What caught our attention as we finished work on “To Pee..” was a one minute short film contest on Passion For Cinema. We were allowed to come up with any number of entries for the contest as long as they were limited to a minutes screen time, minus the titles. That got us thinking; though for quite a while nothing came to mind. A couple of ideas did make us jump; only to fizzle out for some reason. One idea though stayed on. We had seen this watchman at an ATM machine near our place and we had seen him on quite a few nights with only a dog for company. We froze on the idea. We would shoot him on his duty, his vigil and the lack of activity through the vigil. We decided on not having anything dramatic happen in the movie and it would be just another night in the watchman’s day.
We spoke to Chann Setty and convinced him to act. Sumanth meanwhile came up with the idea of starting and ending the movie with another character. Thus, emphasizing the watchman’s day being sandwiched between the end and start of this other person’s day. We started the shoot and it went on smoothly. We almost paid a huge price for some carelessness on our part. We had the camera set on a tripod and were explaining a shot when the tripod suddenly started falling over. Think it was the weight of the camera (with the tripod at full height) and the sloping ground that did it. The tripod was pulled back just in time to save the camera, though we now own a bent tripod. We shot very late in the night; around 12:30 onwards. So we had people slowing down on the road to look. One Rickshaw driver decided to park his vehicle and watch us shoot. What followed though was a scene straight out of AXN amazing videos. His vehicle started rolling and picked up speed along the road (a very steep slope). His run to get to his vehicle, as it sped down the middle of the road, and the jump on to the seat, was one sight, that if shot, could make it to any action flick.
We got Akmal, from a shop opposite the ATM, to act in the film. He was more than ready and we didn’t have to explain much to him. The toughest part was to get Chann Setty to deliver the dialogues as we wanted them. He just couldn’t get one particular line right. We finally had to do a cut and paste of words, to get it right, during editing.
With the footage ready, we got down to the editing and realized what a big mess we were in. We realized the difficulty of making the film fit into the one minute time limit. We had to do away with the sandwiched start and end. We split the screen into 4 to accommodate the watchman’s activities. We somehow got the duration down to one minute, but we had compromised badly. The video in the site is the longer version and not the compromised version submitted to the contest. We named the film “Frozen Nights”.
During the shoot for this, we were working on this other idea for another one minute short. It was to be shot in a shop that bought old newspapers and books. As soon as we were done with first short, we had the task of finding a location for us to shoot in. After talking in nearly half a dozen places we luckily chanced upon one, well off the main road. Devaraj owned the shop and he readily agreed to let us use his place.
After the experience of editing “Frozen Nights”, we decided to have the shots broken up and have trials before we left for the shoot. After planning the shots and their approximate durations we were better prepared to shoot what we wanted to shoot. The shoot again went along fine. We got Devaraj to act and his wife Kondamma too was pulled in. We initially had thought of using a voice over for the woman in the film, not being very sure of finding someone to do the role. But Kondamma’s readiness was a bonus. She went on to mention how she had worked in a studio in Chennai (think it was Gemini) and how she had played a small role in a film there. She was all energy during the shoot and sometimes close to tears when she didn’t get the dialogues right. Devaraj though was superb. The closing shot of the film was all his. He pulled it off in two takes. The way he laughed in that shot added so much more to the film. Devaraj holding the beedi was improvised during the shoot and that too added to the shot. “Samayada Setuve” (A Bridge Across Time) wouldn’t have been possible if not for Devaraj and his family. Thank you.
Editing “Samayada Setuve” was one of the easiest we had done. We had the shots broken up well before and we had the film ready soon.
We wanted to shoot the third film in our hometown, as we had the cast thought out. “Disown” was to be the depiction of a kid’s dilemma on finding Rs.100 lying on the road. The boy we had decided to cast stayed close to Sumanth’s place and had been a part of our first effort “Raahein”. We had decided to convince his parents to play themselves in the film. The shots for this too were planned with the screen time considered. The shoot for this again was completed in a short time. Well within a day. The highlight of this shoot was the trolley we used to shoot the scene where the boy walks back (his face against the sky) after pocketing the money. This trolley had been made to order on a whim and ran on almost 15 ft of track (3 detachable sections of around 5 ft). It was done by a carpenter near Sumanth’s place and we were only too happy to use it for this short. Editing this again was easy and we had it ready in a very short time.
We used royalty free music from the net for our soundtracks for “Frozen Nights” and “Disown”. “Samayada Setuve” had Neehar’s composition for one of our earlier films. Sound used again was from the locations and hence was not much of a pain recreating and syncing.
Watch the making here.
We didn’t win anything at the contest, but got a couple of positive comments for “Disown”. And when we look back at the way we shot the three shorts, we see a learning curve. The final results reflect this progression and we fully intend to keep this going.
Currently we are busy with the final stages of editing and sound mixing for “I Shot Myself”. It’ll end up being a film of around 40-45 mins. Hopefully we’ll have it ready by the end of this month. Will write more on this one soon.
