Great news! The National Film Development Corporation of India, Amsterdam based Augustus films and Berlin based Endorphine Productions board Sunrise अरुणोदय. NFDC will be the majority coproducer of the film with a 50% stake in the investment. We hope to start principal photography early 2013. This was announced at the Marche du film at the Cannes International film festival 2012 by the three coproducers, Rakesh Mehra, Bero Beyer and Fabian Massah.
Read the Screen international article – Endorphine, Augustus wake up for Sunrise

Rakesh Mehra, founding partner of Independent Movies and delegate producer of Sunrise अरुणोदय (Arunoday) will be at the Producer’s Workshop at the Marché du Film, Cannes Film Festival 2012. He would be meeting our co-production partners Bero Beyer and Fabian Massah. More soon…

I have been looking for spaces to set the different locations in the script. And as a large section of the film takes places in an old chawl (from Marathi चाळ, chāḷ) which is an typical 19th century working class housing tenements, comprising of two to five storey buildings with a sloping roof. Each storey has a row of Kholis (rooms) connected  via a long common balcony. The city of Mumbai which had been the industrial hub of India during colonisation is dotted with thousands of such buildings. These dilapidated and rambling buildings still house a large part of the working and the poorer classes. The unofficial red light area in Central Mumbai is made up of a large number of these buildings. Some of which are being demolished and replaced with modern glass office and residential towers and shopping malls.

I found this location, a old town house and it is perfect for the film not only because it resembles the chawls in it’s structure but also for it’s staircases and the many doors in enfilade. Thus by placing the camera at a lower height (like in the pictures) of the children and using wide angle lenses I would like to create create an unnatural distortion making the long passages and winding staircases look like they are part of a maze. The children like the spectators find it difficult to work out it’s geography, slowly we are lost inside it as the giant (adults) terrorise and abuse them . The interiors are very dark and dimly lit up and only the small openings let in the burning sunlight which blind them and stop them from looking outside.

This empty location would be dressed and decorated to give it a lived-in feel, but it would be a place where one felt fear and smelled the presence of evil.

One of scenes from the script:

EXT. HOUSING ESTATE (CHAWL)- NIGHT.
A taxi arrives at a Housing estate in a working class Central Mumbai district. RADHABAI gets out of the taxi. The man sitting on the front seat follows and lifts NAINA out of the back. He carries the little girl in his arms and follows RADHABAI into a building, climbing the rickety wooden stairs, to a first floor apartment.
RADHABAI knocks on the door to the apartment and it is opened by a teenage girl, KOMAL (16). (The singer from the Rangeela Bar)

INT. RADHABAI’S KHOLI / FRONT ROOM – NIGHT.
RADHABAI enters the Kholi (small inner city apartment)

RADHABAI
Girls what are you waiting for? Get my bags,

KOMAL and the others obey.
RADHABAI sits down on the large armchair with big sigh.

RADHABAI (CONT’D)
Oh god! It’s so hot.
Get me a glass of water before I die of thirst.

One of the girls brings her a glass of water and RADHABAI drinks it.

RADHABAI (CONT’D)
Get me some more darling… It’s so hot out there. I am going to die soon.

RADHABAI drinks the second glass of water. The girls look at the sleeping NAINA curiously.
Then with a sigh, RADHABAI gets up and joins the girls goes and looks at NAINA. RADHABAI prods her and, getting no reaction, sits heavily back down into the armchair.
RADHABAI looks around at KOMAL who is standing a little way behind her; her arms crossed, a bored expression on her face.

RADHABAI (CONT’D)
Komal, You have to look after her.

KOMAL does not look very happy to have been burdened with this new charge.

RADHABAI (CONT’D)
Don’t make that face…
Put her to bed.

KOMAL reluctantly moves towards NAINA and picks her up. NAINA appears limp in her arms. KOMAL carries her through a doorway into another room.

