No Smoking on Sets Part 3
Its 12:00 am in the morning. The wrap up was supposed to be at 9:00 pm. John is giving a shot, suddenly gets aggravated and goes,” Don’t you know how to clap.” He walks off the shot and tells Anurag,” You know I got into an accident, my knees are paining. What is that guy doing?” The clap AD is Sunil. He is in a state of shock. Can not believe what has happened. He follows John and politely apologizes. John is furious and goes,” How difficult is it to clap? Let me show you how you clap.” Takes the clap from Sunil’s hand and claps it in front of his face. Sunil is almost in tears. The next moment John hugs Sunil. Everyone bursts into laughter. Everybody, who knew the plan was finding it difficult to control the laughter. Anurag had his face covered with his hand and was laughing. The incident was recorded on a HDV camera and would be part of making of No Smoking DVD! Well who could have planned it other than Anurag! It kind of gives you an idea how much fun is going on the sets.
Earlier in the morning Anurag had taken a very difficult single shot using steadycam. It involved 6-7 actors including John. The scene needed to cover precise movements of the actor with perfect timing to be okay. Finally after six lengthy takes and spending 6 hours the shot was okayed. That delayed the schedule. It was a spectacular shot and is one of the highlights of the film.
Later in the day a probe lense was used to get the view from the eye-piece on K’s house door. Film is such a deceptive medium that the shot was taken by fixing just the eyepiece on the probe lense without the door. The shot taken looked visually stunning. Everyone was excited and was Okayed. Suddenly cinematographer Rajeev Ravi jumped out laughing,” guys the shot needs to be retaken.” But why? Coz reflection of the camera was seen on John’s glasses? The eyepiece was then put in the door and the shot retaken, which looked even better!
The next working day started at 9:00 am at Film City. A replica of John’s bedroom was created. The background behind the windows was covered with green screens for the computer graphics (CG) effect. For those of who don’t know: In the post production work. The green or blue space on the frame is captured by the CG softwares like ‘Smoke’, ‘Maya’ etc and replaced by required visuals/animations making the unreal possible! After the lunch break the unit moved to worli location.
With a day left to shoot at this location the schedule was extended from 9 to 5 instead of 9 to 9. The shoot has to resume 2:00 pm the next day. It gives you an idea how of much of hard work is involved in the show business.
Its even hard for the actors .John had to shoot 9:30 am for the other film and attend the promotion campaign of his next big film ‘Babul’ today. Offcourse complete tons of remaining scenes of the worli location today, as it’s the last day that the expensive location is available. The shoot will atleast go on till 5:00 am today. I am very impressed by John as a person, which is reflected in his talks. He said,” I thank God for keeping me busy.” Remembering God, when you are doing great just shows the kind of person John is!
Some great pictures coming very soon!
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
Manjeet: Thanks for first hand accounting of happenings at the set of No Smoking.
a lively attractive and fantastic reportage.
Thanks Anurag and Oz also to arrange this event:)
Manjeet I’m getting more and more jealous as you continue posting updates …. grrrr ….
Hey thought filmy shooting was like “All work and no play” :o
good to see such pranks being pulled up !!!
And manjeet better beware, Anurag may pull your leg on the sets some day … :-?
Keep the articles coming dude … Me loving them
Thanks Manjeet. And am I dreaming. I just saw your part 4. And cannot see it now. The reason the images cannot be seen is because the thumbnails have been put in the wrong place I think.
Thanks guys for your appreciation
I am loading more pics right now. Its kind a difficult to figure out how to load the pics in individual article. Last time I saved it and OZ published it. I think he will be online soon and publish the saved pictures.
Keep tuned!
Hey Manjeet,
your commercial brake is stretched tooooo long.
pls upload photos asap.
waiting to see your pictographical reportage:)
This Sify connection sucks takes so much time to load a pic :((
Manjeet!!! I couldnt believe what I was reading, bout John throwing attitude on the sets. I just couldnt believe it. Believe me. But I believe “All Work and No Play” makes John a Dull boy. Truly an Amazing Guy.. Not you Manjeet… All the best… for the coming articles and contribution to PFC from guys like OZ, Anurag, Kartik and others. Hope can contribute to it some day…
envious and loving it :D oye gooddu job manjeetey! sadde PFC di shaan badaaye ja!
- Oye Manjeetey, excellent coverage
>- Loved your comments all through while you covered the visit to the sets. – Would loved to have seen some pictures of John pulling Sunil’s leg and the look on Sunil’s face. Quick turn around and click the look of Anurag laughing out. That would have been awesome… but for now your words were enough to create that prank scenario in our heads.
About the behind the scenes for the DVD, ask Anurag to also put forth his images or initial drafts of K and some characters and how they transformed into the final version… also Anurag should show us some of his paintings. Also a behind the scenes capture of how Rajeev Ravi works and into his mind would be quite a trip…
I had read a few years ago that a blue screen is used for video and green for cinema… is it now green screens everywhere or did I get it wrong in the first place?
I do not think the color screen matter that much. The CG software should be able to pick green or blue with equal ease. Any CG experts reading this please confirm.
Both blue and green screens are used. In fact OZ, blue is almost never used in video anymore. It’s usually only green because video cameras are highly sensitive to green channel signals. They have the highest resolution. Therefore, chroma key extracting becomes a lot easier and faster with green. Speed is of huge concern in the video world, which is why green is used a lot there. News broadcasts etc can get away with a little green spilling over the image. But video reads green better than blue. In film you cannot get away with spillage, and that is where blue screen comes in.
Blue is used a lot more in film because it is not a part of flesh tone. Rather, I would say, flesh tone contains a lot less blue than of green or any other color. Often, the spillage of green onto subjects you are photographing looks a lot worse than spillage of blue. There is no excuse for spillage, but you can get away with some on blue screen.
At the end of the day, whether you use blue or green, what is most important is how you light your subject. If you don’t light correctly to avoid spillage, you will go through hell when you are actually extracting the chroma. The easy way out is to light your subjects dead flat, but that’s not really dramatic. It’s a skill that is not easy to perfect. You need a great gaffer for such shoots.
Hey Anurag,was reading your blog,all sounds very interesting,super to see good talent come online and express themselves,lots of luck with the film..