I have to write a little re-cap here to remind myself of how it was. If I can remember correctly. I was in India for a few months and most of the time I spent in Mumbai. When I was in Mumbai I ended up in Andheri West, which is an area of the city were almost most of the people you meet and talk to are somehow involved in the entertainment media industry. The film industry in this city is the biggest film industry in the world and most young people are actors and/or models and they work mostly with Film, TV and TV-Series and things like that. I was a little bit interested to see more of this industry and thought it would be fun to participate in some kind of work related to that. But. I was probably not as comfortable on camera as I would have needed to. I was more interested in the production of film as a whole rather than being seen on the screen. I mean, I tried. I was living in an apartment together with some people that worked as actors also. It was good to get to hear their stories from work and get some advices on how to go about it. I did some photo shoots and went to a few auditions and so on. I went around and talked to different agents and I was networking in the city for a couple of months. But since the competition is very high and most people I met there were really passionate about being seen on camera and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Or should I say, how I wanted to do it. What impresses me with film making is that it is somehow the ultimate artwork where everything is constructed with all dimensions of storytelling included. We have the story, the writing of it, the technology behind it, the light, visuals, sound, acting, editing etc etc. All together. So I decided that trying to get a part in a film was not the right way to go for me. I wasn’t interested in being a part of any big commercial movie production after I’d been around for a couple of months and got to see how it worked. Or maybe I wouldn’t had said no if the right kind of opportunity was there, but I realized that it takes the will of making a career out of it to get to that. I wanted to be a part of something that were made from scratch by a small group. It felt more important to be able to feel close to the project you are working with. I wanted to find some people to work with who were doing totally their own thing. Some independent project without any commercial framework to stick to, or bounderies depending on how you see it. I was just an explorer. There was a lot of people I met that had started their own youtube channel and that sort of thing. I would bump in to them here and there. People you talk to at the gym for example. There was quite a lot of them who were interested in doing something with me because they wanted to have a foreigner in their film. So all of a sudden I was in contact with a lot of people and discussed all sorts of indie project for short film making.
A couple of months had passed by now and I had still not managed to get involved in anything. Just some photo shoots. Eventually I got a phone call regarding a totally different kind if job. I got that job, which I was really happy for and I had to leave India for Thailand really soon, to start my new job there. It all happened with really short notice. So on the day before I left India I took the whole thing about participating in any film project right in my own hands and made my own short film. It never turned out being any professional job. Nothing was payed. And it wasn’t making any money. Was never meant to either. Neither would it turn out being any ultimate artwork to speak of. Nothing special actually. But it was going to be a good memory and a cool story, if I was going to manage to get it done. It was going to be totally independent. Totally underground. No budget whatsoever. No filming permits. No paperwork or anything. It was totally DIY. I took the initiative and sat down with a guy I use to meet at the gym and started to talk about it.
And here is the part one of this story. Which I wrote at the time:
Making a short film in Mumbai – Part 1
He called me to come and visit his group of film makers in an apartment just across the slum from where I lived and where I use to go to the gym. They showed me some of their earlier films and we started to spawn some ideas. Nothing really came right there. But we all agreed about that we should make something quick and easy together before I leave the country. We sat there at their production office in the shape of a sleeping room on an apartment in an old rental house and watched some of their earlier material. Just scenes from some of their so far unmade b-movies. It was awesome. I just gave them compliments and said that I was positive and that I wanted to work with them. We pepped each other up on this one. We wanted to get going. We wanted to start filming something. But what? Just a couple of hours later or maybe the day after they called me up again and asked to see me straight away. Let’s meet at the Infinity Mall. I remember I jumped in to a taxi and just said “infinity”.
They came to the mall where I was sitting by a table and they had an idea they wanted to present. It was about a sitcom series which they were just starting to plan now. And it would probably take a couple of months before they would start shooting for that. I wasn’t going to be here by then and realized that it was not going to happen for me. I got them to realize that too when I. explained that I will be leaving and that we have to do something right now. I started to talk out load about different ideas that just popped up and came to my head. We actually got our phones up and started to film each other with them, doing act outs around the table right there at the food court in the mall with plenty of people around us. It was crazy. At first I was talking something about making a documentary on the entire situation I had ended up in here. Which then evolved into some sort of a played combined documentary and comedy. Kind of a sitcom short film about me trying to make a film in India. So it was a sort of a compromise. I made up something with what they wanted to do combined with what I wanted to do and mixed it in with the situation as it actually was. But the same argument that came from me earlier against their complex idea of a sitcom series backfired right back on my idea right there from them. It was all going to take too long time. It all sounded too complex. They thought it sounded complicated and the meeting almost ended without anything decided. I had to take the lead here and make sure to execute. They didn’t want to seem unprofessional. I didn’t have any experience. But still it all seem to come down to that I was foreigner. Which was even more crazy. I said that it will only be a short YouTube clip, like a couple of minutes long. I said that we have to do something quick and easy before I go. One of the guys agreed. Then the girl agreed. And eventually the other guy agreed also.
To be continued…
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