Written and Directed by: Karan Anshuman DVeography: Jatinder Sharma Edited by: Narayanan AV Production Manager: Bilal Qureshi Narrated by: Karan Anshuman Cast: Ritwika Dey, Sushil Patil, Durgadas Bhakta, Neeraj Anurag, Neha Gulati.

Elevator Etiquette is, for all practical purposes, my first film. Sure, I've made a few 16 mm shorts but they part of a learning process that we call academics. Elevator was a hugely different experience. Here was a professional cast, a professional crew, cutting-edge technology, a script (!) that I had been hanging on to for a year and (voila!) a full blown production. No more get the camera; switch off the lights, load the film, call up the pals, shoot ("screw the tripod dude, we'll be late for class"), view rushes on a crummy projector on an equally crummy wall and then the manual labor of snip-and-splice editing. Screen film for the class. Hey - don't get me wrong, that really was fun and it really formed the base of it all - more importantly - it fired up a drive; to think what could be achieved given the time and resources. A life-changing decision later, I quit my American university (my CS course half-done) and headed back to Mumbai. If I had to make a film, where else would you find conditions more apt than here?

Elevator was written out of pure inspiration. It deals with a subject that everyone in India is part of; using the simple jali-wala lift. Who hasn't been part of this routine, day in and day out? For me, it was one of those rare out-of-body experiences, where you become a passive observer, taking in every little detail and nothing for granted; as one normal day, I entered one of these lifts. In the uneventful six-floor journey up, I was simply looking around at the craziness that had become of this ubiquitous system. The thrill of re-discovering a filmic subject that has been under everyone's nose all along is quite something. In six-floors, I had a story. The same day, the first draft of the screenplay was written in 57 minutes, so plain and clear was the subject in my head. But as time meandered on, certain elements, though present in the first version, slowly became more and more prominent as the film started to look more complex. It was working on two extraordinary levels… from a comedy it had turned into a socio-comedy, this quaint piece of machinery was telling its own story of the part it played in underlining the social structure of a cosmopolitan city where progress is simply not uniform.

Subsequent reworking of the script balanced the inanities with the lessons and the result is well summed up in the tagline for the film: A dying breed of elevators witnesses the continuing struggle of the human ladder. It was time to shoot.

Shooting on film was out. The backing required would be ridiculous and the look of the film would suffer. Though the film is fictitious, I wanted to strike equilibrium between voyeurism (personifying, what must the lift be thinking?) as bought on by a typical security cam and still have the regular cinematic elements to it all. Then DV happened like a new dawn in cinema and everyone suddenly woke up. Having watched some of Lars von Trier's dogma forays (and their subsequent critical acclaim) was enough reason for any film to be shot on DV (hey - we could always convert to film if the product was great and still send it to Cannes, right?) So with that comforting thought at the back of my head, all I did for months was look for the right location (this was easily the toughest part as finding a large, slow, accessible double gated siding cage elevator where we would be allowed to shoot for nothing was quite a task) and it so happened that it was pure chance that one ordinary day, I found it - a dilapidated old office building in a remote corner of Matunga (what was I doing there? Wouldn't you love to know!) and I decided that I was going to shoot the film in 10 days, come what may. All I had at this point was a completed screenplay. That's it.

