2022 was a big year for many people, but for me, it was the year that brought me the ultimate reward I could ever dream of: Selection in the Student Academy Awards!

From the early days of my university college education, I have always been inclined to make movies that reflect both: the world and the imagination I grew up with. So I decided to pursue my career in film-making and look for opportunities where I could get my work in front of people. While I would ultimately win an award from my university for my work, the journey to get there was more challenging than I had anticipated.

Working on the short film "Mela" (English Title: Carnival) was a pretty different experience for me as well. Because while my previous films and other works were usually set in a much more controlled environment, Mela/Carnival was set in an absolutely chaotic setting, that is a ‘carnival.’ And since we were shooting at the real location, an actual carnival only, and that too dealing with three kids as protagonists, it took us initial few days to figure out how to approach this film. The first couple of days were pure failures. Nothing went as we imagined and planned. This made us realize we need to rework our approach. We had to come up with a lot of alterations and improvisations for both: the initial script as well as the shooting plan.

Also, while dealing with kids on camera, we noticed that it is much more efficient to let the kids do and behave in their natural manner rather than trying to block or stage them.

Both of these factors mixed together and shaped the overall treatment of the film — which it has as a finished product. That is a very raw - documentary-style approach. We fragmented the scenes set inside the carnival with a fresh outlook. We decided to let the kids explore it in a sort of chronological way, beginning from the start point of the carnival to the endpoint. We kept the major or main scenes of the script as it was but made dialogues and actions more fluid for the kids. Apart from these, we simply started observing and capturing the kids on camera as one does in a non-fiction or documentary film. This allowed them to bring their own personalities to the surface and reflected them in the form of pretty natural acting. I think it was a result of this that the film also won an award in France’s ‘Festival international du court-métrage Brèves d'Images’ in the best actor’s category. The three kids were awarded with the ‘Prix du comédien’ award at the festival.

Like this, we finished the production or rather a major shooting part of the film in a single carnival over a period of days. However, it wasn’t enough, as we needed a lot of B-rolls and secondary footage for the film too. So we went to different carnivals at times and took random shots. We thought we had enough footage and began to edit the film. The first cut, or rough cut of the film, was extremely fast-paced. There we got the idea to introduce significant musical chunks or montage sequences in the carnival section of the film. This not only allowed us to control the pace of the narrative but also to explore the inner conflicts and emotions of our protagonists: that is three homeless kids.

All of these elements matched and played very well together in capturing the essence and theme of our film: the subtle class commentary over current urban society. Apart from narrative structure, we also achieved the ability to do visual commentary on the same through our film. It also helped us in navigating through the chaos of our film’s setting and added an additional element by bringing on the vibrance of it on the edit table as well as in the final version of the film.

However, editing was just a part or step toward the final product. Working on our own, with no finances and budget — whatever we could pull by ourselves we had already put during the shooting or production stage of the film — we were stuck in the sound design. We had a bit of an experience with sound design as we studied it during our college, but we never actually did it because our areas of interest were pretty different. Left with no choice, we decided to take the sound design of the film in our hands too. We dubbed the entire film in one of the kid’s houses with a location sound recorder and our laptop, using it for playback. We used royalty-free sound effects and music pieces, and we devised layers and layers of soundtracks to create the ambiance of a carnival. We took a lot of help to explore and experiment with various sound effects while designing the sound for the film. At last, we somehow did manage to put and pull it together to what I still call a decent sound quality in the film. It was, and still is, perhaps not the best, but enough.

Finally, as the film completed its entire production journey, it sort of immediately started its festival circuit. Till now, it has been screened in more than 25 film festivals across the globe. I am fortunate to say that it has been screened in almost every part of the world.

So, at last, when it was shortlisted and reached the ‘semi-finals’ of this year’s ‘Student Academy Awards,’ it was a moment of great joy, relief, and excitement. The more exciting part of the story was that it is not just the only Indian film but the only film from all of Asia to be included in this year’s student Oscars among all the categories.

Hence reaching the highest platform it ever could, it is a great milestone for not just our film “Mela (Carnival)” but also for me and the entire team, as well as the support system behind the film.

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