We all agreed to meet up in the morning at the apartment which Nirmal lived in, for the shooting of the film. It was not a very big place, and he also shares the flat with another few guys. It would be Me, Normal, Shree, Dope-mann and the girl (actress). I arrived there pretty early. Me, Nirmal and his flat mates started to move out as much as we could from one room to another in order to be able to shoot the film in there. Dope-mann Joshi, the actual camera man was also there in good time. He had been up all night shooting for a movie and had not got any sleep at all. He came straight from a different shooting. Shree showed up a couple of hours later. He had his toothbrush with him and started off with brushing his teeth, then crawled up in a corner to sleep. The actress arrived eventually as well. She seemed pretty shy and didn’t talk much. I think she didn’t know much English. It took me probably a few hours before I realized that it was a different girl from the one which were there when we had a meeting at the mall. I thought that was pretty funny. That it just passed by without any comment. No one told me that it would be a different actress. Like as if that was completely irrelevant.
We started to shoot the scene of when Foreigner and Cameraman walks in the outside corridor to meet the producer. It is actually the attic corridor just outside Nirmals apartment. The two of us are standing there and smiling as we knock on the door, while Dope-man is filming. The sound disturbance from the construction work right behind us is terrible and in editing I ended up cutting the sound out completely and fill it up with weird sound effects. It seems weird but I think I masked the problem pretty well like that. The next shoot is being filmed from inside and it shows how the producer is just sitting there and he hears how it knocks on the door. When I first saw the footage, was a very long time afterwards and I was happily surprised by how funny he is acting when he is sitting there and singing for himself. I did not know about that. Because I was on the other side of the door.
He goes to open the door and acts really quirky. Then we had to shoot a scene of when we are taking off our shoes. I didn’t really understand why. But Dope-Mann with the camera was keen on shooting that and it seemed obvious for all the others, even though it was not in the script. So we filmed the shoes and then when we walked in. These parts turned out being a bit dull and I felt like I had to do something to it to make it a little bit interesting (as with the entire film). So I inserted some animation effect which I faded back and forwards so that the footage looks partly like comics.
It was all the time a lot of short actions while we shot this film during this day. Action, cut, action, cut, action, cut, action, cut. We sat down and filmed the scene of how the foreigner is asking the producer for money. The camera angles started to come from everywhere. Dope-man was doing a great job trying to find interesting camera angles. The script was so faint that we hardly had any lines to say. Then came the scene when the producer is going to write a check for the foreigner. We got to borrow some bank checks from Nirmal’s flatmate. But he was actually using them for real, so we were not allowed to waste them. We were only allowed one try. I tried to explained how we should shoot this to make it look funny. I wanted the producer to hold the pen like a three year old and only draw circular spiral motions like Mr. Oizo does in the music video for the song Flat Beat when he is smoking sausages and signing documents at his desk. That little yellow muppet doll that headbangs to that electronic beat from the end of 90’s, if you remember. But I didn’t manage to make myself understood and both the producer, Nirmal and Dope-mann thought it would look better if the producer just wrote zeros.
(Later on when this film was finished and I show it to my friend in Sweden. His said something like “…but that part when the producer only writes zeros on the check. Was that just a joke, or what?”. A very confusing comment in general, I. would say. But funny).
At this point we had no plan for putting the text saying that a moment of negotiation followed. So I was prepared for that the scene would appear way to short and be weird. (We actually did not have the plan on making any subtitles at all. Which I am glad we did in the end). Then the foreigner and the cameraman walks out to go to the set where they are going to shoot the film. Which actually is just in the other room in the same apartment.
So we carried over all the things and furnitures and matrasses from one room to another again. The funny thing is that it is actually day time when we are shooting the most part of the film. But the film is about that the foreigner is going to make a film in 12 hours. And at the first shots we got it was almost sunset. So it already had started in the evening. But we filmed it in the evening the day before. So now we had to be cheating on that as well. There was a window in that room and the daylight was shining in. We had to cover the window with something but there were no hatches and no curtains. So we covered it with a blanket which fixed in the corners above the windows by banging in a pen through the blanket like a nail into the wall with a book as a hammer. Still it turned out not working very well. In fact in one of the shots the pure daylight was still shining right in to the camera through a gap where the blanket was hanging down too much in the middle. It was so terrible obvious because it was the scene when we come in to the room for the first time and it was dark and the cameraman is turning on the light. I really wanted to keep the shat because it was so funny that the cameraman is saying “Ka-boom!”, when he turns on the light. And at that point I was all up in making graphics enhancing words like that. So I ended up trying to cover up that daylight shining through in the editing by pasting in a big ugly square thingy in graphics right on to the footage. I made it in segments so that it at least could change the color a few times. It looked really horrible. But I actually haven’t got any comments on it at all so far. I think it is quite funny. It looks so cheap. I am looking forward to get to hear about it.
Recent Comments