BENGALURU: A team of techies-turned-filmmakers from Bengaluru won bronze in the India Film Project’s flagship competition 50-hour filmmaking challenge for their film Dispatched. The team was in Mumbai over the weekend to receive the honour.
The 50-hour challenge begins once the subject is announced on the official website. The theme ‘Everything is connected’ was given at 8pm on September 15. The team shot the film on September 16, from 11am to 11pm, took a break for 2 hours, edited it and submitted it on September 17, just a few minutes before the deadline.
Brimming with excitement, Hasa Samudrala, the director and the editor of the film, says, “As soon as the theme was given to us – Everything is connected — we decided on the actors and then started working on the script. This, we believe, saved a lot of time for us. After shooting, I immediately started editing while Shiva Kumar, our cinematographer, started doing the colour correction. Two others were in the studio to create music for the film. Everything was happening simultaneously and we had to forgo sleep for two days.”
Hasa is an MBA graduate and has worked with many startups. He has directed several short films before. Pranav Chimulkar, the producer and music director of the film, says that every crewmember had to take up additional responsibility during production. “Creating music was an equally challenging task. Though we were allowed to use royalty-free music from the Internet, we decide to make our own, and we had chosen the adventure genre,” he says.
The total cost of the movie was `12,000 and most of the shooting was done in and around HSR Layout. They decided to shoot with the props immediately available with them. Pranav recalls a funny situation, “The bar scene in the film was the most important scene. Since it was a weekend, none of the restaurants were available. That’s when we found a Khanavali (vegetarian restaurant) nearby, which was closing soon. We quickly modified it and that’s where shot the bar scene,” he says.
“I was narrated the screenplay only on the day of the shooting. It was challenging and I really enjoyed working with the team,” says Rakesh Maiya, the lead actor. Pranav is the co-founder of denture Capital, which makes videos for startups. The six-minute short film is about a courier delivery boy’s Valentine’s Day.
29,000 contestants from 18 countries
Termed as Asia’s largest filmmaking challenge, the competition sees participation from across the globe. The contestants have to script, shoot, edit and submit the film on a given theme in a short duration of just 50 hours. There were three categories – Professional, Amature and Mobile. Bengaluru team won Bronze in the professional category. Around 29,200 filmmakers from 18 countries participated in the event.