Shooting in India was an all consuming exhilarating experience, but not without its challenges. The first things you notice are the heat, the golden light and the smell of a vast city, all of which bowl you over in very different ways. Our intention was to shoot most of the video in inner city Mumbai but the insane traffic put a stop to that idea so we had to search further out. We were granted quite incredible access to a suburb about 2 hours drive from central Mumbai in a region called Uran. Through the family ties of the production manager we were able to shoot in some stunning locations that included peoples homes, fishing ports, piers, cremation sites and vast empty beaches. What’s great about shooting in this part of India is that you can literally turn up somewhere and with the right manner and approach shoot a little scene, right there and then on the fly, that you hadn’t originally prepared for. Quite a few telling scenes in the video were shot in this way. We shot handheld using available light which Ben Fordesman (DoP) relished. 90% of what’s made the final cut is naturally lit.
Casting was a similarly completed in a mad dash manner. We did a mixture of street casting and using the network of contacts that our amazing service company, OML, had to hand. There’s always an element of luck in casting, and we definitely lucked out, to the point where we cast the young boy at 11pm the night before we shot his story, as the original cast boy had been hospitalised that very evening. Similar situations like this were thrown in our way daily yet somehow we managed to hurdle them all to end up with this video of which we’re all immensely proud.
