The Making of "The Shadow"

Hey Friends and my dearest viewers,

I am back as promised. Took a bit long though, but finally caught a break to write about the Shadow.

THE IDEA

The Shadow was not meant to as it turned out to be. On the night we shot it,(I don't exactly remember the date) I was flirting with the idea of making a short film. I was at the room of Anupam at the middle of the night chatting over various ideas and determining their pros and cons in a dilettante manner. We were pondering over the idea of a romantic plot where the wife ultimately dies; a very interesting but quite impractical given the present time and resources. 

Then suddenly, while surfing through various genres I came up with the plot where a boy comes to a hostel and finds strange things happening. But it seemed quite improbable because a horror film demanded some special effect and we frankly was to amateur to handle such a thing. We seriously were very skeptical about it.

For a few days I had been giving it a thought of having a special effect with a mirror and a split screen. Suddenly, some adrenaline rushed in and that was the beginning of The Shadow.

MEANS TO THE END

The camera we used for the shoot for the film was just one Samsung DigiCam S1060. No other equipments were used. So next time when you see a shot taken from multiple angles; they were multiple takes.

PROJECT: MIRROR

Quite interestingly, The Shadow was named as Project: Mirror when the first shoot was made. All three of us i.e. Anupam, Pranav and myself searched the campus hostel for a clean bathroom mirror(which was a bit hard to fin as we were looking for impeccably clean ones). So in one of the bathrooms the Charlie-Block of our campus hostel we started shooting.

One of the ground rules for using a split screen was the use of a tripod; but in a less-than-zero-budget movie that was a luxury we couldn't afford. The camera was held over the handle of a bathroom door to keep it steady (although there has been shakes which could not be so well covered).

We shot the climax.From the point where Apupam walks into the bathroom and stuff happens to his image and the scene ends. The entire scene was only 44 secs long which a major disappointment because none of our productions had crossed the one-minute barrier.And that was the end of our first day's shoot.

THE MILLION DOLLAR SPARK

We both had the feeling that the plot was powerful and since the climax was done successfully we hovered around the thoughts of ways to enhance it. With lot of brainstorming and after watching our creation for about a million times this scene caught our eye.

If you see carefully the shadow at the end of the door was Pranav on his patient pacing outside the door which was caught by the camera. Anupam was the first to notice it first and the great idea of using that mistake took birth. 

 Then began the later half of the shoot which was for that matter very simple.

THE FEEL-GOOD FACTOR

The greatest feeling was when the movie was watched and felt that all the pain we took actually bore fruit. From a mere experiment "Project: Mirror" took the shape of "The Shadow". We didn't sleep for a couple of nights, discussed and even quarreled over the minutest of details and it went even to the extent of being looked at suspiciously when we three were found in the hostel bathroom with a camera waiting for some privacy. But all of it was worth it when the words of appreciation and the amount of love we received from the different viewers.

Thank you all once again for giving us your love and support and making "The Shadow" such a success. Please follow and forward the link of this blog to people you know. The viewers are the backbone of Paul Diamond Productions

For more news on upcoming projects stay tuned with our blog and please contact us in case you want to give us your feedback. Trust me, they mean a lot.

Cheers,

Rajarshi