It is about a man … a man trapped in loneliness. His quest for something, for someone to fill his gap of loneliness. When he doesn’t find it he builds his own imaginary world like most of us, finally to get trapped in his own imagination.
A lonely man in Mumbai…a Mumbai that is long dead. The sole survivor in this city, he leads a routine life which is disrupted by the presence of some words scratched off on a wall. He gets down to a search for this person who supposedly is writing these words to finally end up in a situation where he realizes that all this was his own imagination. It was his various fears …of loneliness, of his fear that a city like Mumbai which never sleeps to fall off into deep slumber forever considering the various recent calamities, bomb explosions, riots, floods.
The colours reflected melancholy and solitude but yet that constant fight within oneself in a situation where one is forced to lead a life though there is nothing to even survive on, could not be reflected with these colours. It needed to burn within itself. The colours needed to jump out of the screen and burn you right within.
I experimented with yellows and browns. The colours worked well. But the medium wasn’t working. The colours though few dint quite bring out the monochrome feel that I required.so I tried a different medium…rather an old one…Ink. I used photo ink and water proof ink to create a burned old rusty feel. The inks created an effect which suited best for the kind of ambience that the film needed… that of desolation and loneliness.
These are all various fears experienced by everyone and anyone at some point of time in their lives. Some of us succumb to these fears while others overcome them, yet another group of people choose to build an imaginary world of their own where they like to comfort themselves within it, ignoring all the signboards that stare right at us telling us ‘hey look this is not true!’ They finally reach a point of no return… trapped in their imagination.
There were so many experiences that I went through during the entire diploma project. There were hurdles and ‘glide throughs’ alternating one another. Yet I seem to have grown as an individual, as an artist as a film maker, if I could call myself one. The essence of a story, the process of visualization, threading it into a script, executing the ideas and turning it into frames that play at 24frames per second…tedious it is but gratifying too.
