Filmmaker Gauri Shinde, who recently made a commercial advertisement for messaging platform WhatsApp and did it all on remote, has shared her frustration while doing so, adding that it gets very difficult trying to explain things to actors over phone.
She told Mid-Day in an interview, “Over the phone, you can’t tell your actors how to emote. The intimate space that a director shares with her performers was missing. For instance, in the haircut ad, I wanted to tell Amruta (Subhash, actor in the ad) exactly which strand to cut.”
About her recent experience, Gauri added, “I couldn’t make hand gestures to explain things. Also, I had to remember that my right, on camera, becomes their left.” The Dear Zindagi director also revealed that her senior actor, Sulabha Arya managed the shoot well because her son is a “competent director of photography”, adding that Amruta shot her own portions.
Shootings were stalled in March when nationwide lockdown was announced in India in the wake of coronavirus pandemic. Government allowed shootings to resume after May 31 when the lockdown ended and a few TV shows began shooting by June end.
During the shutdown, quite a few artists and filmmakers shot ads, music videos and short films from their homes, coordinating with their teams over phone.