How did it start…
It was a casual, unusually warm evening in St. Louis. We were sitting at the back yard enjoying the evening and sipping beers when the idea of making a short film was born. We had previously produced plays but the idea of making a short film always seemed farfetched. But Wish was born when the lack of awareness and kindness towards the LGBTQ community. We felt the need to make people aware in the smallest way we can.
Once the decision to take the leap was final, we had to think about the logistics. I mean we absolutely had nothing to go ahead with. We just had two DSLR cameras and we soon realized to make a short film, a hell lot of more was needed. To begin with we needed lights, microphones, editing software. We had zero budget and so we went ahead and bought two lights from the Home Depot and taped it with frosted shower liner to give the effect. Bought some cheap mics from Amazon. Installed the 30 day free version of Final Cut Pro. By the way, we still use those lights.
Total budget for the film was less than $500 and most of it was spent on food! This was funded by all the team members
This being a very sensitive topic, our next challenge was finding the right cast. Since none of us are professional actors, this required a lot of work on the actors’ part to do justice to the characters. We were really lucky that Sudhir Saha agreed to take up the challenge of playing the protagonist, Nikhil. Honestly, he worked really hard and pushed himself to a great extent and did a tremendously good job. Well, the fact that he had bagged the best actor award in the Indie Shorts Film festival, speaks about his talent and hard work.
We did not know how to create rain artificially when we were making this short. So we had to rely on the weather to get a shot of Nikhil staring outside through the window on a rainy gloomy morning. We did not have a way to create the effect of the flames, so we used a paper to cover and open our cheap home depot lights to give that effect. We had to shoot and reshoot some scenes because we did not have a monitor to see how the shots came out.
Wish won three awards: Honorable Mention at Indie Short Fest, Award Nomination (Best LGBTQ short) at IndieX Film Fest and Official Selection at Indie Short Fest
It was all a trial and error method. The process of making this film was a learning experience. We learned how different it was from a play production. The script had to be crisp yet detailed. We learned how a character could say a thousand words by just speaking a few words. We learned how the camera captures every small movement of your eye and the twitch of your facial muscle. We learned how important it is to maintain the continuity of a film, hence small details had to be taken into account.
Once all the shots were taken, our next big challenge was editing the shots and telling the successful story. We realized that the story telling actually happens through successful editing.
Wish gave us the validation that a team with no prior knowledge of filmmaking can actually produce a film and get recognized
What kept us going despite all the challenges we faced was the cause of the film and our will and drive to create something. For the sake of creativity we were willing to go as many miles as we had to, and spend as many sleepless nights as needed. But at the end it all paid off. We did not expect laurels or recognition in film festivals. That was an add on. But we touched many lives, people shared our movie with friends and our work gave at least some people the courage to accept themselves as they are. That was our real success. That is our inspiration to grow and make more movies. Tell more stories.