STEPWELL SEQUENCE
One of the other unexpected part of the shoot was INSECTS! In the thousands, of all sizes suggesting a Hitchcock thriller during the night shoots. Some of them leaving huge blisters on the poor lightmen and also causing headaches to our cinematographer (Nutty – Nataraja Subramanium). So some of the sequences which were initially supposed to be night sequences were shot as ‘Day for Night’. One such sequence was the stepwell sequences with hundreds of extras (actual villagers from devigarh) and some camels for good measure, who were facing a camera for the first time in life and a really complex jimmy jib shot starting from the surface of the well with shimmering reflection of lamps to the crowd and finally revealing the last stages of the eclipse juxtaposed with the fort. And as we had got used to by this time, there was no time to take safety shots. A Dark Deed done in the darkness of the eclipse night …. at 4 o’clock in the afternoon!
To
start with, this shot required choreographing the reveal of the moon and styling
the shot to make it work seamlessly with the rest of the film. Once that was done
of course, it was down to the grindstone cutting intricate separate moving mattes
for foreground and background characters, for the trees, the fort and removal
of wires that were crisscrossing across the frame in this complex camera move.
