Five year old me: Naive, innocent and extremely likely to take what people said metaphorically, literally. A landmark moment for my overactive imagination came early, from one of my mother’s dialogues. Sometimes, when her back was turned, I would conspire, to do something fun, though probably ill-advised. Without ever turning back, she would warn me and already know what I was up to. When I asked her, 'Aapko kaise pata chala main yeh karne wali hun?', my omniscient mother would reply 'Meri aankhein sir ke peeche bhi hai!' It blew my mind as a child, every time it happened. I began staring hard at the bun tied at the back of her head, waiting for two eyes to blink out at me.

Present day me: As a director, my mind imagines itself as a multi-tasking and multi-thinking Juggernaut. I swing between thoughts, the various departments and processes of my brain like Tarzan on forest vines (with some yodelling of my own). I feel I too have developed eyes on the back of my head. My crew might even say there are invisible antennas on my head, predicting which person is a broken arrow and what bombs tick away!

Whatever the script may be, a day of shoot, to me, can be compared to a racy love story, a suspense thriller, or a black comedy. One day, I am shooting a beautiful film with ultra-cute children. One of these children has decided that we must be reincarnations from the devil himself — he’s not happy. Brainstorm—who or what is going to tease the special smile from him that is absolutely necessary for the film? Yes, this shoot is a suspense thriller; one with a happy ending
once we get our shots and return the child back to it’s alternate universe!

A racy love story day has to be a live product shoot. Slices of peach being captured in extreme slow motion as the creamy milk embraces them in its folds. Bedsheets with infinitely high thread counts unfurling and being tucked tightly into a mattress. A shiny, growling motorbike escaping with its rider into the sunset. All day, the shots are being described as lovely, smooth, beautiful, breathtaking, hot, ‘makkhan’. Love them.

And last but not the least are the black comedy shoot days. Actually, various moments in each and every shoot fall into the black comedy zone. Its the last hour of a shoot and a major light blows. A moment of pin-drop silence and then many, many people run to the light. Sadly, their sheer presence does not miraculously revive the dead light. Or some smartass declares at lunch that the shoot is going to be super smooth from here on. All the Furies of Greek mythology hear this and chaos reigns on set till the smartass is sacrificed to the Gods.

These are the meanderings of the mind of a director.

The love for shoots I feel, is endless but this article has a word count which is not.

Shradha Ojha is a director with Minikin DGWorks. This article first appeared in the November issue of Manifest, which can be bought here.