During the Sundance film festival 2012, I read an article in the Hollywood reporter, about two guys, Stephan Paternot and Duncan Cork who launched slated.com,  ‘an online hub designed to provide a private investment network for established independent filmmakers looking for backers, and investors looking for seasoned filmmakers with quality projects and solid reputations.’

Google said:
‘Slated is the next-generation online marketplace for investing in film.
For investors & industry professionals, Slated provides exclusive access to a socially-vetted marketplace of high-quality films and filmmakers. Slated makes it easier to track a film’s progress, to follow trusted people and their portfolios, and to receive targeted updates that will help them find their next great film.
For filmmakers, Slated provides a level of validation for their projects and a platform to promote their films to an active audience including investors, distributors, and sales agents.’

That sounded really cool and inspiring. And I am always ready and willing to check out anything new on the web. I enrolled and submitted my project. It took some time and I got some really helpful emails from them. Duncan Cork suggested a new design for the poster. I corrected and reworked my project presentation, financial information. I got my Actors Adil Hussain and Tannishtha Chatterjee, partner & fellow Producer Rakesh Mehra and co-producers Bero Beyer and Fabian Massah to join in.

The great thing is that visitors can only see the synopsis and the teaser, the whole load of other info and financial info is hidden and can only be accessed by investors who are members on slated. You can’t just become a investor, you have to apply and there is some very serious vetting procedure behind all this.

Anyway Voila! Sunrise is online now. One of the first Indian projects on slated.com

Check it out. http://slated.com/films/447/

more reading on slated:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/25/stephan-paternots-slated-aims-to-disrupt-hollywood-as-the-angellist-for-film-funding/

http://slatedblog.posterous.com/hollywood-20-film-finance-meets-crowdfunding

Sorry I haven’t been so silent but I have been doing things in the background. So I have decided to break the silence and write whatever happens as I wait to make this film.

Things have been on the move since me and my partner Producer Rakesh Mehra went to Open Doors co-production lab of the 64th Locarno Film Festival (2011) from the 6th to the 9th August.

Open Doors Lab – #Locarno64 was much awaited by me. We had been selected last May and had this grueling wait. It was a great chance for us – after all we were amongst the 12 short-listed projects from over 200 project applications that the Open Doors Lab had received. Rakesh flew in from Mumbai and joined him after flying to Zurich and then on a small plane to Lugano.

As I flew over the craggy Alps, I remembered the last time I had been to Locarno was in 1996, I had been selected in the ‘Leopards of tomorrow’ with my short film ‘Le Cochon’. I also remembered that a simple tomato sandwich was 4 times the price of the same in any Western capital. I also remembered the Air Hostess giving me a big gold foil wrapped chocolate medallion. But things had changed… cuts in airline budgets I guess.

We had over 33 meeting with potential funders, financiers, producers. Some of them have become our partners (co-producers) on the project like Fabian Massah of Berlin based production company – Endorphine Productions and Dutch producer Bero Beyer of Augustus film.

We have been working together on the vast array of documents, budgets, finance plans, recoupement strategies etc. I also had a some great feedback on the last version of the script from Bero and Fabian and have been working to incorporate them into the new version. We have sent our dossier to a few other people who we met in Locarno and are waiting to hear from them. Reaction time is often long and one has to patient.

The crowd-funding money is sitting in the bank and unfortunately not getting too interest with the Banking crisis… I’m really worried to put it into an investment (as some have suggested to me).

It sometimes feels like you are Estragon and Vladimir and you are waiting for Godot.

Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a while?

Tell us bit about yourself? Where you come from? What you studied and how you became an actor? What are your influences?

I started acting at a very young age, during elementary school. As a child I was fascinated by the stand-up comedian who used to perform each year during the Assamese Festival of Rongali Bihu. I would invite the neighbours’ kids to watch my version of stand up comedy on a make shift stage constructed out of some broken beds on the back veranda of our house. I learnt by imitating popular Bollywood actors. I decided to become a professional actor when I was 16 years old.

