The Trifecta Conquered: Props, Characters & Costumes.

What we found

As the last leg of prep for the video begins, I'm delighted to see all the pieces come together; it almost feels like a magnetic nucleus attracting all these different components to itself to form a perfect little organism of its own.

With the city turning out to be a treasure trove of costumers, tailors, antique prop shops and fabric stores, I've found that with a big ol' smile and some broken tamil, it's become easier to keep things within budget whilst getting exactly what I want. With a brilliant crew toiling away on this project (a lot more on the crew in the next post) I feel super geared and psyched for shoot day: Monday the 29th of August. 

Tailoring the Look

Driving the point home with the tailor in three languages - Tamil, English & Tanglish.

Tailors trying not to laugh at my sketches and tamil.

This place took three days to track down. Felt like one of those models on ANTM that don't make the go-see cuz they're so lost. But when we found it, boy was it worth the hunt. More images of the costumes in the next post.

hehe.

Sketching out characters' costumes & finding fabric swatches.

Prop-Shop-Stop: I realize it looks like a big junkyard but this place was a find and a half. With a bit of crawling under furniture, standing on chairs and coughing and sneezing we found our little family of props.   

Might buy one of these babies for myself. Renting these just isn't good enough.

Vintage Fanfare.

The Big-ticket Find. Not a single key works but looks pretty damn good! 

All Photos courtesy of Ekta Saran, my beloved Behind-the-Scenes Co-ordinator. 

With Dance rehearsals in full-swing, it is as exciting as it is nerve-wracking. Let the footloose-ing begin! Anddddd Jazz Hands! 

Creative Exile

The Music Video That will be 
So for the last 10 days, I've been stationed in the South of India, doing all the leg work for my first music video. Constantly learning from my extremely creative visual wizard director and co-conceptualizer of the video, Mrinal, everyday has been as fulfilling as writing the song itself. With the video being a dramatic, vivid broadway style representation of the song, Champion of Broken Hearts, I've been working on designing the characters that inhabit the world, building their backstories, and their relation to the character that I will be portraying - the champion of broken hearts - the protagonist. Subsequently, defining and designing the look of the space that all the shenanigans take place at, has been such a cool creative challenge. 
My dear friend Ekta, photographer, writer, story teller and fellow creative delinquent, who arrived late last night, early this morning, to support me on this project, will be documenting this whole process to create the behind the scenes featurette not just for the single, but for posterity too. 
As the process of propping starts tomorrow, I'm mad excited to source out the props from the prop-shops that the thriving film and theatre industry have gone time and time to populate their stages and screens.  
A few of my favourite things on the list, to be sourced:

BARE - A Picture Project. 
This is an ongoing project that simply documents faces that tell me a story or inspire me in a certain way. The first of this series, this is the face of Farida Ahmed, a face that, to me, represents a sense of solemnity, a face that holds within it the silence of a quiet night of hard work and the bitter sweet joy of sacrifice. A face that could but won't give a lot away, a lot of the time. A face that has etched itself in my mind. 

My Current Creative Fix:
The Artist's Way - Julia Cameron: This brilliant soul-starting book is for anyone who are or daydream about being a creative artist in any way. The book guides you through a spiritual exorcism of your doubts and the things that hold you back in your journey in creativity as a purpose. Thanks to one of my dearest friends, Tiffany, who introduced me to this book, I have completely given in to the book and the engaging words of Julia Cameron and week by week it dazzles me and evokes a deep sense of thought and creative duty. 


Getting My Mind-Blown By:
The Genius of Bach: Picture yourself waltzing with the person you love the most in a maze within an orchard of apple trees, fragrant flowers, dancing up trees, trapezing from bark to bark, where every dried leaf you step on crunches in rhythm and the air is the perfectly warm and teasingly cool, where you never run out of breath and your skin and your whole body feels sensitive, bare, feeling every pulse, hearing every sound, reveling in the now-ness of life, where every beautiful indescribable emotion rises within you, occupies every cell within your body till it becomes all you are and all you want to be. That is the music of Bach. Swallowing me whole. 


    

Singing on Screen - Part 1

The first of a series of indulgent love letters to some of my most beloved actors belting it out in film.


Audrey in Breakfast Tiffanys - Henry Mancini's Moon River




Julie Delpy's Disarming Waltz




John Cussack & Peter Fucking Frampton - Oh Yeah!




This is the definition of my dream relationship. One of the best closing scenes ever.