Sabse Badi Daulat (SBD) | Shooting experience

This was a remarkable project in so many ways. This actually was the project that confirmed for myself that filmmaking is where I wanted to spend my life. Being born in India I had had a love for the moving image all my life, but this had not gone much beyond the daydreaming stage. SBD changed all of that.

I grew up in a big Indian family and for me family values were always paramount. I loved the films which showed family issues and revolved around some kind of family drama. But then no Indian really hates the love stories and I had grown up watching the beautifully filmed musical love stories as well.

My uncle who was an indie filmmaker in UK was coming over to India for a visit and he said he wanted to make a film in India. He emailed me the script and I immediately fell in love with it. Not only was it a love story, it was a love story based around the problem of dowry that has been a big social issue for many decades in India. I wanted to do it.

We started the pre-production for the film even before he travelled to India. My experience of working in a distributed team over Google docs, phone calls and emails really grew from there and recently it has helped me a lot when you know...2020 hit the world. But getting back to the story of SBD, uncle Sunny wanted to shoot it in a village and fortunately for us we had relatives in a very nice village which could provide the perfect backdrop for this story.

After Sunny arrived in India, we spent a lot of time in pre-production, to get everything ready before travelling to the village. It was not just a question of taking our camera kits, but everything else that we knew we may not find in the village. Some of these things included big power banks, extra batteries for the camera, some foods items you only get in Delhi and even a desk jet printer.

In a way, we set up a small indie film productions office in our relatives' house. But they had a big house and big hearts, they accommodated all of us and our "luggage". We cast the male lead and female lead from Delhi and planned to cast the rest of the characters from the village itself. That actually worked better than we had hoped. We were able to find authentic, real villagers who didn't have to try to look the part because they were already what they were pretending to be on screen.

Then for 6 days we did nothing but shooting. Every morning, afternoon, evening and most late nights, we were busy in shooting. This is where the extensive pre-production helped us immensely. We knew exactly what we were shooting and when. But we didn't know where. Being the first AD, I was part of the decision-making process for creating the schedule as well as picking out the locations for the scenes.

An Indian village life is unlike anything you have ever seen. At most times when we were shooting outdoors there was a large crowd of spectators all around us, just outside the frame. One scene we had to postpone and shift location because of an issue with noisy spectators.

Even though we gave our best effort for each scene, there was one in particular that we spent extra effort on. This scene where the lead couple have a fight was one that the director had singled out as his Magnum Opus on day 1. There was space in the schedule to try to shoot this scene 3 times. We used all three slots. The lighting that the director wanted was very experimental and he insisted on a certain look. I, along with my local production assistants, worked on creating these make-shift rigs from LED lights to try to achieve that look.

The lighting experiments and the director's demands from the performers...well, suffice it to say we ultimately did 71 retakes for that scene over three nights. But finally, when it was in the can, the director was satisfied with it and that's what counts on a film set.

When we were not shooting, we were sitting at home planning the next day's scenes. The downtime was also spent with the same people, some of whom were family and others who felt like family after spending so many intense days with them.

The great achievement of that shoot was that when the director called "Pack Up" on the sixth day, every single shot had been covered and we still had a few hours of sunlight left. I call that a triumph of our adherence to best practices, following the processes and paying attention to every single detail.

After a couple of months when I saw the film after post-production, I felt a surge of pride - I had helped in making that happen! It was my first project and it got me hooked on filmmaking for life.