Moby meets Mumbai: Local filmmakers make him a VFX styled music video

Moby offers up his music

When international electronic music maverick Moby announced a competition for a DIY music video in February this year, Mumbai film director Rohan Sabharwal was all over the project and the chance to use Moby's music royalty free.

Being a member at www.mobygratis.com Sabharwal received this email from the musician:

"the videos from the album 'wait for me' have all been made by friends of mine who were given complete creative control. the video for the song 'wait for me' was made by my friend jessica dimmock. i gave her $5,000 and complete creative control to do whatever she wanted to do, and i think it's an amazing and honest short film. i'm having a competition where mobygratis users can win $5,000 to make a video for 'wait for me'. details are at mobygratis.com. thanks, moby."

"This is the perfect opportunity for me to step away from directing television programs and ad films where decisions made are largely dependent on what the client wants," thought Sabharwal.

A collaboration with aspiring filmmakers

"I am interested in the song given to us called 'Wait For Me'. It's a beautiful song, very dark, and an aspiring young filmmaker we know volunteered a very nice story, based on her own experiences, for the music video. It will also be shot and edited by a set of aspiring filmmakers, who get the chance to use the highest end equipment for production and post-production.

"I do a lot of work with aspiring filmmakers," says Sabharwal. "I value their opinion more especially since they do not begin a project with any limitations in place, like a lot of seasoned professionals do. They are not aware of what's allowed and what is not, what can pose a problem and what will not, will something offend someone or is a certain thing not professional. They are very open and say what's on their mind. Then it's up to me whether their advice can be used or not, but the great thing is that there are always plenty of suggestions."

We checked in with Sabharwal and the team during the course of the making of the music video.

 

"We are starting to work on the project right now," wrote Sabharwal last week. "It's a very difficult shoot and we have decided to use stop motion in our video. We've listened to the song over and over again to get ideas. It's a very sad song and the first thing we got from it was a sense of loneliness.

"We are shooting the video on the streets of Mumbai which will be constructed using thousands of still photos with a Canon 7D camera. In post production the entire video will be animated to look and feel a certain way." 

Meet Sohil T, director of the music video

It turned out to be a tedious process, requiring the students to click thousands of still images and stitch them together, from over two days shooting at over 20 locations all over Mumbai city.

This film is directed by Sohil T, a business studies student who figured out what he really wanted to do after a stint at Binghamton University in New York. Realizing that he couldn’t spend the rest of his life in a corporate environment, Sohil returned to Mumbai to pursue being a filmmaker like thousands of others. He joined Mumbai’s advertising industry.

Sabharwal says his young director reminds him of "extremely creative but eccentric directors like Lynch and Soderburgh. Sohil has envisioned this film in a way that relies more on visuals than narrative and it was his idea to capture the very raw environs of the city in a very artistic and compelling fashion."

The post production work and camera operating was carried out by Shikha Basu, an animator by profession who has worked with the likes of cult Hindi film director Ram Gopal Varma. "Her vision fit Sohil's perfectly because of the experimental and visual nature of the film," says Sabharwal.

Cutting chai is the Mumai motif

The first day of shooting started off at the Banganga Tank at Walkeshwar, where the crew shot ascetics bathing in the tank. From then on they covered all of South Mumbai via Colaba Causeway and Forjett Street all the way up to Bandra, where they wrapped for the day. Continuing the next day in the suburbs with another 12 locations, including a local gym (an akhada) in the midst of a slum in Khar. The central idea of their film deals with "unity in diversity."

"We have linked all strata of Mumbai society by a single glass of typically Mumbai tea (called cutting chai). Something that we believe is a common connection between everyone in this city. That glass has been put to the lips of all sorts of people from a doctor to a taxi driver to a college student to an actor and the hundred other different characters that make Mumbai."

In one scene we watch the Taj Mahal hotel go up in flames, footage from November 26 2008, the day of the Mumbai terror attacks, against the soundtrack of Moby's music. The scene, rendered in special effects by young Indian filmmakers 16 months after the event, reminds us that pain is difficult to forget even if Mumbai appears to move on, one glass of tea at a time.

Vote for this video on the competition website. Two of the submitted videos worldwide will win as a result of votes cast by users. This is the only entry from India so far.

In March 2009, Mumbai director Siddharth Sikand was comissioned by Dido's music label Sony to direct a short film/music video also set in Mumbai. He chose a day in the life of a female cab driver.