In previous blog I have told you about how we successfully accomplished our 2nd day of our shoot. Now today I will tell you details about our Day 3 shoot of short film Payback, this is the day when we shot the most challenging scenes of the film.

Day 3 was shot on the immediate next weekend. We shot it on Saturday.

Day 3's shoot involved :

"Ankur" - the male lead character. (the same person who was in Day1)

"Kamalika" - the female lead character.

"Jaydeep" - yes myself..a small role.  

 

Day 3's shoot was primarily divided into 2 locations.

1st location was at Prinsep Ghat and 2nd location was at Park Street.

Shots in Prinsep Ghat were again subdivided into 2 parts one on land where we see Ankur frustrated and agitated sitting on a pavement and other we show Ankur in a boat alone floating on a river.

Prinsep Ghat in picture below :

Day 3's shoot involved very less dialogues, so in most of the scenes of Day 3 expression was very much important so that we could convey the right emotion to the audience without any dialogues which I feel is very difficult from actor's perspective.

In Day 3, most of the shots we show Ankur as frustrated and agitated wandering across the city. So I planned to give Ankur a slightly different look, so I asked him to keep beards that is not to cut for some days and hairs not combed properly, dressing style not neat.

We planned to start our Day 3 shoot at around 10 AM sharp and we made it this time. The 1st few shots involved only Ankur. I explained the shot to him and after some retakes he gave it well, next few shots went well.

Then came the shot were Ankur and Kamalika both are required, actually in that scene Ankur sees Kamalika and he gets thunderstruck due to a particular reason that when you will see the film will understand. I wanted the shot to be a particular style, thanks to my cinematographer who made it just the way I wanted it to be. After 2 or 3 retakes he made  it perfect and both the actor and actress gave the perfect shot.

Some more shots followed after that and then it was done and next we have to move for the boat scene.

Myself, Ankur and Somsubhra our cinematographer moved onto the boat. In the  boat shots we mainly see Ankur suddenly awakens in a boat in the middle of the river and can't remember how he came up there, then we asks boatman to row the boat to the land, we faced some challenges doing it but got some good shots in the end. 

With the end of this one 1st half of the shoot is done, next shots were planned at open street in ParkStreet and the problem there was traffic and crowd, both was high.

We had a quick lunch as we were running short of time, then we took a cab and moved to PartStreet, a 20 minute drive from there.

As we reached PartStreet we saw the traffic was huge so naturally if we start shooting in that place, a huge crowd will gather which will in turn hamper our shoot, moreover I planned to take the shots as natural as possible so I thought of an alternative.

I planned to shoot in a way so that it seems as if we are doing photography. The approach gave us success in the end.

We started planning for our 1st shot it was a very difficult shot as we planned it to be a continuous shot for around 1 minute and lot of movements was there in the shot, moreover in that shot, I was involved as an actor too, after around 9-10 retakes I finally got the desired shot, it was so annoying, sometimes someone outsider was coming in the frame, sometimes their is a mismatch in co-ordination as I said lot of movement was there in the shot and we required a perfect co-ordination between ourselves.

Below is a snapshot of the shot :

Next shot was another headache, I still remember we were retaking this shot again and again, I don't remember how many times we had done retake on this one. Actually this shot again involved a perfect co-ordination between actor, actress and cinematographer. In this scene Ankur have to chase after Kamalika in the streets and Kamalika at the end disappears around a street corner and our cinematographer had to track them, that is he have to run behind then in the whole shot. Now in every shot someone or the other was getting into the frame in a way which was giving the frame an ugly look. At last we got the perfect one.

Below is a snapshot of the shot :

Next few shots went well.

Then all of a sudden rain started and I was overjoyed as I was hoping for long to shoot the next few scenes in rain, actually the shots involved Ankur searching for Shilpa in the streets where traffic was high so naturally addition of rain will add a little more drama to the shots.

It was not raining so heavily so shooting continued. We got some good shots, then suddenly rain started heavily and we had to go under shelter. We waited for around half an hour, rain slowed down a little then again we started, then we shot some of my favourite time lapses, which gave the film a different flavour. Well the time lapse shot was our last planned shot for the day.

Below is a snapshot from the time lapse :

We all together shouted "Wrap Up.." as we were done with our last shot and we wrapped up for the day.

 

**Details of Day 4 and 5 will be published shortly.