Feb came. Feb gone.

February 2010, the most awaited 28 days month for the 30 young student filmmakers. It was full of hardcore work. All the groups were extremely busy in getting permissions, planning, arranging their characters for shooting, along with their already hectic school/college/university lives.

There have been lots of text messages and voice calls exchanges among all of them and with their volunteers, characters, authorities and all. Coping with their school /college /university teachers and assignments along with their shoots was a big challenge. They have to convince their respective teachers about the importance of this on going project. And they did.

Some of the groups have came up with exciting footage for their films and they have become even more excited about the post-production phase. These days everyone is busy in thinking about the kind of music they want to have in their films and talking to some musicians about it. Some are trying to get hold of the archival footage from news channels for their films.

Let’s see who makes a strong film and who fails to impress in March 2010. We are not too far from seeing their footage being cut on editing suite finally.

Moiz Masood Sultani.

Workshop 1 – Day 6

Workshop day 6 – 2nd Feb, the day starts with usual wait for the Lahoris to come out of their guest house and this time me dragging them into the van. Today SM took charge and explained the actual planning of pre production. It was detailed lecture of how to plan a documentary.

Later Mr. Athar Zuberi joined us who took the lecture on camera and handed out his research to all participants which would help them in their production while handling the camera.

We had a documentary screened then. SM joined us back and further carried the camera handling class. The participants discussed the queries regarding their films while licking lollipops supplied by none other than SM himself.

With all this the class broke for lunch. As this was our last day in the hotel, everybody ate as it’s their last day in this world, tasting everything in the menu and all kinds of desserts there. (exaggeration for the sake of fun!)

After the lunch, Patrick and Grace joined us. They carried discussions with each group separately. Moving forward Patrick discussed some interview techniques. We had live interview sessions between Kayzad and Ali Ahmed which didn’t turn out to be such a good example. Everybody then pointed Lata to be as the next target due to her reputation of chatterbox. So Lata and Grace volunteered for it next, which turned out to be the most interesting interview. Kiran and Kamran showed us their talents and it turned out to be a pretty successful interview. A lot of mistakes were pointed out and a lot of things were learnt. Hence the day ended with a productive feel. But hey the day is not all over yet……we have planned our outing and here we go for it. Azaadi!