The following are details for the making of my film Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Tum Yeh Kehtay Ho. It is now online and can be watched here.

Synopsis:

This film is based on Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem, Tum Yeh Kehtay Ho Ab Koee. The poem refers to the state of mind in a time of struggle, which in my opinion reflects current times for the people of our country. The project was done in reaction to what we, as Pakistanis have been going through from the past several year.

The film contains non-animated miniature sculptures and landscape that we shot on film.

Production Details:

The pre-production + set building took about 3 months, shooting took approx 4 days in total, post took approx 2 and a half months. It was shot on 35mm and is my first project on the film format. Camera used was Arriflex 435 Xtreme. Model scale was 1/32, which means that each character’s full height in a standing pose was just a bit over 2.1 inches. The full set area was 8×8 ft, all of the shooting with a crew of 15 people, lights and set was done in a total working space of approx 16x25ft. Got pretty cramped up and overheated during shoots. This was actually an empty mezzanine office that we rented out for 3 months, located in a shady badar commercial alley in Karachi, where the whole set was built from scratch, and where i kind of lived throughout. The project was intended to be a big glob of technical challenges where almost everything was a problem to be solved. The appropriate lens for such a project would have been something like a T-Rex Superscope System or the Revolution Lens System which are not available in the country and besides, even if they were, they cost a fortune just for a single day (like $1K/day for real). However we tried to replace the need for those by having a much more controlled and planned environment, using various pre-tested lenses in combination with adapters at times, and took this more as an experiment than actually a film. A small version of a crain within the space was used at times, sometimes in combination with a track dolly. A metal rig was built from scratch in the iron market near lalu khet, for precision controlled low radius circular camera motion. Actually the biggest challenge was to get the relatively humongous and heavy 35mm camera to capture these tiny objects steadily and smoothly while moving thru the set as desired and without loosing any focus, and focus is a b**** at this scale. Focus made us do things we would never do in the decency of public. Basically, during the shoot, if we tenderly touched the camera with the tip of our finger, the captured footage imitated a 7.5 earthquake. I was working with probably the most radical forward minded film crew in the country (Azad Film), they put up with every crazy thing i asked from them for the sake of precision, especially Farhan Hafeez – Cinematographer, who really put all his soul into this.

Here are pictures from the shoot. You can also view these pictures with more informative annotations on flickr.

The set ground is clay, mountains have a plaster base. The landscape was sculptured over 2 separate pieces of standard 4×8 plywood, joined or split apart depending on shot requirement. fog is mostly from fog generators, coal+lubhan, and sometimes cigarette smoke when in a smaller setting. Some props were made by hand, some props including characters were bought from hobby collection stores online, however all of these had to be repainted or modified to get the desired look. The shrubs are plant roots from an ancient big plant pot we stole from a bungalow in phase 6 (roots from new plants in the market just weren’t working for me). The sky is a back lit print, originally in bright blue shades which allowed better control over sky intensity in post production.

Video Making of the Film:

Watch the completed film here

Credits:

Written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Voice by Zia Mohyeddin, Produced by Jami – Azad Film Company.

Ali Kapadia – Director, Set, Art Dir, Edit, CG/Composit
Farhan Hafeez – Cinematographer, The most hard working dp in the country!
Khurram Baig – Assistant Director
Sohail Abdullah – Landscape Artist/Sculpture Supervisor

..full Credits at the end of the film

Important: This is an Azad Film Production. It is a completely non-profit film, which was impossible without the open hearted support and endless contribution of Jami, nothing would have happened without his support. Im greatly thankful to him for believing in this throughout from start till the very end.