Journey of RED

Someday around the mid of September 2015, I came across this film festival by an NGO called Antardrishti – Drishti Short film festival. They were calling for films less than 10 minutes in duration on the theme of eye donation. The deadline was almost a month away. Having just made 4-5 short films earlier with friends of which only 2 are still in youtube and the rest are the embarrassing amateur attempts, that felt like a huge leap for me.

As part of brainstorming, I started watching videos on blind people, short films that are already made on the theme, previous year winners of the contest etc. I jotted down every idea that struck me. Few of which are interesting that I’ve still reserved them for my future projects.

Once I start working on a project, I prepare few dialogues that would form the crux of the story and weave scenes around them. Few of the dialogues that didn’t make it to the final draft –

“All I see is just black!”

“You see the truth. Black is the truth. You see truth as it is and we’re just seeing light bouncing off things!”

I was playing around with these dialogues, having a hero and a heroine with the heroine being blind, hero wanting to present her a gift. I explored more on the gifts that can be given to blind people. (There actually is a short film by the name Present, if I remember correctly – almost on the same idea). But my version climaxed with our hero choosing experiences as gifts over physical objects.

Before starting to write down the script, I wanted to watch interviews of blind people to see them react to sound and space around them. While browsing across various videos in youtube, I came across the videos by Tommy Edison, particularly his video on colours. That was the spark.

“Colours can’t be understood unless you see it” – This became the core idea. I then wanted someone to be confused about it and another character to clarify it. Being a graphic designer myself, I made the main character, an aspiring graphic designer whose major part of work deals with colours. I started sketching out scenes for him. He getting ready for a job interview. The interview scene where he is asked the question – “How’d you explain the colour Red to a blind person? “. Still I was not clear how to conclude the story. My initial thought was to have a deep conversation scene between the main character and a humourous blind person (inspired from Tommy Edison himself).

I used to listen to music while writing down the script. While working on the first draft of Red, I was listening to the “kannathil Muthamittal” soundtracks by AR Rahman. The “sundari” song from the album was playing and it suddenly struck me, why not have a child resolving the question? And I came up with the pivotal line, “Just make them see it”. There was no stopping after that. I finished the first draft the same day and was really happy the way it shaped itself during the process.

But I couldn’t make the film that year and I had to let the contest pass.

2 years later, I came across the same contest on the same theme and I was super excited. I was older by 3 films and had a camera of my own. Vanilla Studios had established itself as an end-to-end production house(with just me beside my equipment :p).

I took the core concept and rewrote the script with crispier scenes. I got in touch with Charles (Father of Geona, our child artist) and Ankith to play the main characters. Then, Jeevan and Shilpa joined in to make the cast complete. I wanted to shoot the interview scene of the film in Chalk Studio where I interned before joining Wipro, but couldn’t secure permissions. Then I came across this amazing design studio called Lollipop, who were more than happy to help us with the shoot. Their studio really added a character to the film.

I made the film in a week. The interview scene was shot the day before the deadline. I had to record the dialogues on the day of the deadline. I completed editing by night and submitted it a minute before midnight. It went on to win the Golden Eye Award that year.

Again 3 months ago, I came across another contest on the same theme but they wanted a film of 3 minutes or less running time. Hence I had to make Red, super-short. I began trimming the scenes and thought why not jump straight to the climax scene and bring every element from the previous film and place them all in the same scene. I wrote around 3 versions for the 3 minute version. Then I met up with Peter, who played the lead this time and Vishnu to plan the shoot properly. We had a brainstorming session discussing camera angles and shots. Geona was chosen to reprise her role from the previous movie. Nandita (from Or Iravu) played a blind lady while her husband Jagadeesh played Geona’s father character.

The latest version of Red was shot in a half-day time at Cubbon Park, Bangalore. Jagadeesh introduced Alint, a pianist during the shoot. He composed the amazing score for the film. This is my second film to have an original score after Thiruttu Naaye and this time I really enjoyed the scoring process.

One important thing I had been neglecting all these years of filmmaking was the sound. I focused more on visuals and this made my films look half-backed except when I had narrations or making music videos :p. For this film, I tried sync sound for the first time. We recorded all the dialogues along with the shoot in my Rode videomic attached to Iphone. The output was pretty decent. Only drawback I found in those dialogues were the background noise of the traffic.

As usual I cut away the portions of the location sound where we didn’t have dialogues and filled those silences with ambient noise of traffic and park. Still I found the sounds of cars and horns distracting during the dialogues. I found a way to take the viewer’s mind off this. I took this idea from a Philip Bloom video. If you have a noisy video just show the viewers the source of the noise and their mind would mute the noise as the video progresses(Not the exact words). I added sounds of the cars and bikes which are prominently appearing in the scene. I also enhanced the effect by giving a panning sound so that it will feel immersive. Having watched the film already, if you feel that you didn’t notice all these, then I shall consider it a successful attempt.

I did the post-production of this project completely in Da-Vinci Resolve’s free version. In addition to being available completely free, it is a fully functional end-to-end post production suit. And the best in colour grading used by Hollywood studios. Moving to a new software felt a little odd in the beginning. But this being a short project, I had more time to explore the tools and get the hang of it.

Finally, Red is online now. You can watch it here and share your comments.