This is how I directed my first shoot with Guru Randhawa for GAP

The one thing I absolutely love about my field of work is, it's not about how good your planning is but how vigilant you can be during the need of an hour.

This is how I directed my first shoot with Guru Randhawa for GAP.

3 weeks ago, the GAP brief landed on Elements Mediaworks

3 Days Before the shoot: It was a usual morning in a creative agency with chaos all over the place. And little did I know that I was about to be dragged into the same chaos

I was approached by my former colleague saying "we need a concept for the GAP store opening with Guru". I curiously, ask her "when is the deadline for this"? She looks at me and smiles giving me a one-word answer i.e "NOW"

I quickly came up with a concept the same day and organized the concept in a presentation (p.s ppt skills are like a swiss knife) and flashed the concept out to the client. awaited in suspense while working on a few backups just in case if the client says "kuch maza nhi aaya"

But, to my surprise, it go approved in one go.

And the next few things were pretty easy,

-Finalize the treatment note

-get the production in place

-AND execute

Fast-forward to the Shoot day,

IT WAS THE DAY, the camera team was in the place. I and the camera operator had a little chat over how I visualized the shots, angles, and overall video. Applying something that I learned recently which helped me a lot while working on this project is “WALK BACKWARDS FROM YOUR FINAL VISUALS”, this came in handy in breakdown my final video into small segments which made it easy for the camera operator to process them.

After waiting for a while the man of the hour was finally here, with the flock of bodyguards surrounding him like a shield, and within a fraction of a second the crowd went wild on him. After a quick onstage performance, GURU rushed to inaugurate the GAP store.?

This is where we come into the picture, but before we set up our camera and mic system I was approached by my former colleague again (yeah, the one I've mentioned above) she communicated the message from the brand’s side, “we don’t have 20 mins with GURU, you guys need to wrap up the shoot in 5 mins”

(Prelude: While ideating the concept I was told that we’ll be getting 20 minutes exclusively for the content shoot, and I wrote the concept note accordingly to keep the time constrain in mind which I felt was less)

But now even 10 minutes feel more, anything is better compared to 5 minutes. And here’s the time when every planning that I had done crumbles down.?

How can a 20-minute concept note be done in 5 minutes while keeping the content same or at least “SOMEWHAT” similar to the original concept note??

And just the time when I was about to go nuts (P.s Which I feel any 20 years would have) by thinking that I’ll blow this up, a quote from the book I read almost 4 years ago struck my head like a bullet?

“Never lose your calm in the midst of chaos” - Marus Aurelius?

(or something like that, it came to me vividly)

I took the camera operator and made him aware of our time constrain, we quickly restructured the script by adding few shot and reducing a few. After all the media formalities were once done

I got a few minutes with Guru to brief him on the concept and explain him the shots, he got it instantly.?

The camera was rolling and so was our 5-minute countdown. It was a surprising sight that you don’t get to see commonly in the Advertising and Media Agency world, that is the brand managers were more concerned about the talent and his comfort, which is kinda contradict of what brand managers really care about,? where most of the time they are just concern about deliverables. Taking a mental picture of this positive scenario we proceeded shot by shot and with no retakes; as a matter of fact, GURU add his notes on the script as well.?

The camera operator was charging in with rage with a try to cover every possible shot I explained to him, and as soon we got one shot he looked at me (the camera guy) and I nodded, confirming that we got the shot and we are good to go to the next one. I don’t know who would had take this amount of uncalculated risk, THERE WAS NO PLAYBACK. Yessssss, there was no playback confirmation about the shots that we were taking. Which means I really don’t know how did the short turn out on camera. Usually, you get to see a playback to understand and reassess what you’ve captured. In this given situation the playback didn’t exist for me and whenever I nodded my head looking at the camera guy was totally out of sheer instinct (the guts feeling of “THIS HAS TO BE IT”)

I was so induced in directing the shoot, I almost forgot that we had a time constraint but by this time it did not matter because we had almost finished the shoot.

The last shot and,

The HIGH, The ECSTASY, The BLISS (whatever you call it)

That feeling was unlike any, the smile on my team members faces was the best thing about that shoot.?

Nothing had been more dynamic in my past accumulation of experience than this.

(p.s the shot turned out great and got the desired result in the post-production. As the matter of fact, it got approved by the client in one shot as well)

#shoot #behindthescenes #gap #creativestrategy #productionhouse #mediaagency #agencywork