I almost became a stand up comedian in Assam after joining Dhrubojit Kishore Choudhury’s troupe. Choudhury shaped my early philosophy. He convinced me that performances are much more than entertainment; they should come from a deeper calling within. He emphasized creating a deep bond with the audience. Meanwhile I began to get opportunities to act in films, television and radio plays, and also recorded several audio versions of our stand up comedy performances. These sold like hot cakes throughout Assam making us very popular.

I joined the National School of Drama, New Delhi in 1990 and met another extraordinary performer and teacher Khalid Tyabji. Tyabji was the second person who influenced me deeply. His way of life and his quality of performance drove me to re-examine the intentions behind my acting. His dedication and the low profile he kept inspired me to leave behind my original aspiration of becoming a hero in Hindi Films and led me to dive headlong into learning the art of acting .

In 1999, I played Othello in ‘Othello- a Play in Black and White’ directed by Roysten Abel. The production went on to win the Fringe First and my performance received rave reviews in the Scotsman and in the Independent in Britain. Over the next ten years we staged Othello throughout Europe, Africa and India. These performances were the means for me to practice and fine tune my acting skills.

During this long journey I met one more Person to whom I owe the rest of my life, my co-actor in Othello, Dilip Shankar. He helped me redefine the meaning of acting, action and being an actor and the relationship of this to life. In addition to my role in Othello, I have acted in movies such as ITI SRIKANTO, FOR REAL, ISHQIYA, GANGOR, LIFE OF PI, AGENT VINOD, LESSONS IN FORGETTING AND NOW ENGLISH VINGLISH. I have also acted in the TV series, Jasoos Vijay.

I have also taught at the NSD and the Royal Conservatory of Music and Drama in The Hague and the Drama School of Amsterdam

You are suddenly doing a lot of film work (some very commercial stuff too), tell us more about what you are doing? How is it different from what you have done in the past? why did you stay away from cinema in the past or did you?

It’s interesting that I am doing a lot of the work I wanted to do before I met Tyabji. I did not enjoy acting in films as much as in theatre. I felt it was not challenging enough. Most film-making remains in the realm of so called naturalism, but even when films transcend the boundaries of naturalistic acting they cannot, in my opinion, facilitate an actor with the ability to take off and fly. Most film directors lack an in-depth understanding of the art of acting. In contrast, the stage is an empty space in the kind of theatre that I believe in. An actor needs to create everything with his/her bare body. It is the actor’s body and vocal sound (not necessarily text) that are the only means with which a universe of possibilities can be created. The actor offers everything to the audience; it’s a joyous offering given with gratitude and love. The possibility of doing this kind of work held me back from acting in films for many years.

Things change and these days I have opened myself up to acting in films. Thankfully I did not need to go to Bombay to look for this opportunity – it found it’s way to me. The values, ideas, opinions I had about the film world needed to be confronted head-on and challenged. Scary and potentially dangerous as it may it sound, that confrontation has made me lighter and I laugh openly, frequently now than ever before.

What was it like working with Ang Lee on Life of Pi? How was it working with international co-actors like Depardieu?

What immediately struck me about Ang Lee is his humility… genuine humility. His being is very quiet. His quality of listening to the other is very intense, thus he manages to pass on instructions to the actors, apparently verbally, but not quite. I seemed to have understood what he wanted from me even if the words were not uttered. His whispering into the ears of actors, communicates in a deeper level. He is a silent co-musician of a complex orchestra who also has the added responsibility of being a conductor. He is a co-creator in the most profound sense of the word.

