gb file. i forgot exporting at a lower bitrate (as i had to transfer online). had to do it again, it took another 40 minutes. at 1030am i started uploading it. my dsl subscriber provides a speed on demand facility which i had planned to take. i upgraded but the speeds didn't take off. numerous calls to customer care and the only replies i get are "sir it says upto 2mbps. upto. no guarantees". now, at 11:20 am, the connection dropped. the phone line dropped. what happened now was that the electrical repairs going on, accidentally damaged the dsl phone line. my representative in mumbai was frantic, he committed to a 9am timeline and he had to leave around 1pm.

i had my bag ready, so in pajamas and slippers, i drove to my office. being a sunday wifi was limited to floors, to which i did not have access. i did not have an ethernet cable and finding that would have taken enormous time. i went up down all floors, until i found a place that was "catching" some signal. i sneaked in, kept standing for the next 20 minutes of the transfer (holding a 17inch laptop standing was a challenge in itself with energy levels gone). the upload completed and i was relieved. in some time my proxy informed that download on his end completed too. 1:00pm. but there was more in store.

my representative told me friday he did not have a dvd writer but will get it burnt from a cafe, thats why the 9am deadline. now i am told that all cafes are closed on sunday. he did have a cd writer and with my bitrate lowered for online transfer, i asked him to burn it on a cd. we also had to burn a dvd video. for which i found freeware that encoded and burnt mov files. i attached with instructions to my representative. i did a dummy test here and for a 7min film, the output dvd iso was only 500mb. so i asked him to burn the dvd-video on cd, the idea of which took time to explain also. i still don't know if he got it and if it worked. but he called me half an hour later. at 99% his burn fails and pc restarts. he tells me he is forgetting his personal commitments and getting this done. but i gave up now. i thanked him and told him to let me know when it is resolved. in the meantime i had to work on the documentation again, it was painful to do it again. my health was hopelessly bad now. i emailed him the documents and at 3pm with the cd still not burnt. i slept, praying. i woke up 4:30 and called him, what he said i do not know, he sounded happy so i assumed it must have burnt successfully. at 5:00 pm i get a call and he gives the phone to the organizers who ask me about the documentations which i answer. now my eyes were wide. my film had been submitted. subject to the condition the burnt dics work. which i did not till i was at the event. friday evening till sunday afternoon, i was in some other dimension.

monday i was back to office. wednesday i took my flight for mumbai and reached the screening + awards ceremony venue thursday morning at 9. god was i anxious. i was given the list of films as i entered the auditorium, but it did not have my short in the list. heart was pounding now, would feel so stupid going back home now. so i check with the organizers and they tell me "o leo libra yeah yeah.. we all laughed a lot have a seat..". finally.

the shorts started rolling and 65 shorts later, confidence dented by how little the audience appreciated (it was a tough crowd- comprising only of competitors), then mine started. what reception. what laughter.  it felt like a dream. i always fancied myself as an entertainer. maybe i can be one professionally. an hour later, i won 2 out of 8 awards i was competing for. phew!

and the biggest reward.. the biggest applause of all the 70 shorts that were screened.

[ UPDATE: Won a 3rd award days later after this post- Best Film, Group Audience]