As we start making the rounds of the film festival circuit, here’s a look back at our process and the journey of making Flickering Light / Peeli Batti.
Before we start a film, we always create a storyboard from the script. Here’s a look at our handwritten storyboard, highlighting what each scene might look like, the words that could go with a particular scene, and how the scene would take the story forward.
Then we went about creating the sound track, for which we layered Jahnavi’s vocals with our friend Ajit Ranganath’s brilliant sitar piece, and other sounds and samples.
The next step was to assemble the sets and try out different techniques and materials to bring the ideas to life.
When we started the film, we wanted to use sand extensively, like in this picture where you can see the bed through a screen of black sand. And although we did use sand in a lot of our scenes, we also used other materials to mimic the look of black sand, like black cloth and paper, this was simply because the stiffness of cloth and paper made them a little easier to work with.
We also thought of using clay figures for the characters as seen in the pictures here, but we abandoned that approach in favour of the technique of pixilation (using real people as stop motion figures). This was exciting (and also a little scary), not only because we had never used this technique before, but also because we had decided to put ourselves in front of the camera as actors for the first time.
The sets were constructed using miniatures, plexiglass and dimmable lights layered with sand and butter paper. Finally, it was simply a matter of taking endless pictures – 24 for each second, with multiple takes for each scene.
After all the shooting was completed, the pictures (shot with a canon camera, using Dragonframe) were strung together in using DaVinci Resolve, with editing and compositing taking up most of our remaining time.
The entire process took us over two years, with long breaks in between. It was a rocky ride with major roadblocks along the way. Now the film is over and out of our hands; it feels like saying goodbye to a friend we have seen grow and come into their own, ready to move on to the next adventure.
