Slumdog what?
The first question people generally ask when we tell people we’re making a film about the Indian Women’s National Boxing Team is: “So, what did you think of Slumdog?”
Luckily, my co-director Ameesha’s invaluable networking skills usually save the day. She quickly steers the conversation over to our film, which she happily discusses with any interested parties.
These days, we’re in the thick of transcribing and logging our material. Basically, we hunker down in front of the TV with whatever borrowed equipment we can scavenge and proceed tape by tape, noting what happens during each and every second of our 140+ hours of footage.
After finishing roughly 90 tapes so far, we have a system down pat. Ameesha calls out the timecode (”6 minutes 42 seconds!”) and anything notable about the shot (”It’s a wide shot. It’s shaky! Anna, you cut off her hands! Gets better at 6:56 when you turn off the neutral density filter…” etc.) and I furiously type it all out on my laptop.
Since we’re making a dub of the tape simultaneously, there’s no pausing and no going back. It also forces us to do in real time, otherwise 140 hours to transcribe could easily turn into 280 hours. We have to take breaks every two tapes or so, otherwise we run the risk of going crazy. (Plus, Ameesha is constantly hungry… what?)
When it’s a particularly beautiful day, we allow ourselves at least 20 minutes of lazing about on the balcony before trudging back in for another round. Oh, the life of an artist.
In our note taking, we borrow heavily from existing film terms, like CU for closeup and XLS for extreme long shot. But we’ve also developed our own short hand:
Repo: The camera is repositioning and the shot is unusable.
Magic: Something memorable happens. It’s a keeper!
Sucks: Self-explanatory. We always joke about my “shoddy camera work.”
Black screen: I’ve forgotten that I’m recording and the camera is pointed at the ground or some unsuspecting person’s butt. Ironically, it’s always a relief when this happens because we get to take a little breather.
Now that we’re all set up with a decent editing station (iMac, I love you) and software (thanks Eddie), we’ll be uploading short teasers based on what we’ve captured so far. Below is a link to the first one, shot in Mumbai in June 2008. There isn’t much boxing to be seen, this is just to set the stage for the “magic” to come. For the record, I haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire, partly out of spite. Ameesha, on the other hand, did see it and said it “sucks.” Haha.
Here’s our first sneak peek:
http://www.vimeo.com/6333149 Category : Blogroll
