Hide and Seek: All the action in one take

The director of the short-film ‘Hide and Seek’ shot in a single take with sync sound talks of his on-set experiences

Deepak Reddy

Deepak Reddy, who’d wrapped his five minute short-film, Hide and Seek , in a single-take shot, is every bit a minimalistic filmmaker, with an eye for detailing. A product of Annapurna International School of Film and Media, who currently resides in the US, Deepak had shot the horror film in sync sound, a first of its kind in the arena. The man had made the film at a Banjara Hills house during his India trip early this year. The short film narrates the story of a man in a troubled relationship.

He vividly remembers, “We shot the film in steady cam. We had to stop the shoot every time an actor or the sound or the camera angle went wrong. We had to shoot over 20 takes to finish the film . It took us six hours to do that. It really helped that I had a bound script readied, quite a while before the shoot.” The lead actor in the film, John Kottoly, was just a call away before the shoot began, given his association with Deepak since a few years. The filmmaker’s good friends Kamran (composer) and Harikanth (executive producer) were equally clinical in getting things moving.

Deepak’s focus as a filmmaker is to create visually arresting shots over fast cuts. Being a fan of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, it was the 1980-film

The Shining that inspired him to make

Hide and Seek . Despite the minimal length of

Hide and Seek , Deepak manages to narrate two back-stories as a basis for the narrative. He wanted to break free of cliches and create a shock value by the end of it.

“With regard to sync-sound, the attempt was to make the setting as real as possible. I’d realised that how much ever one dubs for a horror film in the studios, the on-set impact is never recreated,” Deepak quips.

While another short film by Deepak gears up for release next month, he’s nearly finalised a script for his feature film debut too. (The short film can be watched on Youtube.)