BENGALURU: The lockdown has been tough on all, and every individual has a story to tell. Oh Fish, a short movie that was released on Friday on YouTube, brings together one such lockdown story of a couple falling in love amidst the novel crisis. The movie stars Sandalwood actor Dheekshith Shetty and Vainidhi Jagdish.
Vidhyaa B Reddy, the director the movie, says she wanted the movie to focus on the positive side of the lockdown. “During the situation, there was nothing happening in the creative workspace. There was no place to shoot. And even if many of the works were in post-production, there was no place to release them. But there are so many positive stories we hear about ever day and I wanted to speak about that,” says Reddy, who started her career with Mani Ratnam’s production house Madras Talkies, where she worked as an associate director with Ratnam in the Tamil movie Five Star.
Though Reddy calls her new project a ‘happy movie’, bringing it to life was not easy as the team had no proper location to shoot and the crew collaborated from different cities like Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. “While the movie was shot at my place, the cinematographer had to direct the whole movie on Zoom and the set designer guided us from Kolkata,” says Reddy, who started shooting the movie in June. While the shoot took three days, post-production took around two months.
“I could not send the raw footage to the editor in Mumbai since there was no courier service. I had to send 700-800 GB footage online, which took a lot of time,” says 38-year-old Reddy, who is the founder of Kettle Production. Shetty, whose last movie Dia was a huge hit, said he loved the script from the beginning. “The feel good concept appealed to me.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to work in such a unique manner with Vidhyaa and her team,” says Shetty. Jagadish, who plays the female lead in the movie, was also hooked to the story from the first narration. “It was a new experience for me and I got to work with some of the best names in the industry. Despite the lockdown, the entire crew made it work across cities. This just might be the way we work in the new normal,” says the daughter of yesteryear actor Jai Jagadish and Vijayalakshmi Singh.