Needless to say, the next 8 days were quite harrowing, and the last 2 downright nerve-racking. Having never handled DV before, I had to start from scratch. The Internet was most useful in the research department and several lessons are to be learnt from the myriad sites out there dedicated to DV filmmaking. The next stage was equipment - essentially procuring a DV camera. After managing a list of people who had a camera, I lucked out soon and at the end of the day actually had a choice between a Canon XM1 and a Sony PDP150 - both extremely neat machines. However, I chose the XM1 as it was smaller (with a decent sized viewfinder, since it had to be on battery as we were going to move around in and the lift - which essentially meant there was no monitor) and my cinematographer had used it before to shoot another short. Since the film has no sound (only a v/o, some sfx and lots of music) an on-location sound recordist was not needed - a major headache done away with, the oxymoronic SILENCE! not required. (Later, during the shoot, it allowed me to continually give instructions to the actors during the shot - something that few directors can afford to do when shooting a low-budget video). The crew came next (for some reason crew members seemed much more of a priority than the cast) and once more the barrage of phone calls and meetings started. I was surprised at the enthusiasm and response I got from the established industry-folk I talked with. To be so open-minded about working on a 19-year-old director's first film was quite unexpectedly pleasant. It was the same story with the actors, some were only contacted on the night before the shoot and reaction was on the lines of "It would be a privilege to be a part of your first film!"

Each and every one of the cast and crew worked on the project as a favor. Here is a great example of the bonhomie that the medium of cinema can create. Until now, I have not been able to convey my fullest appreciation to these people. There certainly is a great future for independent cinema in this country, no matter what anyone might say.

My first shot was the film's only outdoor sequence and on a public road. It took 8 takes to get right, mainly because of crowd interference. Not the greatest of starts and I crossed my fingers that the rest wouldn't be anything like this… we'd never finish in time. But, after the first hurdle, everything was smooth sailing. The eventual shooting ratio was 1:5, very reasonable indeed.

Of the mishaps, there was a handful. TCR breaks in the tapes (that created a havoc while dumping), a lousy tripod that we eventually never used, easily drained batteries (and the resultant waste of time), and a couple of goofs brought on by the camera were all part of it. Lessons have been learnt from these for all times, and some of the foul ups made it to the final cut as they added a zany element to the film. As André Bazin, the French critic, put so aptly, "…chance and reality are have more talent than all the world's filmmakers."

Shoot done, the cast and crew endlessly thanked, I set off to edit.

Frustratingly enough, this didn't happen until 60 days later. By now I had seen the VHS rushes several million times and had edited the film on paper and in my head to the last detail based on the makeshift timecode (the TCR had to be wiped off and replaced with the time and day of shooting as imprinted by the camera!) I pretty much saw the visual final cut in my head before I had entered the edit studio. There was little else to be done, as the music and v/o only came after the visuals.

There are only 2 native-DV-capable edit studios running Final Cut Pro on the G4 platform in Mumbai. Luckily, I got to know the guys who set up Studio Agneetaar (translate that into English and you're bound to smirk if you know the basics of DV editing) and pestered him long enough to give me some free time on his machine, confident that it would take only a shift to get things in place and complete the film.

Well, I was quite wrong, it took much much more. Several reasons for that: for starters, while there are 2 edit studios, there seem to be even fewer editors who are well equipped for and comfortable with FCP. This resulted in my film serving as a lab rat for a good many experiments, mostly vague ones like importing digital midi music, getting a little showy with titles and conversion formats among other digital platforms. Being on the tech savvy side, I picked up a few skills in the sessions we had and often was the one at the mouse, trying to perform a few acrobatics with the virgin technology. At the end of it, the edit was one big party and a hugely enjoyable experience. The same familiar rush of adrenalin on seeing the final cut of your film was definitely present.

The film is completely digital in nature. The music has been recorded straight onto digital media using a midi synth, the v/o done in a studio on DAT, the film edited on Final Cut Pro after being imported from DV using Firewire technology and of course, shot on DV. There has been absolutely no generation loss at any level (except the darn VHS transfers that everyone ends up seeing). I think this is quite cool considering at one point after the shoot, I almost succumbed to transferring to Beta and editing on Avid because of easy availability. But of course, patience pays.

And now, it's festival submission time. Digital Talkies becomes the World Premiere for the film and optimistic that I am, I intend sending the film to all major festivals (a considerable lot accept films on DV - no, Cannes doesn't). First films are a great deal aren't they? Hell, you never know…

Karan Anshuman is a co-founder of upperstall.com