Assignment 7: Movie Making!

Making a movie...

Here was an assignment I was looking forward to with some excitement and some uncertainty. Making a film is a combination of a lot of things: brain-storming, script writing, story boarding, shooting, editing. The prospect of doing it for the very first time was extremely exciting. The fact that I had no knowledge of the editing software led to the uncertainty.

Yet, here we were, making not one but two movies! One was to be a documentary and the second was to be a fiction. And all in 3 days flat.

We got into groups of three, putting our heads together for any brilliant ideas. Truthfully, we hadn't a clue as to what we were going to do in the beginning. The documentary, we decided would be based in Narayanpura, but when it came to the fiction we were still prowling around in the dark. What we needed was inspiration- as the wise would say! But inspiration lurks further away from you the more you try to forcefully hunt it down.

DOCUMENTARY: 

My frequent trips to Narayanpur had made it a somewhat familiar place. I felt that being with the people and asking them the awkward questions that we did, had already forced me to break down that certain barrier that we each carry with us. The conversations we had had and the tools we used were not just to gain information, it also helped break the ice.

The others in my group, Neha and Rudransh had also stuck with Narayanpura since the beginning for all the assignments. They too had formed a bond with the place, and together we came to a quick decision that Narayanpura would be the place for our film.

We made a few more trips to the place a few days before shooting. We made a few friends, collected a whole lot more of information and promised to return. 

Their way of life and surroundings made it all very foreign and strange in the beginning. We all have heard of the village life and their routines; we all accept it. Yet if we were to live in the village for a few days, each one of us would be uncomfortable.

It was a feeling that I consciously noticed a change in over the days. The more times I spent in Narayanpura, the more I began to enjoy, respect and understand the surroundings. We may have visited Narayanpura well over 8-9 times, just for the filming. 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 I had expected. They were helpful and patient with us and our sometimes bizarre 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.

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. We drew from the fact that there were a lot of monkeys around the village and parents kept their children in check using monkey stories to scare them. 

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.

On our last day at Narayanpura, we gave Ramkrishnaappa photographs of the villagers with masks of various personalities. They were from our previous assignment that we did in that place. The people were absolutely thrilled to receive their photographs, and it was interesting to see the way three or four children ran about the village passing the photographs over to whomever they belonged. The reactions we received felt like a wonderful end to our last day in Narayanpura.

ANIMATION:

Our exposure and experiences in Narayanpura gave 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 tried to create one of our own through the movie.

Since the setting of our movie was at 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 Final Cut Pro with music, sound effects and commentary.

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.