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Amidst the myriad cacophony of visual media which is hurled at us from the minute we wake up, its very difficult to find a meaningful stretch of frames which makes one pause and ponder. So its a stroke of luck which brought me to this digital short on the Buzz18 site (i was trying to locate another video for a friend of mine).

Iraada didnt blow my mind, but certainly made me smile- the kind of smile you have after having an amazing meal at a dhaba in some no man’s land, which you discovered accidentally. The name of the guy who made it rang a bell, so did the guy on the screen. Fellow PFCites might know him from before.

I thought it might be a better idea to let you hear from the horse’s mouth than rant on myself. So without further a do - i present Iradaa and the D’Silvas, the duo behind it .

But first the Iradaa behind all of this–

(Video Courtesy Buzz18)

And now Elvis D’Silva Speaketh

It was the first day of 2005. We were on holiday in Singapore and we had promised ourselves that we would return with (the raw material for) a short film. I don’t know if this is a unique case of obsession or whether other filmmakers (or creative people in general) are constantly hating themselves when they don’t have an idea for their next project…but I do a pretty good job of beating myself up about stuff like that every single day.

So in keeping with the time hopping nature of my film, let’s start at the beginning - which was some time in 2001 when I decided that I wanted to be more than just a watcher and reviewer of films. I wanted to put my reputation where my mouth was – make a film instead of just criticizing other people’s work. Having said that and being a suburban kid with no connections, I was brutally averse to the idea of ‘assisting’ someone in the hope of learning the ropes. You see, I am a child of the first dot com revolution so I was all about the DIY culture and in need of instant gratification (six years on I’m still one of a million hopefuls waiting to make his feature directorial debut so I guess the joke is on me). I was tutored by the best – Scorsese, Fincher, the Scott brothers, WKW, Welles, Lynch, Tarantino, Rodriguez…you name the director and I learnt from him. I was making animated short films before it was fashionable to claim that one was ‘in animation’ and I took to the digital toolkit for live action film making like a kitten takes to a ball of string.

To this day I haven’t rolled a single frame of celluloid to realise my motion picture dreams and I don’t regret it. Over the years I’ve taught myself how to shoot, edit, play with the colour and do whatever else it takes to avoid betraying the low-res roots of my films. Along the way I’ve gathered a certain amount of hands-on experience that will definitely come in handy whenever a producer decides that it is my turn to try for the brass ring, which brings us back to January 1, 2005
the genesis of Iraadaa…

We had two days to go before life resumed its dreary Mumbai routine and we had no short film and no idea of how to go about making one. We had ditched the script we traveled with so we had zip-a-dee-doo-dah. And then we watched The Sea Inside.

You know the one – about the quadriplegic who decides to die and the stunningly moving way in which the very physical Javier Bardem played the very still character of Ramón Sampedro. So we cried, my wife and I, on that first day of a new year as we watched the movie in the quiet theatre with several other strangers all around us joining in the chorus of sniffles and sobs. When we returned to our room we asked the question, “How can we make a film like that?”

As anyone who has watched Iraadaa will know, our short film is nothing like The Sea Inside except that in both films, a man has decided to die. Sonal came up with the story and we planned on using everything we could, of our surroundings and our experience, to give the film a sense of place and feeling. We shot scenes as we evolved them and here’s a secret no one knew until now – this film was originally shot in English. Between the time we went on holiday and the time this film was finally finished I experienced a change of heart personally.

For the first four or five years of my career as a short filmmaker I wanted to make films in my language, which is English – the uniquely hybrid, seemingly nonsensical mix of Hindi expletives, lazily rolled ‘R’s and inaccurate emphasis on vowels and consonants that most Indians and definitely all Mumbaikars understand. But somewhere along the way, after I watched the first cut, I felt that the film needed to be in Hindi (because it might help the film’s chances at festivals and also convince people that I could direct in the language).
So we re-shot my portions in Mumbai and used the creative freedom provided by the angle at which I’d shot her end of the phone conversation to change the entire language of the movie!

Here are some of the things I wanted to achieve with the film:
• Make a short film that did not feel static or stagnant just because it was an indie effort. Towards this end I cut this film several times (over a couple of years) until it achieved its current lean mean running time of six minutes and nine seconds from start to finish (Among the things that fell by the wayside was a nearly thirty second-long title sequence.) Oh yeah, the film was originally about eight minutes long.
• Stick with a single POV. It always bugs me when I’m watching movies and you see the people who are having a flashback in the actual flashback. Unless all those shots were of the person in a mirror (s)he should not have a memory of themselves in every single memory they had. Which is why when she is standing behind him and having a conversation, you only see the back of his head. Most directors would have caved in at that point and placed the camera behind the computer monitor.
• Use colour coding as a subtle but tangible reminder of what time frame (past or present) the story is in. In Iraadaa the present is green and the past is red. Which also had a philosophical connection to traffic lights but…nevermind. :o)
• Use some of the in-camera effects to the advantage of the story.
Did I achieve my goals? That’s what the comments are for so that you can let me know, one way or the other.

So what, if anything, was the end result of my DIY experiment?
Not much really.

The film played at one festival even though I sent it to about a dozen (at least). We never did figure out why it didn’t appeal to festival programmers (and I guess we never will, unless someone lets fly in the comments…) but it got a very generous response at the Mocha Film Club in Mumbai and on my page at the On The Lot competition, with several people taking the time to tell us personally that the story resonated with them.
It also screened on NDTV Profit’s Indie Film Club where Nikhil Advani was the guest director and the first person ever to tell me that the film reminded him of the work of Wong Kar-Wai. He also said I should be making feature films so Mr. Advani, if you’re reading this, I’d love for you to call me back! :o)
So career wise Iraadaa did little or nothing for me except give me the confidence to know that I can tell an intimate story in an interesting way. I also learnt an immeasurable amount about editing and also a little about reshooting after the fact.
I learnt that it’s important to have a script (or at least some sort of plan).
I learnt that a film truly comes together in the edit (so give your editor enough to work with).
When people get together to make a film instead of just thinking I’m just the scriptwriter or I’m just shooting what the director tells me or I can only cut what’s in the script…that’s when something special comes about. The rest of the time you are just doing a job.
And if a job is what you really want, filmmaking is the worst place to find one. As someone who is pursuing the dream out of sheer passion and not even a glimmer of hope from any of the producers he’s met so far, I think I have the right to say that more than any working feature filmmaker. The people who do this because they want to tell stories, in any way they can – those are the people I respect. Everything else is just a press release.
If you got this far, thank you for reading and good luck in all your filmmaking endeavours. You never know who’s watching.

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