Depardieu is ripe. Seasoned and most relaxed actor that i have ever met. The funniest experience that I had with him was that he improvised words in french which I did not understand, in spite of my request to him not to improvise or speak any extra words than what were written in the script, since I only learnt those specific French words written in the script, after several grueling sessions with a French friend of mine.  During the take, he uttered words totally unintelligible to me and I missed the cue. Ang Lee comes to me with a suggestion that I must not take a pause before I respond to Depardieu’s question. I could not point my finger to Depardieu’s addition of unintelligible french words which were not in the script, so I said to Ang, “Lets go for another take, please”. As Ang left for the director’s seat I growled at Depardieu with a smile, “You did not give me the right cue, Gerard”. He said in heavily accented English, “No, no, no, no I gave you the cue”. I said, “You did not say ‘el mam’”. He says, “Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, I forgot!” We laughed loudly. Ang must have heard this conversation over the wireless microphones we were equipped with and must have grinned his trademark childlike smile. Second take was perfect!

Why are you doing Sunrise? What is it that attracts you a low budget film like this?

After I read the script I realized that I did not notice more than four words spoken by the character that I am supposed to play. And I did not find it contrived. I read it again in order to find faults in the situations around or with the protagonist and did not find any either. The journey of the protagonist is scored with nuances and subtlety. The writing explores the inner complexities of the role through apparently mundane repeated actions, but I noticed the opportunity of exploring the reality behind these repetitions. The complex and unpredictable relationship of the protagonist with his wife and the others are equally challenging. The choice made by the protagonist to massacre so many people at the end is very far away from the choice that I would make (or so I think !!) and is challenging for me to truthfully enact and to arrive at emotionally. And the story depicts one of the most grim and brutal realities of humanity. It is a story devoid of love and innocence . It makes me desperate to believe in love and beauty. I admire the writer-director’s honesty and straight forwardness .

I am earning enough money by doing big Budget movies to decently support my family and myself so that I can also act in movies that tell a story with passion, compassion , truthfulness and honesty. Often these themes and attitude of creating a work of art do no attract sponsors.

What’s your goal or aim as a creative person?
My goal is to create myself according to the vision that I have glimpsed in my quietest moments several times in the past few years. What is that vision ? To explore to the fullest all my emotional, mental , physical and deep psychic energies and to embrace them with gratitude and humility – Love them and transcend them, to fly away into the infinity ha ha ha ha ….it sounds very selfish, yes it is “Selfish” but not selfish….What ???

When I was in Paris for the camera tests, I took the opportunity to brain-storm with Eryck Abecassis, the music composer on the style of the music for the film. So we decided to redo the music on the teaser to match the mood of the film.  The original music that Eryck had created was very good and served it’s purpose as a narrative and expressive music for the crowd-funding. People  had loved it. But I felt we needed to do something less narrative that would illustrate the mood of the film.  This is particularly important when meeting would-be co-producers and industry professionals at the Open Doors co-production Lab at the Locarno International film festival. I wanted them to ‘see’ how the film would look like finished.  I think the new music or background sound makes us feel like something ominous is going to happen. It creates suspense and anxiety. One can feel the pain of the protagonists and one feels the need to know more.

I re-edited the original trailer and added some new shots in the beginning and the end. The new music is more what’s called ‘Noise’… a music created from mechanical and electric noise. It very minimalistic and modern. Something I want to use in Sunrise to illustrate it’s oneirophrenic ambience.

Check out the new teaser

On the 29th May 2011, at 0600hrs GMT, I became someone who wasn’t just talking about crowd-funding but someone who had crowd-funded a project. I was a veteran.

My campaign published on www.indiegogo.com/sunrise-film was to raise $35,000 to shoot Sunrise अरुणोदय, a 90 minute micro-budget indie fiction feature film. An oneirophrenic psychological thriller which tells the story of Joshi, a cop who tries to find his little daughter who goes missing on her way back from school in an apathetic megalopolis. The film is to be shot on real locations in the city of Mumbai, on multiple HDSLRS, with cine lenses.

I have some great talent attached to the project: Adil Hussain (Joshi) who recently played Pi’s father in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Tannishtha Chatterjee (Leela) who has played in many international feature films like the British film Brick Lane as well as in my first film.

