As a DOP Girish was always my first choice.The guy is a genius when it comes to low cost lighting. I had seen him doing wonders with minimal budget.During the pre production Girish and I storyboarded the entire script and spent countless hours looking at these visuals and discussing the options. Good thing about restrictions is that it challenges your grey cells and makes you think innovatively. I loved playing with colors, and that is what we wanted to tease out in the frames. To create that kind of visuals, we really needed to think out of the box. With the budget we had, we could hire only a limited amount of lighting equipment. Therefore before hiring any of the lighting equipment we thought and rethought over and over making sure that it was absolutely needed. First thing Girish and I did was dissect the screenplay again and again to come up with a most viable lighting design. We divided the scenes in 3 categories - scenes that could be shot in natural light, scene that could be shot with minimal lighting, scenes which demanded hiring high end-lighting equipment including generators. While doing this exercise we realized , many of the scenes that were set at night and demanded good amount of lighting cost, could easily be turned into day scenes without affecting the story ,which enabled us to use natural lighting.

Girish spent a lot of time reading and researching on low cost effective lighting. He came up basic lighting kit,which we called the JUGAAD kit,that included couple of 500 watt halogen lights, 100 watt household lights, couple of Chinese lights, some light filters.This JUGAAD kit was invaluable and saved us a lot of lighting cost.  We ended up lending this kit many micro budget film makers who didn’t have budget to hire high end lighting equipment for free.

With most of the money spent on lights we could hardly afford trolleys or cranes. As substitute we used simple tricks ,for example for trolley effect on a on the smooth surface we used a moderately big piece of cloth and placed the tripod on top it .With a slight pull to the cloth ,the tripod moved smoothly to give  a trolley effect  or alternatively we powdered the track that we chalked out for the trolley movement and used the tripod to slide over it. However these tricks were easier said than done. They were extremely difficult to maneuver,but thats what people say practice makes it perfect. For crane shots ,well we didn’t have one :).But for shots that needed to be taken from top we mostly used aluminium ladder. We found many innovative ways of making steady cams on internet,which we used for our advantage.

By the time we finished writing the screenplay we were very confident about the story however we were equally getting nervous about the budget. So far the short films I made were self-funded and within a limited budget, but pulling off a feature in such budget was almost next to impossible. Thinking and rethinking, frantically searching online, talking to people to find out different options that might work out, I had nothing viable. And that’s when it happened, the stroke of inspiration. It was a Friday night, i had just returned home from work, eagerly looking forward for a weekend, when I found Ruban sitting in front of his laptop , his face beaming with a glow which he later he accredited to Hunt for Gollum, a fan made prequel to Lord Of The Rings. A group of passionate amateurs created most astonishing prequel to LOTR almost at par with the world Peter Jackson created, in a shoestring budget. The question was could we pull something like this off?

My dream has always been to gather a team of people who would want to experiment with ideas and would do whatever it takes to learn and gain expertise in the domain they are passionate about and Hunt For Gollum rekindled that dream once again. I immediately called Girish, who was in Mumbai at that time shooting for another film ,with the hope of bringing him on board as DOP for the project. Half way through the exciting conversation (as i would like to believe it), i hadn't sensed any reaction from the otherside. It was almost twenty minutes of me continuously talking and the guy had not said a single word apart from initial greetings. I was almost losing hope of this working out, before i heard him say "I will do it" . Many days later when i asked him about the initial cold response he politely said "It was April fools day, and I had to make sure that this wasn’t a prank." . Oh well !


I was finally making a decision of self-funding the film. i couldn't agree more with Bret Stern,the author of "How to Shoot a feature film for under $10,000*" , that when it comes to filmmaking there is hardly a difference between being broke or saving up some money to fund it yourself. I knew it was a big challenge and accepting this challenge would mean being part of the big, fat ever growing JUGAAD movement. The fun was just a beginning.

While working on the screenplay Kiran and I soon realized it was going to be much more challenging than we initially thought it to be. It was supposed to be a short film. But as we started developing the story we realized that ,the kind of characters we needed to create and stories we needed to weave around them ,giving them sufficient reasons to be distracted at the party and also do justice to them by following those stories through the film, wasn’t possible to fit into a short film’s time frame.Having never written a feature earlier, we spent a lot of time researching, trying to understand the different writing styles,character building, story designing while trying to understand what might and mightn’t work.We wanted to keep the story less dramatized and very real. With each character we wanted to break some kind of stereotype. The biggest challenge for us was to create the character of Nirmal Pandey .We wanted to create a cop who was almost opposite of all the on screen cop characters we had seen. His laid back attitude towards everything makes you question his capability and honesty,but there is a dormant aggression that plays throughout. We wanted him to be the sutradhar or anchor taking the audience through the story while trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

I always wanted to tell a story exploring the complexity of human emotions. As a child, it was simpler times when I could just label things under two categories bad and good. But life and growing up process teaches you a lot of things and you tend to realize there is no bad or good people, there are just people and their extraordinary circumstances. I wanted to base the story on this thought.

From the inception to completion Supari has been a film celebrating the true spirit of collaboration and teamwork. People from all different backgrounds of work, from performing arts and film industry to accounting and software industries have come together with one single goal of making this dream project a reality. It has been an experiment to create excellence within limited resources, an attempt to push beyond limits and a perfect playground for innovation.

The story of Supari came to life over a post dinner stroll discussion. That night topic of discussion was “The invisible Gorilla experiment”. Ruban,my husband had insisted me to take the invisible Gorilla test earlier that evening and I was amazed to see the result. The experiment showed how people can focus so hard on something that they become blind to the unexpected, even when staring right at it. When one develops "inattentional blindness," as this effect is called, it becomes easy to miss details when one is not looking out for them. I was searching for inspiration for a new story and the sparkle in Ruban’s eyes told me that already had the framework for it.“What if in a party full of people a murder takes place in front of everyone. But people are so busy in their own little world that no one noticed how it happened.Now the challenge is not only to figure out who did it but also how it was done.” And thus the seed for Supari was sown.