Filmi Chakkar

We were asked to make two movies:
one documentary, and one fiction.
Anisha Rudransh and I worked together.

Our documentary was based on Narayanpur, a pottery village 7 kms from yelahanka.
This sleepy little village has several potters, who make a living out of their pottery, and rely on it for their survival. There are some people who do other things like agriculture, and small-time businesses and shops. The village is relatively quite a new one, which has come up due to the shifting of the airport in Devanahalli.
We visited the people there several times, and conversed with them about their lives and the village.

Our frequent trips there had made it a somewhat familiar place. Spending time with the people and asking them the awkward questions that we did, had already broken down the barriers that were there between us and broken the ice. The conversations we had had and the tools we used were not just to gain information, they also helped break the ice.We made a few more trips to the place a few days before shooting. We made friends, collected a whole lot of information and promised to return. We may have visited Narayanpura well over 8-9 times, just for the filming and each time we returned, the more we connected with the place.

It was a refreshing and exciting to know that the people had accepted us. Sure, we stuck out like a sore thumb with a fancy bike, western clothes and absolutely no knowledge of kannada- yet their reactions to us were far better than what we had expected. They were helpful and patient with us and our sometimes bizarre (for them) requests.

While thinking about the format of the documentary, we came up with:

1) documenting a space (like the chai-kadai or water pump)

2) documenting a person's daily life

3) documenting the chain of interactions that happen between people by switching people to follow each time they came in contact.

4) documenting hot spots around the entire village.

After spending time siting around on the fields, having bananas and one rupee snacks with tea from the chai-kadai, interacting with the over-excited children, chatting with the villagers while lazying around and dodging unfriendly overprotective cows, we felt like a part of Narayanpura. We realized that we didn't really want to document just one space or one person's life. It would not effectively represent all that made Narayanpur what it is. Thus we decided to create a montage of various spaces around the village that we felt gave an insight into the lives of the people there.

Monkeys are quite a nuisance, and a common sight there. The children are made to do things by scaring them with monkeys. Like, a parent might say "If you dont do your homework, the monkey will take you away."
Creating a montage without a story and yet keeping the audience with us in the movie all the way is difficult. To overcome that we thought of ways to tie everything together and connect the unconnected. We thought then, of using a monkey as a guide to guide us through all the sights and sounds of the village. Monkeys are careful observers and opportunists, and we used this to shoot our film, and add a little humour to it.

We wrote out our final script and detailed storyboard. After a couple of trial shots to get the movement of the camera (as monkey) right, we began shooting.

We shot the documentary over three days, and made several trips to Narayanpur, often more than once in a day, to get different shots. We had to organise our time according to the train, and tap and children! We edited it on FCP.

Our second film was an animated fiction, a story we would have wanted to or expected to hear from the villagers.
Our exposure and experiences in Narayanpura had given us a lot more unconsciously. We got quite a few ideas for our fiction during our first few visits to Narayanpura. We ideated and came up with couple of stories:

1) a foreigner completely lost in translation in a village

2) a man herding cows unable to pull convince one of the cows to cross over the train tracks in time

3) a young village girl struggling with her talent and love to work at the wheel while everyone tries convincing her otherwise as she is a female.

4) a man at a train crossing

We finally zeroed onto the story of the man at the railway crossing, with the job of lowering the level to block the roads when a train is approaching.

The story shaped into something that we could see happening in the settings around Narayanpura. Being a comparatively new village, Narayanpura did not have any stories or legends of their own that a community settled in a place for centuries usually has. We had expected to hear some eerie ghost story, considering the village had all the elements one could ask for-a burial ground, a snake temple and a railway track. Thus, we created a story of our own through the movie, based on the level crossing and the man who sat manning it every night.

He is an oldish man, bored of his monotonous cyclic existence. He sits there in his cabin all night long, and has to close the level crossing whenever the train comes. His job is to ensure the safety of travellers, and he does his job mechanically, repetitively, in the same manner everyday, with no break in the boring cycle.

One day, just as the train comes, and he is about to close the level crossing, he decides that he needs some entertainment. He watches an unaware biker head to his doom, and does not do his 'daily duty'.
The bike crashes into the train......... and he smiles.

Since the setting of our movie was night, all the shooting would need to be done in the dark. After checking it out on our cameras, we realized that shooting in the dark would be extremely difficult and may not produce the results we wanted. We thus turned towards animation as another means of showcasing our story. Shifting to animation was a big decision since it is a time consuming process, and doing it along with another movie in 3 days is difficult. Yet we stuck to it.

We created an entire script, and made many iterations for the storyboard. Choosing one that would be effective yet not over complicated, we began work. We scanned out the basic hand drawn images, and began 3 days of Photoshop and Flash work. The compilation was done on Flash and then editing on Final Cut Pro with music, sound effects and commentary.

This week was STRESSFUL!!
Although we were happy with the final results of our films, there is always scope for improvement. The pointers Ulrique and Victor provided helped us see our movies in a different way. Often when one creates something, they look at it in comparision to what they had initially imagined. Getting feedback from someone else therefore, was interesting and gave us a few more things to think about for our films.