Jean-Marc Ferriere, my Rio based French DoP  (also shot my first feature film Let the Wind Blow (Hava Aney Dey) in Mumbai (ready to jump on a plane with his lenses and gear), Eryck Abecassis, a Parisian composer who had also worked on my first film and composed the music for the teaser, my invaluable Mumbai comrades, Rakesh Mehra and  Yogesh Vinayak Joshi, script and dialogues writer (Mumbai Meri Jaan) with an eye for a great cast, Tejas Parvatkar, theatre director as my trusted AD and friend and young and motivated band of motorcycle riding assistants, trainees and interns. I was born and had spent the first 27 years of my life in Mumbai (10 years of which I had worked as assistant art director and then as production designer and art director in the Mumbai film industry) and I know the place like the back of my hand. We have everything in place except the cash for the shooting.

By now, I had spent months studying crowd-funding campaigns, the different portals and their fine print and watching video-casts by web gurus. In these times of recession in Europe, state disengagement is reaching unbelievable proportions with governments ruthlessly cutting down on Culture and Education. Crowd-sourcing has become the buzzword and was being touted as the future of funding of the arts. Everyone is talking about it at the film markets of Cannes, Berlin and Toronto.  Some have even  tried their hand at it, yet failing to make any considerable collection. The International film festival of Rotterdam had launched their crowd-funding experiment, Cinema Reloaded  in 2009 but unfortunately had not been very successful. The only crowd-funded projects that have really worked are Zombie horror films or RPG dungeon master stuff which bank on a large existing network of people who were easy to tap. Then there was the Age of Stupid, a wonderful feature film about climate change that raised 245,000 pounds through crowd-funding. I read and re-read their extremely informative ‘How to crowdfund your film’ page.

The best crowdfunding websites according to most ‘web-gurus’ are the oldest: Kickstarter and IndieGoGo.

The campaign lasted a harrowing, cliff hanging, 120 days and a total of US$21,000 contributed by 146 funders. Though our goal was $35,000 we managed to reach 60% of the total.  It was extremely difficult but in the end I feel strengthened and empowered by the trust our contributors put into the idea of the film and in me. What was the most touching and telling about the experience was that the majority of the people who funded the film were not, as you may expect, cinema professionals or cinephiles. Beyond friends and family, the majority of my funders were individuals, some of them acquaintances but many unknown to me, who were touched by the story of the film – the tragedy of child trafficking in India – and believed that by contributing to the making of my film that they could do something to help fight against this terrible injustice. Indiegogo allows contributors to leave comments on the site. Some comments included,

This is such an important issue! Thank you for helping bring this to more and more of the worldwide public! We need to protect ALL children! This is a great step…..

I think this is an amazing opportunity to highlight the horrors of human trafficking, especially when it involves children. All the best in getting the rest of the money for the film.

Congratulations! What a great cause! It’s about time someone made a movie about this topic! Wishing you complete success!

What crowd-funding adds to the making of a film is the ability to connect directly with one’s audience, bypassing production companies and distributors who think they know what we want to watch. Here people were funding me to do something that they know is a challenge to make because they want the issue to be highlighted, in effect sending the message to the conventional industry that it must stand up and take note of what the public wants.

We didn’t only crowdfund the project but also managed to crowdsource some invaluable resources worth tens of thousand of dollars. Attracted to the crowdfunding initiative, three companies have pledged their in-kind support, the first being Cine-Trad, Paris who offered to support us with the subtitling of the film, Just Fuel and MadMen Productions, Paris who will support us for the post-production and lastly Luma Tech, Florida with their lenses.

People often send me emails and ask me what’s the secret? There is no secret… you need a network and you have to keep ‘reminding’ them that they need to participate.

I am now preparing a strong pitch for the Locarno Film festival, Open Doors selection where we hope to win one of the three cash grants to help us shoot the film. It may not have been possible to raise all the money to make Sunrise through crowdfunding alone, but the cash raised provides important seed funding. More importantly, the support pledged by ordinary people and the in-kind support of companies demonstrates that there is a strong belief in the project from individuals all over the world. This is testimony to the strength of the project and to the strength of people power to achieve seemingly insurmountable goals.

