Saturday, May 17, 2008

The night safari!!!

Working in the gaming industry we all had a common interest “Entertainment”. The office planned a trip to Mukteshwar for the whole gaming unit. The desire to make this trip a memorable one the five of us got down to plan what seemed like a prank at that time but turned out to be a stepping stone to something which might blossom into a full fledged career.

We thought about renting a camera and make a script based on ghost in order to scare everyone. I was not involved a lot in the beginning due to work pressures and hence Shrey and Vikas worked on the script and came out with a draft. We then got together and finalized it and developed the screenplay and dialogues. Then it was time for action. No one else apart from the five of us knew about the script. We rented a sony PD camera. We took some shots with everyone as a part of the script but then had to wait till everyone goes to sleep since the majority of the shots had to taken in the night.

One everyone called it a day and went to sleep by around 1 am, we started our work. We had to shoot a lot of shots in the tent. We used lanterns to create the eerie lighting effects. We had to take some outdoor shots in the night but since we did not have any preparation for lighting we could not do it. We then decided to rest a bit and continue shooting early in the morning. We shot the rest of the scenes in the morning and later edited the shots to give it a night effect. This was our first project and was a very casual one so we did not realize that we had a lot of open sky in the morning shots and later on it was difficult to darken the shots to give it a night effect.

Once back from the trip we captured the cassettes and started work on the editing. Most of the work was done by Vikas and Shrey as they were more experience in post production. Khushpal, Vijay and I also were there to provide support. Finally, it was time for the show. We displayed our effort in front of our office on the projector. We were happy to see the overwhelming response by our colleagues. Our team was surprised as they did not have any idea about the script. It was very encouraging and we started thinking about the next script.
You can view "The night safari" at

No comments: