.png)
Moving Movie: Color Blind
Indus Creations (IC) is an Indian theater group based in Seattle founded in 2005. In December their members made their first short film - Color Blind. Goonj talks to the group to understand the hows, whats and whys behind the movie making process
 |
| Pradeep Ganapathyraj |
Goonj: So how did the idea for making a movie take shape?
IC: We are an Indian theater group based in Seattle. We have been staging plays for the past 7 years (www.induscreations.org). It had always been our dream to tinker with films – and we had tried our hand at making trailers to promote our plays. So this was a natural progression…
Goonj: What did it take to make Color Blind? As in… what kind of preparation was involved?
IC: Some of the core Indus members – like Pradeep, Arjun – started volunteering for film productions in and around the Seattle area. Pradeep also attended a Film Making Workshop offered at the University of Washington – this opened up a window into what film making actually was and made a lot of abstract concepts more real. The next step was using all this exposure to create something on our own – exciting! And Pradeep was ready to drive this effort.
Goonj: Was there a filmmaking philosophy is place?
IC: The objective of the Short Film was clear – to learn as much as possible and release something tangible. Pradeep had a few principles – most of the film would happen outdoors (to prevent the sometimes static nature of short films), no live sounds (too complex for our first attempt) and we will leverage local talent (hiring paid talent did not fit our budget). We made a number of storyboards – these weren’t fancy – just text and pictures in Microsoft Word.
Goonj: How did you decide on the story?
IC: We considered a bunch of different stories. But ultimately decided on the story involving the attacks on Indian Students in Australia. A couple of reasons. One, definitely the acuteness of the situation that we wanted to highlight and the fact that we wanted to talk about both sides of the coin. From a filmmaking perspective, this was one of our tightest plots (of all the ones that we had come up with). Also, there was a lot of media and public attention and concern around these incidents.
Goonj: Where did you find your team?
IC: We started putting together our team based on people we knew, people we found through distribution groups and organizations like Pratidhwani. It is so true that if you start out with a strong idea, energy and commitment – you get equally enthusiastic people to support you!
Goonj: Could you describe the filming process?
IC: Once we had finalized the story, we came up with the dialogs, camera angles, locations etc. – this was the most interesting part, since it was very different from conceptualizing plays. Since most of our scenes were outdoors, we had to get permission for filming. One of our scenes needed people to come out of a stadium; we had to synchronize our filming with a local game. All this scheduling was critical. We filmed for 2 days – and it was so much fun! A few of the crew members had done films before – and everyone pitched in with ideas and suggestions as we faced one real-life obstacle after another. With all that film in hand – post production was the next challenge.
Goonj: Was post-processing easy?
IC: Oh no! Video editing, captioning, voice dubbing, adding background sounds were all amazing exercises and very time intensive as well. After a few more months – this work was complete. So, approximately 4 months of pre-production, 2 days of filming and 2 months of post-production later – on Dec 26 our short film ‘Color Blind’ was ready for everyone to see. We knew this was our first attempt and a number of things can be improved – but we were ecstatic! It was a memorable day for Indus Creations – the day we released our first short film.
