No Smoking on sets Coverage….How it started!
After been on PFC for few weeks, I could feel the minds of other bloggers. I remember the days, when I use to chat on yahoo in Bollywood chat room hoping to find people passionate about cinema. I was able to find just one girl from Delhi on yahoo, who was doing Mass. Comm. We discussed quality film makers such as Sudhir Mishra, Anurag et al. She even had Anurag’s phone#, as he had visited her school. This was more than a year back, when I was in the US thinking of returning to Bombay to pursue my dreams of becoming a film maker! I could not find any online medium where one could discuss cinema. PFC is such a great platform to discuss, learn and know the facts of film making.
Seeing the popularity of Anurag’s blog, I could feel how thirsty people were to know about his film. No doubt it would be a historic film in our film industry. A cult film! I wanted to be on sets to watch Anurag’s approach of directing a film. I shot an email to Rajkumar, the chief AD expressing the same. He could only check his email after I had covered the sets and posted two blogsJ
One fine day it just struck me that there are so many people online like me, who would love been on sets! What if the shooting of the film is covered! It would be a great insight for Anurag’s fan. What would make people feel like they are virtually on the sets? May be lot of photographs, knowing about people working behind the scene and sharing behind the scene atmosphere. The result was an email sent to Oz explaining in detail, how I would like to cover the shoot and how it would be beneficial for PFC, No Smoking and help me learn hands-on film making. I expected Oz would reply right back with excitement. But he did notL Then I left a comment on one of Anurag’s blog, bugging Oz again and also addressing Anurag this time about the same idea. There was still no response. The comment I left was deleted after few minutes. I guess to keep secrecy, while Oz was working on it behind the scene? Anurag could not have read it. Some of you might have during comment’s very short life on PFC. I had given up the idea. I continued blogging on PFC. Next day I checked my email. Oz had written me, asking my phone#. I replied back with my #. Within few minutes Oz called and said Anurag is interested in the idea call him right now. He gave me Anurag’s #. I called Anurag.He did not answer. Then tried again after some time, I got the message that the phone is out of range. I had a feeling that he is very busy, so sent him a SMS message, explaining him the scenario. He replied with a SMS message informing me he is in a meeting and will call soon. I was relaxed that finally its gonna happen! Anurag called but could only talk for few seconds, as he had to go for the short.Then I started waiting for Anurag’s phone call hoping it could come any second. Nothing happened for few hours. My friends called me for a game of CricketJ I played for few hours and came back online to read Rajkumar’s comment on PFC that the long meeting is over now they have an AD meeting. The whole day I was waiting for the call without any results. The next day I waited till afternoon to hear from Anurag. Then I sent him a brief SMS explaining my plan of coverage. I emailed him the details of my plan too. One more day passed by. The very next day, when I checked my email Anurag had left the location with the call time! I was so delighted! Got my camera and note book in a bag and was off for the shoot in a flash!
It would not have been possible without Anurag, Oz, ‘No Smoking’ team and everybody on PFC! We might be the pioneers in covering the shooting of a film online. Who knows it might become a necessity for the film industry in foreseeable future!
Tags: Teaching Film-making, The No Smoking Diary
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
“Knock Knock Knock and Door shall be open to you”
RK bhaiya. I was just thinking, where are you located and howcome you are always online. Most likely the first one to read a new article and leave a comment:)
Kuch apne bare mein batao yaar.
am always online? perhaps because I dont log out from PFC page though I may not having this page on my screen so it must show me as online. Hey yesterday I made my last comment around 11 PM IST in the night and today I joined around 13.30 PM IST in the noon.
Way to go Manjeet…I am happy for you my friend…I hope one day we might all meet and work together.
While you story has started…waiting for mine to start.
…my regards to you.
Best of luck manjeet. Bro, your passion and hardwork are surely going to get you results. Thanks for living a part of my dream.