Our first location was a cafe, followed by some mall scenes and finally some outdoor shots—all this in the first half of the day. The cafe scene was the longest scene and involved the most amount of dialogue. Our first decision, and in hind sight our worst decision, was to try and do the sound in post. After our experience with Trigonometry, I was sceptical about our sound set up and didn’t want to risk the possibility of the sound giving up on us at the screening. The decision paid off in the short run though, and we were zipping through our takes.
Cast and crew were now up to eight, including the waiter from the cafe; we roped him in on the spot.
We wrapped up our outdoor shots on Sheikh Zayed road en route to picking up our 9th cast and crew member. By the time we reached our lunch cum indoor-shoot destination, cast and crew was up to 10.
All through the afternoon shoot, we were concerned about a baby and pram take that was a crucial establishment scene. It was now getting close to dusk, and the scene was an outdoor one supposed to be in the day. As luck would have it, while we were outside shooting another shot, a lady walked by with a baby and a pram. I ran to her and entreated her to act in the movie. She looked at me in astonishment and then indicated that she didn’t understand a word I was saying. She was Russian and didn’t speak English!
We somehow managed to give her directions with hand gestures, but in about 10 minutes, we realized we weren’t really getting anywhere. I was still willing to plod on as long as we had some shots to stitch together when the mother gestured that she had to leave and would come back. That was, of course, code for, “All right then, I think I’ve had enough. Bye bye now.”
Our collective hearts sank and we quickly moved on to some other shots that needed to be taken. No one wanted to acknowledge the elephant in the room. If we didn’t get the shot with the baby and mother, what was the alternative?
Wonder of wonders, she returned with her husband, who spoke English, and helped us translate to his wife! Suddenly, a friend showed up with his family. He had dragged his kids out of a birthday party, just to help us out. We now had a full family scene that we could shoot.
Our faith in humanity restored, we wrapped up the shoot and rushed to the next location, a clinic. Again we roped in a nurse from the clinic for one scene, and cast and crew by this time was up to an impressive 18.
Cast member 19 joined us later that night to shoot a scene in my apartment. There was still the editing. And we had two important scenes to shoot on Saturday morning. At midnight, we were still shooting downstairs below our apartment block.
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