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MY CAUSE: Feed The Children, Inc.

I Swear I Won't Booze Anymore - Shooting The Video
(Originally posted on www.passionforcinema.com/author/kenny)

Here’s our first professional video, for the song Kaan Dhorisu (Mod Nakhau), which roughly translates as ‘I swear I won’t booze anymore’. I couldn’t participate in PFCOne this year, but I hope this can make up for it a bit. The video’s meant primarily for TV, so we had to keep it U-rated. It’s been made with a skeleton crew and the barest minimum budget possible. Thanks a lot to fellow PFCite Vijay for his post on guerilla filmmaking, especially his points about feeding the crew well and respecting space and property.
I can’t remember being more tense than during the days that led up to the shoot. Shooting for fun with a small made-in-China digicam is one thing; hiring a professional camera for TV quality is another. Getting your friends and family to act in their spare time is one thing, getting them to do it without making yourself look like a fool in front of a professional crew is another. That’s always the big worry – not looking like an idiot in the presence of people who know better.
Producing the album had already cleaned me out, and we were doing the video on donated funds. There was absolutely no way we could afford a second day of shooting. Everything had to be done in one day. So we planned like hell. We first made a scratch video using the aforementioned made-in-China digicam and Windows Movie Maker (but we have Sony Vegas now – ha ha). Then we kind of reverse-storyboarded it and took printouts of the 64 frames/shots we needed, so that we wouldn’t be groping in the dark, maybe even literally.
Things will always go wrong whenever one undertakes any major endeavour. I guess we just have to work our way around whatever Murphy sends up. We had a few small hiccups too, but nothing earth-shattering. The only persistent pest for me was a painful corn on my left foot – kind of tough when you’re handling practically all positions on the crew from producer-director to props and assistant cook.
In fact, the rain gods were kind to us on shooting day. When we finally wrapped at 9.30 PM and I drove a couple of buddies back home, we saw that it had been raining heavily just a couple of kilometres away from our location. And it rained there too once I was back home and dry.
Musically, this song is the simplest of the album. A little too simple to the point of being a tad embarassing for me, personally. C Am F G is probably the most common chord progression in the world. I would have preferred to make a video of one of the other musically richer songs, but we decided on this one because it was the most populist – a song about swearing off boozing and running after girls. Our former bassist had composed the germ during a frustrated phase in his life.
There are a few small things here and there which I always feel I should have pushed a bit harder for. It’s a fine line during takes and retakes between getting a perfect expression and pissing off the actor. The trouble with acting is that even when you’re doing the same thing for the 15th time, you still have to give it the same 100%. Every time. A funny thing I’ve noticed is that good mimics and story-tellers don’t necessarily make good actors. Right from the days of school skits to this video, I’ve seen people who’re the life of the party and great at narrating stories, and you’d think they’d make great actors, but they don’t always. I have a pet theory about it, but I’m hardly an acting guru.
All said and done, we had a lot of fun. From waking up at 4.30 in the morning to finally crashing at midnight. Eventually, I’d love to dabble in all genres (except torture porn and K-serials) but I don’t think anything can be as much fun as working on comedy. And few things give me a bigger high than hearing people laugh at my work. In the right way, that is.



(I’d written this post long ago, but my uncle, who appears at the end, had a serious accident and was in hospital for 45 days. He’s on the long slow road to recovery now, though.)