I have been in Paris since the last few days with  Jean-Marc Ferriere, my Director of Photography and Bertrand Levallois, Post-Production Manager and CEO of Paris based Just Fuel and our French co-producer who got us a Cineroid EVF, AJA KiPro mini, a TV Logic Monitor standard tripod, a Canon 7D and access to his post-production house. Eryck Abecassis, the music director and composer is lent me his Panasonic Lumix GH2 body. Jean-Marc has his Russian Lomo Cine lenses 18mm and a 50mm. We want to check the workflow and find the best config for us.

 Here’s what Jean-Marc’s observations on the Tests we did:

A quick brief on our recent Paris camera test and what more to come:

We had high hopes on the AF100 Panasonic camera when it came out this year .
Finally  I got a camera to test in June and I have to say that  it is so awfully noisy , even after tweaking the parameters in the menu, we got it better but decided against it.

The hacked GH1 is way better than the AF100 dynamic wise and even at 800 ASA (less noise than the AF100), but without the possible video feed to an external monitor during recording, its (GH1) viewfinder and LCD screen are not precise enough to monitor focus accurately, too bad.
I do keep the GH1as an extra body for specific shots for its compactness: it can be rigged anywhere and its flippable LCD screen is very handy.

The GH2 was then tested in Paris for its HDMI out with the Kipro-mini and again we turned it down , not good enough for our  filming conditions.

The literature on internet is always full of good stories but the only rule is “test, test, test…!”

Our goal is to bring our own  equipment in Mumbai and shoot freely with a light crew.

Thanks to Bertrand Levallois, Partho and I finally got to compare the cameras with proper monitoring to view the results and see what these HD-DSLRs really can deliver in low light conditions for the big screen.

The Canon 7D so far is our choice, with the exposure curves supplied by Steve Shaw of Light Illusion and my 1990′s LOMO Cine lenses (with the OCT 19 to EOS mount manufactured by Steve Morton – http://cinemods.com/
We really liked Light Illusion‘s Log curve, quite better than the Technicolor one.
The 7D has the shallow depth of field we missed in Let The Wind Blow, good resolution and correct noise level, as long as the images are well exposed and the need for color correction kept to the minimum .
The 7D also is very rugged and can take humidity and harsh conditions, just overheating can be a concern but we are preparing  a drama shoot, not  a documentary or live show with longish takes.

Some will ask why not go for the 5D?
Well it’s a full frame sensor (24×36) and it makes it very tricky to get shots in focus in low light conditions (even at T2.8) with its 480 lines HDMI output during recording. One might not  notice before it’s too late to re shoot.
I have to say I like the 5D’s color rendition.

We got to participate in Christophe Grelié‘s test of the Sony F3 with a Kipro-mini recorder in Paris for his current feature film shoot and even without the LogC upgrade, it would be a great contender if we have the cash…

There are Canon 7D available with a PL mount so we still hope to shoot with the Illuminas supplied by Luma Tech Inc and Glenn Leibold.

I’m now hoping to test the Canon 1D markIV (w/ a smaller sensor than the 5D -crop factor 1.3- and slightly larger than super 35mm) and see if the mirror clears the back of the Lomo lenses as its high ASA potential is just ideal for our project.

A Canon 1D Mark IV PL mounted is in the price range of the Sony F3 which too is excellent at high ASA, so the F3 would win with its built in NDs , zebra, etc.. still the F3 also requires a proper viewfinder !
The new external viewfinders are correct but very flimsy… some rental houses are supplying the F3 with the old school HDCam viewfinder

I assume my Lomo set of lenses will not vignette on the 1D with the OCT19 to EOS adaptor.
Test test test…

Then again new cameras come out every 6 months…
…will hopefully test the Sony FS100 soon as well but it’s got another mount , E mount !

So will keep you all posted !
Cheers
Jean-Marc.

STOP PRESS: Vitaliy_Kiselev hacks GH2