Both India days are shot, we're heading to Mumbai today, staying for B-reel footage, and then doing a three-step jump to Guillan, China.
I'm finally getting used to India. I definitely had a case of culture shock the first day or so in Pune, the traffic thing just made me feel really unsafe, like we were constantly on the brink of killing someone or getting crushed ourselves. The city sort of has a hive mind or awareness, like a flock of birds changing direction, and as long as you go with the flow (and honk incessantly) you can avoid meeting whatever god(s) you believe in.
That's another thing here. Freedom of religion. Paintings on cars, privately owned city buses, statues, walls, a lot of them have religious markings. Catholicism from the British, Islam from the Arabs, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, it's all here and out and proud. Canada has legal freedom, but these guys are the ones with true social freedom. There's a general understanding that it's okay to like different gods, and for the most part everyone gets along. If you want to build a giant Ganesh on the corner of your street, go for it! It can sit beside the virgin Mary statue, and nobody's going to complain and get it torn down because it conflicts with their beliefs. This area of the world has figured out millennia ago how to work together despite differences, and out of it came the cradle of life. Amazing.
For the most part, time's been going pretty slowly. It's a lot of effort just to get basic things done, like eating breakfast. Never eggs and toast, it's veg or non-veg, masala or rice with peas, tofu chunks, dark green goo, and a heap of hot peppers. It isn't "plug the address of the location into your GPS", it's "let's stop five different times and ask for directions because only the main streets have names". Meh, live and let live. Patience isn't just a virtue here, it's the key to keeping your mental health.
A quick run-down of the shoot days:
Day One - started off in sort of a walled city square, a temple in the middle and a ring of small stone rooms that pass for housing on the outside. Whipped the camera packages into shape, got our two camera departments working together, trained the camera assistants to follow a workflow through not much more than hand signals. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Decided to shoot handheld out of a rickshaw, followed in a chase vehicle for a bit through mid-day traffic. Got to our next location, the marketplace. We were a bit ahead of time, so the white guys wanted to shop. They tried to convince me to come along and finish my work once we got back, but I knew better and stayed behind. Good thing too, because as soon as they left, our Indian "B" camera unit landed and started shooting on top of a parking structure. LOTS of shooting. Still working inside the chase vehicle, just running on my own laptop battery, watching it slowly fade, cutting away non-essentials like screen brightness, extra programs, to make it last longer. White guys come back and start shooting in the market. Now I have LOTS of data coming in, one from five stories above me, the other is across a very chaotic, busy street that wouldn't even notice if they ran me over. The pollution is starting to make my eyes water, makes it really hard to run up five flights of stairs and back for that stupid roof camera. Still no power. I start getting serious with the Indian production people, insisting that they get me power. They offer up a hotel three blocks away, but that's much too far for my purposes. Running on fumes, plugged into the battery backup and turned it on, get 15 minutes of emergency power from that and it dies. SPLIT SCREEN Meanwhile, a crowd is growing in the streets. They are Arab and they are angry. A full bus of Indian riot police show up, file out of a bus, and spread out across the square, taking up points on corners of buildings, entrances and exits, control points in the crowd, very systematic. The sun goes down. Shooting stops. We throw everything into our cars and GET OUT OF THERE.
Day Two - set up in a little mini village set up beside a medical training facility for the support staff to live in. Shoot kids playing cricket. Camera guys know me and I've got them trained, so things go great. Relocate to a school for our last location. Set up, light, go to lunch. Eat with the camera crew, trade emails and job stories just like we do back home. Shoot kids training to box in the school, shoot in a makeshift boxing ring on their playground/sports field, and that's a wrap on India. Sort of. Much more small impromptu stuff to come from everybody's personal cameras that we'll use for filler, but "principal photography" as they call it, is done.
Tonight, we eat, we plan, we sleep. Here's some pictures.
B
I'm finally getting used to India. I definitely had a case of culture shock the first day or so in Pune, the traffic thing just made me feel really unsafe, like we were constantly on the brink of killing someone or getting crushed ourselves. The city sort of has a hive mind or awareness, like a flock of birds changing direction, and as long as you go with the flow (and honk incessantly) you can avoid meeting whatever god(s) you believe in.
That's another thing here. Freedom of religion. Paintings on cars, privately owned city buses, statues, walls, a lot of them have religious markings. Catholicism from the British, Islam from the Arabs, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, it's all here and out and proud. Canada has legal freedom, but these guys are the ones with true social freedom. There's a general understanding that it's okay to like different gods, and for the most part everyone gets along. If you want to build a giant Ganesh on the corner of your street, go for it! It can sit beside the virgin Mary statue, and nobody's going to complain and get it torn down because it conflicts with their beliefs. This area of the world has figured out millennia ago how to work together despite differences, and out of it came the cradle of life. Amazing.
For the most part, time's been going pretty slowly. It's a lot of effort just to get basic things done, like eating breakfast. Never eggs and toast, it's veg or non-veg, masala or rice with peas, tofu chunks, dark green goo, and a heap of hot peppers. It isn't "plug the address of the location into your GPS", it's "let's stop five different times and ask for directions because only the main streets have names". Meh, live and let live. Patience isn't just a virtue here, it's the key to keeping your mental health.
A quick run-down of the shoot days:
Day One - started off in sort of a walled city square, a temple in the middle and a ring of small stone rooms that pass for housing on the outside. Whipped the camera packages into shape, got our two camera departments working together, trained the camera assistants to follow a workflow through not much more than hand signals. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Decided to shoot handheld out of a rickshaw, followed in a chase vehicle for a bit through mid-day traffic. Got to our next location, the marketplace. We were a bit ahead of time, so the white guys wanted to shop. They tried to convince me to come along and finish my work once we got back, but I knew better and stayed behind. Good thing too, because as soon as they left, our Indian "B" camera unit landed and started shooting on top of a parking structure. LOTS of shooting. Still working inside the chase vehicle, just running on my own laptop battery, watching it slowly fade, cutting away non-essentials like screen brightness, extra programs, to make it last longer. White guys come back and start shooting in the market. Now I have LOTS of data coming in, one from five stories above me, the other is across a very chaotic, busy street that wouldn't even notice if they ran me over. The pollution is starting to make my eyes water, makes it really hard to run up five flights of stairs and back for that stupid roof camera. Still no power. I start getting serious with the Indian production people, insisting that they get me power. They offer up a hotel three blocks away, but that's much too far for my purposes. Running on fumes, plugged into the battery backup and turned it on, get 15 minutes of emergency power from that and it dies. SPLIT SCREEN Meanwhile, a crowd is growing in the streets. They are Arab and they are angry. A full bus of Indian riot police show up, file out of a bus, and spread out across the square, taking up points on corners of buildings, entrances and exits, control points in the crowd, very systematic. The sun goes down. Shooting stops. We throw everything into our cars and GET OUT OF THERE.
Day Two - set up in a little mini village set up beside a medical training facility for the support staff to live in. Shoot kids playing cricket. Camera guys know me and I've got them trained, so things go great. Relocate to a school for our last location. Set up, light, go to lunch. Eat with the camera crew, trade emails and job stories just like we do back home. Shoot kids training to box in the school, shoot in a makeshift boxing ring on their playground/sports field, and that's a wrap on India. Sort of. Much more small impromptu stuff to come from everybody's personal cameras that we'll use for filler, but "principal photography" as they call it, is done.
Tonight, we eat, we plan, we sleep. Here's some pictures.
B
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