By Ashish Varghese

My aspiration to be connected with the Film Industry began when I was about thirteen years old, when my father got me to the set of his Marathi Feature film – Jagavegli Paiz. It was just beautiful. I always had my family telling me that I would be an actor because that was the trend those days. It took me ten years after that to realize that I actually liked telling stories – my way.

I had no money to support any formal education, hence I worked with semi-professionals to learn the basics, and shot three short films – Channel 3 , Cheesecake & Free as the Wind, which never made it to my reel. Though all the films had a good story, it lacked craft & experience. The three films definitely added to my experience and made me an aspiring, enthusiastic director. I was the AD for the Dubai stint of the film, Happy New Year. This set a bench mark for my next films. On the last three days of shoot for Happy New Year which happened in Mumbai, I directed my first official short film, ARAMGHAR, under the banner of my production house, SEAFACE Films. The film had three days of prep, and Mumbai being the hub made it easy to put things together. Though not entirely satisfied with the turnaround, the film got a great response from the audience. It is currently distributed by Pocket Films. After that, it was just obvious that I had to up my game, and hence came along the short, L’attente – The Wait.

The writing of L’attente started with an emotion of long lost love. The hope that every person goes through after a breakup – hope she or he still loves me. It took me five days to write the first draft. I then collaborated with my co-writer and critic Swapna Kurup to finalize the script in two months. We went back and forth with the two characters, and even changed their attitude towards each other until we nailed them once our key characters were cast.

Arjun Raman was a immediate pick. I knew people would like him even if he was rude. For the role of Dev, we went through a lot of screen tests in Dubai until we locked Mohammed Ali. It took us time because Ali was not the age he was about to play, but he definitely was the voice and talent. Both the actors Mohammed Ali and Arjun Raman have been part of the commercial scene in Dubai, and there was no doubt that we had the right cast.

We met in Ali’s office, The Kreative Company, for two months on weekends to rehearse the lines. It helped us change and improvise dialogues that best suited both the actors. We now had the creative team in place, and it was time to put the remaining core team together and schedule the shoot.

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Our shoot schedule was completely dependent on the dates of the location. This was the biggest challenge as we approached a lot of cafés to help us with space to shoot. The keyword was – Free of Cost. After a lot of rejections, we got a positive email response from BALANCE CAFÉ, from the manager Michelle Callaghan. She understood exactly what we were doing and how we wanted to do it. She extended us her full support, with the agreement that the days of the recce and the shoot the crew would order food from her restaurant.

Action Filmz helped with their gear free of charge, but we paid a minimal wage to the crew who were managing the gear. We chose the 5D Mark 2 with an amazing DOP from Polland, Daniel Tudano, who was assisted by Samier Ali. The framing and the look just got better with Daniel on board.

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We shot for two days for 12 hours, each spread over 20 days due to our busy schedules. The first day was extremely slow as we all were synchronizing as a crew, but this was expected. The second day went as planned and we bagged all our shots. I had an offline edit as well for the second day due to the long break, which helped us account for any shots that we hadn’t considered. The key things as a director I missed on the shoot days was a good first AD, sound artist, art director and a continuity supervisor. The waiter we casted, Cris Mejia, doubled up as a continuity supervisor, and she was amazing at it, but again we only had her for Day 1 of the shoot.

The offline edit came along very prompt as I was doing it, but the validation that it was the right edit for the film came over after one month of the shoot. One of the key reasons why a director should not be the editor – the director is not willing to sacrifice any of his shots, and makes sure all make it to the edit. After a lot of rounds and revisions, and our critic approval, we proceeded to online the film with RGB Art Production.

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One of the keys to the success of the film was the music, which was composed by a Vietnamese Talent named Jay Bach. The inspiration for the music was Thomas Newman from Revolutionary Road. This is what we achieved for the film. Our biggest challenge was to compose the music as one breath for the climax, and it was definitely poetic. For the opening of the film, we originally wanted the song “Chanson Triste” from Carla Bruni. We sent out a lot of emails and tried reaching out to her, but were unsuccessful. As we were coming to the end of the online edit, we had to get the Audio Mix in place. Through a couple of contacts and their friends in France, we came across an upcoming talent, Clarisse Dubois, who proposed the Song “You”. The song was written for a girl singing for her lost love. We asked Clarisse to change it to a man singing for her lost love, made it a bit slower, and that’s we got the lovely track you now hear in the film.

The SFX, ambient and audio cleaning was done by Mangojam Studios. The clock ticking at the beginning of the film was a creation of the audio engineer, which insinuated the name of the film L’attente – The wait. The budget spent for the film was US$ 3300 v/s US$ 30,000 which would have been the cost if every talent had to be paid the right price.

We finally mastered the file after 18 months since the initial ideation. This would have been faster if we had a post-production Producer on board. Eventually our aim was to make the film perfect and worthwhile, as all the crew involved has either compromised on their fees or not taken them at all. All had just one goal: that was to make a film that we all were proud for years to come.

The film was submitted to a number of film festivals and eventually won awards as well. Now we are on the lookout again — for different subjects with all the support and expertise available to put together a good short film. “The Wait” is on again.