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Land of Light Bulbs

behind the scenes

By Carolyn Chon

March 20^th, 2021

Travel shoots, ah it's a special kind of love. My favourite kind of shoot.

You explore foreign soil without the full freedom one would have as a traveler, but instead exploring foreign soil through another set of eyes. Where your keen senses are put to work, attune to the whats, whos, and wheres that may very well become the intricate backdrop of your piece of work. While the obvious perk might be that everything is paid for, the real perk for me personally is being immersed into one's local work culture.

Anyways, let's get to them recce photos first!

Gujarat Guuuudness

We flew into Vadodara, Gujarat from Mumbai to get our shoot underway. We stayed and spent about two weeks there, pretty much 99% of the shoot took place in Gujarat. Plenty of hours were definitely had on the road, moving between our accommodation and the shoot locations. Plenty of power naps were also had on these daily road trips, plenty of unpleasant sleep faces also surfaced, obviously.

Let's take a breather from all that indoor stuff and head for some outdoors now. Allow me to also type out summat summat about this particular project.

So, this particular project was a joint-venture between the company I work with, Director's Think Tank and our buddies/partners in India, Fingerprint Films. A project for Petronas Malaysia to celebrate their partners in India, and the fun bunch of agency peeps we got to work with from Ensemble Worldwide.

Co-directed by the calm, brilliant and talented Rajesh Mapuskar (India) and by the not-so-calm, brilliant and talented Rajay Singh (Malaysia). Also co something else, was co-exec produced by Madhukar and Tek Nam, again respectively from India and Malaysia. And our absolutely wonderful DOP for this was Anu Moothedath.

Production was pretty much 98% from India, while a handful of us Malaysians participated in production as well. Frankly speaking, I don't think I've ever played so many roles on a production before but it was pure fun to be involved in many different aspects of both the pre-production as well as the shoot itself.

Getting into Aman's garage.

The Charming Village in Rajpipla

This village we shot in, where many homes were built with natural resources. Walls made of mud, clay and cow dung, bamboos and wood for gates and fence were quaint and cosy. Nestled next to a beautiful lake, we were gifted with beautiful sunsets. This was also where I got to watch a herd of cows swim across the lake, My first time watching cows swim actually.

And with the photos of Raj Pipla, we've come to an end of this post of our behind-the-scenes for Land of Light Bulbs. This shoot was hands down, the most fun shoot I've ever been on, the one shoot that I would love to re-live.