Final semester. I was looking for a college elective which could further my filmmaking career and help me learn something new. That's when I heard about the Studio Project Elective down at the Industrial Design Center (aka IDC). In a Studio Project, you have to showcase a creative product of your choice. So I hunted down Prof. Mazhar Kamran, who has worked in the Hindi Film Industry, and pitched the idea of a Short Film for a Studio Project. He had one condition for me: I had to take his World Cinema course on classic directors like Eisenstein, Fellini, Rossellini,Truffaut, Godard, Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Kiarostami, etc. We had a deal and that's how "Hello?" was born.

"Hello?" has been the biggest challenge I could give myself. I have been a filmmaker for almost 4 years now. But I've never written a script. I have always been a cinematographer, editor and director. To write a script all by myself from scratch was no mean task. And I spent 4 months writing, revising and re-revising it to perfection. I had written the script keeping in mind a single location and a single actor so as to make my production easier, so that I could focus more on my filmmaking finesse rather than have to worry about scheduling actors and ensuring that the actors come on time and all that management nightmare.

With the script fully ready to go, then came the casting. I needed someone new, but someone good. Someone who was like wet clay, and could be moulded according to the character. That's when I found Vyanktesh Nagre, a freshman who was in the theatre club of IIT Bombay. I approached him, and he was overwhelmed with the offer and jumped aboard immediately. I gave him the script and had him prepare.

With the actor situation out of the way, now came the production design. I had to acquire a telephone and a mug. I went down to the IIT Bombay Telephone Exchange and rummaged through 5 storerooms to find a white telephone. But I wasn't going to settle for white. My roommate, Chaitanya Mandugula, the extremely talented graphic designer offered to spray paint it and paint the mug as well. And boy, did he do a hell of a job. People still have a hard time believing the telephone wasn't originally red!

Now came the hardest part of making this film: The Location. Compromise was a disease I have always suffered from and my New Year Resolution for 2017 was to rid myself of it. Hello? was going to be my cure. And I kept my word. I relentlessly chased down one of the most exclusive and elusive laboratories in Electrical Engineering, the Nanofabrication Laboratories. Finally, I managed to obtain permission to shoot. But there were two more hurdles: 1. I needed a super busy lab to be empty 2. I wasn't allowed to enter the lab without an escort. We jumped over both these hurdles with the help of one towering individual: Aneesh Joseph. He was kind enough to escort us to the lab at 11:30pm, when there was nobody working. It was during the Shoot that I realized the true importance of a script: Efficiency. A shoot can be done efficiently only with a precise script. With only one location and actor, the margin for error minimized even more and we were done in a record time of 3 hours. The voice overs took another extra hour. I still owe Mr. Joseph a beer for his services. 

The shoot was surprisingly very short. I had packed enough munchies for a 7 hour shoot. I shot with my Sony A7Sii armed with a Rokinon 35mm T1.5 US AMC Cine Lens. The settings were Full Frame 4K at 25fps shot on SLog2. I wanted the image flat so I could grade in post (something I wanted to make a habit of). I borrowed a Vanguard gun mount tripod for the stationary scenes. For the on-location sound and dialogues, I used my Rode VideoMic Pro mounted on my A7Sii. Our escort was kind enough to stay out of the frame and help us modify the layout of the lab as per our requirements as long as we promised to stay back after the shoot to put everything back as it were.

The edit was pretty easy as everything I had to do was jotted down in the script and all I had to do was follow it to the T. I used Adobe Premiere Pro CC to go through the film in about a week. I was preoccupied with a lot of other things, so I took my time editing this nicely rather than rushing through it and turning it into a botched job. I used Magic Bullet Looks and Lumetri Color for the Color Grading. Upgrading my laptop's RAM to 16GB was a blessing, the render took a bit over 1.5 hours.

I rushed over to my professor to show him the fruits of my 5 months of labor (the longest I've worked on a single film). He had me add a small scene at the beginning to make the ending a bit more apparent, and once I had done that he said two things which I will never forget:

1. "You have exceeded my expectations by a huge margin."

2. "So you did learn something from my World Cinema course."

To be compared to some of the most respected and influential directors of all the time by whom I consider to be my father figure and mentor was really the most satisfying moment of my entire life. That's when I knew that "Hello?" was a hit.