When Sahil Luthra along with his batchmate Charanjit Singh decided to make a live movie, they were posed with a total lack of knowledge about the art. Having to make a career start didn’t make things easy either. Faced with a dilemma they took the route to discussing it at their favorite haunt – Arena Chandigarh. That turned out to be the start of the unending journey’s to the centre library (a place they literally hated when they were doing the course) and buried under pointed advice and guidance, and of course a lot of books on film making, they started to unravel the film world, thread by thread. Film Theory, Camera Angle, Set Design, Continuity, Rule of Thirds and techniques of story telling began to make sense in their heads. Well let’s watch the Movie and then have a frank talk with them.

 

How did your institute help you in achieving your aims?


I think i owe a lot to Arena Chandigarh and Vineet Sir in realizing my dream of making films. He introduced me to "Citizen Kane". He introduced me to Hitchcock. I’ve read and re-read books on his recommendations through the Arena 17 library. I have always preferred Modern Cinema but if it wasn’t for him, i wouldn’t have discovered the likes of Orson Welles, Hitchcock, Coppola and many other greats. Though it’s been almost an year since the completion of my course, i still visit him occasionally for an update on my knowledge of films.

 

Congratulations on the wonderful movie. How did the idea for this movie strike you?
Thanks. I was originally working on a much bigger project as my first short film. It was about time travel and the writing was done. But as we worked on it, we realized it would be quite a challenge to finish it since it was our very first film. I decided to tackle something smaller, much smaller. I think there were some funny kidnapping ads playing on tv around the same time. So i developed this idea of a kidnap which we later filmed as “Captured”
How did you form the team? What were the roles?
The majority of the team were my fellow arena chandigarh students. We found another guy through the process, he did the dialogues and played a part as well.
Why did you chose this medium to make your story?
I think i have gone on to prefer live action over animation lately.

Which software did you use for this movie?

I used after effects for color correction and tracking and adobe premiere for editing.

What was the one incident you remember from the making of this movie?

In order to shoot on time , i had to clean the entire location myself. The house had been abandoned for a while. :)

Sahil K Luthra , Director
Sahil K Luthra , Director

Any other incident?

I cant seem to remember another one.

Did you get stuck any where during the making? or almost gave up?

Charanjit Singh had problems sitting on his knees with those jeans on, with the amount of retakes we did, he almost didn’t want to do it. But we took a little rest and went on again.
So how did you carry on from there?

We had ganne (sugarcane) ka juice during the break and he was ready to do it again. That was a cheap trick, but it worked 🙂
Tell us something about your next movie project?

My next project is a prequel to my very first short film. Its titled “Precaptured” and we are shooting this in the second weekend of November with the same cast and a few new additions. Thank you!

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