When they get to the so called “set”, the foreigner is disappointed about how small the room is and say that in Hindi. There is a few cuts from different angles in this scene and in one of them the sound is so terrible that we had to delete it completely and add a voice over in post-production again. I asked Nirmal to record his voice on his phone and send it to me via Whatsapp. This is over a year after the shooting and we are in completely different countries from eachother (different time zones). It is in the middle of the night where he is and he just finished his job and is on the bus on his way home and. You can tell on the recording that he made at that present moment, that he is really tired. The voice doesn’t fit to the context. The footage shows an excited man waving his arms around. But the voice is from a tired person sitting on a public bus. I didn’t want to bother him by asking for another one. I found it hilarious and just had to use it. But the same goes for my voice over. It is crap. I say something in Hindi that I found out via google translate which means something like “c’mon, this is way too small”. And since it was already ages ago I was in India I had no perception whatsoever of how Hindi sounds like anymore… and I end up sounding like a farmer from the north of Sweden on the accent. Which I found hilarious at the time.
Then the cameraman is saying that the small size of the room is good for the sound. And the foreigner is convinced right away and they clap their hands together to some random sound effects.
Right after that the foreigner asks the cameraman where he has his camera. And the cameraman looks is putting on a little act explaining that he lost the camera. I like Nirmals acting here. He really looks sad on his eyes. And the explanations are so random. He is bladdering aboud how he was running, running… bugging. And he is completely improvising here. When I was editing the film I realized that he is saying “bugging” the third time. I am not sure that it is on purpose. But I found it hilarious at the time, because it does not seem unlikely that this person has been running around bugging people. And someone took the camera away from him. This little detail in the script was something we put in as an excuse to why we would not have a camera as props to shoot the cameraman with. And that’s why we would use the phone as props for camera in the film. But it all went so fast and then we were offered a gopro as props which. We used in the first part of the film when they meet on the street. I don’t know. If we would have a little bit more time we would probably have re-written it and shot it again. Because the story seems so weird like this. But, that is why we made the film seem to have been made in less then 12 hours. But when you read these blog posts about the making of the film, you probably realize that this is not actually the entire truth. It is exegurated to let us get away with our mistakes. However it is a pretty rushed film, which ended up taking a huge amount of time to get finished. In fact it almost didn’t get finished at all. It all ended up in my own hands.
So this is the part when I pull up my new iphone and says that it would do the job. Which is probably true, as well. But this film is actually. Shot with a real professional camera (can’t remember which one though). I say something like. “Here we can shoot with this. I paid 80 000 rupees for it. It will do”. And I look like a jerk when I say it and look at a another direction totally randomly. It is an expensive phone. Likely mostly for the brand. But the camera is pretty good also. Now Nirmal starts his improvised screen play as well. He takes the phone in his hand and acts like he starts looking through it to learn the settings or something. I just point at the screen and say “you see…” also very random. When I edited this I put on some comic effect and some stripes in the background and freeze framed it as I let it fade out. I added some sound effect for when he touches the screen of the film. I paused the video and looked at the image, and I actually liked it. I took a picture of my computer screen and send it to a friend who thought that we were taking a selfie. I thought it was a cool picture, with the two of us in there and with the comic effects etc. An as a joke I called it a poster. A couple of weeks later when the film was all done, someone asked me for a poster of the film and I picked that image. Just cropped it, corrected the colors and added the title and our names to it. When this scene is fading away it takes us in to the start of the third act. The third act starts when the actress enters. I separated this film into three acts for the reason that since I was using so much speech bubbles, subtitles and comic effects, which all seemed pretty heavy. It pretty soon got quite heavy for the computer and the longer I got the slower it was working and the hotter the computer got. The project took up so much hard drive space also. It was redicolus. I had never seen anything like it. I mean, ok I have not been doing that much heavy video editing, so my experience is limited. But to reach a 100GB went very fast (the entire project of the film took up over 700GB. And it is a 15 min short film. I had been looking around for some advices online. I posted in some facebook groups for help etc. But it was my own idea to devide the film in to three parts. And it was due to technical spec limitations I suppose. So I first edited 3 or for minutes as good as I wanted them. Then rendered it out and finished it as an independent project. Then I did the same with the next 5 minutes or so. Then the same with the last part. But instead of render out the last part I just imported the two earlier parts to the project and pasted them in before that last part. And it was then I rendered it all out as the finished film. I still have. A lot to learn. I am not sure if this is a common way of doing it. I actually didn’t get any comment regarding this when I asked around on the Facebook groups. Never mind.
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