The Way We Shot (From Home)

With barriers to film production brought in by the pandemic, filmmakers came up with creative ways to tell and shoot stories

- NAINI THAKER & MANSVINI KAUSHIK

It was the initial days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Everything was under complete shutdown and all conventional shoots had come to a halt. As other sectors were innovating with business models and people were adjusting to work from home, the entertainment industry, too, began experimenting with the made-from-home content.

In March itself, the team at Bodhi Tree Multimedia, a Mumbai-based production house, began brainstorming. They wanted to come up with something different, but they knew the story had to be relevant-yet-practical to implement. Soon, they settled on a thriller set during the lockdown.

“It started as an experiment, so we needed to build that self-confidence on whether we could execute a project of good quality, considering the restraints,” says Mautik Tolia, CEO, Bodhi Tree Multimedia and producer of the web series The Gone Game. The team first made a trailer, then devised ways to improve on the idea, and later pitched it to the studios. The thriller, set during the pandemic, where there is more than meets the eye in the death of a coronavirus victim, was shot remotely.

Ordinarily, completing a web series of this scale would take a 100-member team and six to seven months of writing, then another couple of months in production and post production. But for The Gone Game, writing to post production was completed in two months, all with a team of just 20.