Blimey!!!

Just when I learn how to upload a video the hard way (manually), Blogger comes up with a simple 'Post Video' link for all posts.

First Video Post!!

I've been meaning to put up a video on my blog for months now -- it's really not that complex of a process if you know what you're doing. Hopefully it'll be a lot simpler in the future now that I have an idea of what to do. This was taken at Mamta didi's house after that first night I went over there (and wrote on my blog abt it). Since then I've stopped taking photos and videos -- which is not something I'm proud of. But I AM proud of my effort to put up this video!!!

Click To Play

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Just completed 4 weeks out of 7. There's still so much left to do, but at least it feels like if I've survived this long, it can only get better, not worse -- right?

Every day is such a challenge, on so many different levels -- personally, professionally, physically, emotionally. The growth curve is huge -- and like every film I've done in the past, I know I'm going to come out a stronger, smarter individual, with a plethora of newly gained knowledge. I'm never going to remember the stress, the minute-to-minute chaos, the dread I feel at certain times each day (like when there's a phone call you REALLY don't want to take, but of course they're going to call you, over & over again).

I often feel down about myself, because it's such a thankless job. At the end of the day, you may have resolved 10 issues, but there are still another 15 that have come up, of which 5 are just unavoidable, and you just have to bear the brunt of it.

But the other day, speaking to my friend Smriti made me feel soooo much better about myself. She's a producer & writer -- I can't imagine why anyone would want to produce, but that's a whole different story. She recently directed a short film, and was giving accolades to being a director, because she found it to be a huge challenge -- and it made her realize how important the experience was for her as a producer to see the other side of it. Somehow, even though I always knew that in the back of my mind, it just made me feel much better to hear it from someone in a similar position as me. That even though I may not be cut out to produce, it's an important skill for me to at least learn (even if I don't put it into practice) bc it'll only help me on the other side, as a director.

Anyway -- that was my two cents on it. 3 weeks left!!!

End of Week 2

Week 1 ended with one of our lights setting off the fire alarm & sprinklers on the 8th floor -- where the whole building was evacuated for 45 minutes, and we ran around looking for buckets and containers to hold the water dripping onto the 7th floor. Eventually our shooting was shut down by health & safety, and weren't able to shoot one scene scheduled for that location. We're still waiting to hear what that location is going to claim on our insurance -- fun, fun.

Week 2 was fine -- the usual hiccups, but nothing major. It rained and was freezing cold for the first 3 days of the week, so we ended up rescheduling a lot of outdoor scenes -- eventually, we got pretty much everything in that location as well, except for one nighttime outdoor scene, to be rescheduled for some other time.

2 weeks - 2 rescheduled scenes. Not looking great, but not looking bad either. As of tomorrow, we are no longer parked at one location for the week -- we pretty much change locations everyday. That's going to come with its own hassles and headaches -- I don't even want to try to pre-empt them ... will deal w/them as they come.

Today was our second day off since the shoot started. I went to visit my Mausi in Finchley (treated myself to a cab rather than the usual tube). I had lunch, and then took a nice one hour nap, and headed back to Central London, as our producer, Arun had planned a dinner for the principle cast as well as close friends.

It's almost 1am, and I have to wake up at 6am everyday for the next 6 days, so I'm probably going to regret staying up and typing out my random thoughts -- but there was one really nice quote that I felt I had to share.

Naseer mentioned a quote, which he had heard from some actor, he couldn't remember who (ironically). He used himself as an example.


There are 5 stages to every actor's life:
1) Who is Naseeruddin Shah?
2) Get me Naseeruddin Shah.
3) Get me a Naseeruddin Shah type.
4) Get me a younger Naseeruddin Shah.
5) Who is Naseeruddin Shah?

Feels like a Holiday

It's been a beautiful week in London -- so rather than going to the gym (the first day I've gone this week) I decided to go for a walk to Regent's Park instead, since it's only a 10 minute walk away from the flat.

I swear, it felt like the whole world was sitting outside in a pub tonight. I kept seeing glasses of wine on tables of restaurants, and hearing laughter of people standing around in pubs. But surprisingly, I wasn't longing for it myself ... I think it's because today was (Mashallah, knock on wood) a good day at work -- no major crises, issues, etc. And I came back home with enough energy to work out, so that definitely made me feel good about myself.

Ok, I'm going to try to go to sleep by 11pm tonight.

Rushes

I was only on set for a few hours today (our second day of shooting). I've realized that my time on set, though useful in solving people's minute-to-minute issues, is not optimized. Arriving back at the office, I had 28 emails requiring immediate attention -- most of these emails contain documents of deal memos/budget quotes/breakdowns and take forever for each one.

So, needless to say, I was swamped when I got into the office. But it was nice to be in a quiet office, versus being on set where I was battling all day with various departments who kept insisting that it was required by law to have a medic on set, vs. other departments swearing that they got legal council and it's not required ... It was maddening.

I hadn't seen any of the shooting from the day before, bc I was busy coordinating a stills photo shoot for the principle actors (Naseeruddin Shah, Greta Scacchi, and two other actors). I came into the office and asked our editor Sanjeev how the rushes looked from the day before. 'Rushes' are the footage of what was shot the day before -- they don't have sound though. Sanjeev asks me 'Did you purposely keep this guy out of frame?' I frowned -- 'No -- show me.' I looked at the shots, and everything on the left side of the frame was cut out. In some shots it didn't show as much , but in other shots, heads and bodies were literally cut out of frame. I immediately sent Sanjeev to set with his Beta machine and monitor to show Jag the problem.

3 hours of confusion ensued -- was this a lab telecine issue? Should we print all 4000 feet that we shot yesterday (an £800 cost)? It was 5 minutes to when they closed -- we waited literally till the last minute to find out if there was any new information available to us to make this decision. Finally -- we found out that the grain glass for the camera was for a Super 35mm camera -- whereas we're shooting on 35mm. What that translates to is -- our framing guidelines were incorrect for the entire 1 1/2 days that we had shot so far. So everything was framed wrong, and that explained why things were cut off on the left side. (I would need to draw a diagram to be able to explain exactly what the 35/super35 difference means, but my blogging skills are severly limited -- and I just don't have the time).

The 80 person crew sat around for the next 2 hours, as they waited for the correct grain glass to be delivered to set (rush hour in Central London). Myself and our producer Arun sat in the office, wondering what this would cost us if everything had to be re-shot -- was this even possible given all the logistical constraints? Only until Jag arrived into the office after we wrapped our shoot, a few hours later, and watched all the rushes, were we able to assess what damage had been done. Lucky for us, it wasn't detrimental -- only about 4 shots needed to be retaken. Tomorrow we will watch today's rushes, and again assess what will need to be re-shot.

Amidst all this chaos, my friend Shaun came to visit me at the office. I think I barely spoke a couple of sentences with him ... he understood though and happily used our free internet and left.

So that was day 2 of 42!

D-Day

Tomorrow we begin our 7 week, 42 day shoot. The last two weeks leading upto this day have been absolute madness. In any given day, there are 20 absolutely urgent issues that need to be solved/taken care of at the same time -- you start concentrating on one, and you forget the others -- only to get an urget phone call/email from the person waiting on the other end for the answer to their query.

All our crew arrived this evening, along with our lead actor, Naseeruddin Shah.

******* And then I never completed this post *******