This project is dedicated to Anurag Dasgupta: filmmaker, educator, mentor & friend.
Background
It was December 2021 when I met Anurag for the first time. At the time, I was a final year undergraduate student reluctantly sitting through a 4-week long mobile documentary filmmaking workshop. Little did I know that Anurag was going to come in as the instructor, flip my perspective of ‘film’ on its head, and inspire me to undertake a year-long filmmaking project.
One of his first instructions in the workshop was to delete everything from our phone galleries, to make up space for the anticipated footage. I’d never been a storer of photographs myself, but I had stocked up a few favourites over the years. Fascinating, isn’t it? The need to hold onto a tangible fragment of the past, especially if you can’t have that past again. Poof. I deleted every digitally archived memory of the past and made space for newer things.
It has been a year since that moment. Even today, I do not have a single image stored on my phone. From that day on, I decided to make a change in the way I store memories from my life and prevent them from drowning in the ocean of a stretched timeline.
Well said & done, but I still had no idea as to what that change may be.
In the workshop, I ended up making a 4-minute long investigative piece on why people climb rocks, titled “Why Do People Climb?”. However, a discussion that I had with Anurag during that time stuck with me and inspired me to explore film as a medium to archive the moments of my life.
As he explained the fundamentals of filmmaking, he said, “films are just visuals and sounds strung together to communicate a story”. I was taken aback by his minimalistic definition. I thought, “wait, that can’t be all. There must be something more”. Think long and hard about every film that you’ve ever watched and you’ll realise that, at the very core, that’s all there is: Visuals and sounds, strung together to communicate a story.
Every single day, we wake up and perceive the world around us. As it turns out, two senses take up the most exposure: sight & hearing. Sight receives visuals and hearing receives sounds. Spot a connection with films yet?
A major chunk of our perception of the world is comprised of just visuals & sounds, which is exactly what films use too. Therefore, it almost feels natural to think of films as a pure medium to represent someone’s visual and auditory perception of the world.
While exploring this line of thought sometime around December, I received confirmation of my move to a new city in January for the completion of my undergraduate thesis. I anticipated a sequence of events that 2022 had lined up for me: shifting to a new city, graduating from college, figuring out what to do and starting my fully-fledged ‘adult’ life; no turning back.
The irreversible changes by themselves did not bother me as such but I could foresee what they would ultimately lead to. I was about to leave behind yet another group of people that I loved, to go out & follow my dreams. Throughout my life, I’ve been terrible at maintaining relationships; even more so if they were majorly virtual. This means that strong relationships eventually fade out into nothingness because of my sporadic communication.
I wanted to end this cycle in 2022. I decided that it was time to figure out my own method of letting important people in my life be in touch with me & stay aware of my experiences.
That is when it all came together. What if I could share my perception of the world, using visuals & sounds, as a religious practice to keep in touch with the people that I was to move away from?
This is exactly what I did. For the past year, I have been recording moments of my life (almost) every single day and compiling them into a film every month. All of them follow the same outline, which is that of a letter written to you from me, with a designated number: x/12. Each month of 2022, neatly packaged into an audio-visual letter, approximately 2 minutes & 30 seconds long.
When I look at any of them now, I can see how each film communicated precisely what I felt during that month and grew to become an appropriate visual archive of most of the moments that I experienced.
As 2022 drew to a close, I decided to chalk out all the things that I learnt about filmmaking, documentation & life while being on this arduous 365-days-long project. This article covers some of the major ones.
The ideal duration for documenting a moment.
If you are familiar with Cesar Kuriyama’s One Second A Day project, you would be aware of the massive trend that followed afterwards. People around the world decided to stop pulling out their phones every time an interesting moment was taking place and decided to capture a single thing of value every day for one second.
I myself was a part of this trend, trying it out in December 2019 when I volunteered at the Serendipity Arts Festival. During that time, I understood that a second of video documentation is nothing more than a slightly animated photograph. Since it’s all strung together as a video, everything moves by too fast.
Over the years, I experimented with different video durations (2 seconds in January & February 2021) but none of them seemed to be enough. Just what was the right duration for capturing a moment?
Turns out there isn’t a fixed answer. In the filmmaking workshop, Anurag’s favourite dialogue to me was: “Why did you stop recording here?”. Over time, I grew to understand that there is no ideal duration to record a moment for. You just have to keep recording, patiently, and almost always for more time than you anticipate. This means collecting a lot of shots that might be extremely long in duration. I followed this religiously for the entire year.
When I used to sit down to edit my film for the month, I took time to review each shot and mark out the best moments from it. This was a rather strenuous process but had quite a bit of impact. The ‘best moments’ would then dictate how long a particular shot would be displayed for in the film, instead of me trying to forcibly assign a random duration.
Therefore, in my 2022 films, some shots are longer than others (breaking the structure of the One Second A Day project), while others pass by in a quick second.
I now realise that this is what adds to the dynamic nature of a film which leaves you hooked to it. You never know when a shot is going to end or when a new one will begin.
Rhythm.
I do not believe that I’m even close to mastering the rhythm required to be a proficient filmmaker. However, I did get better with time. During the filmmaking workshop, Anurag explained how each shot is rhythmically cut and introduced to ensure a smooth flow. I remember him playing a scene from a movie and standing in front of the projector, counting down from 1 to 6. Every time he’d say 6, the shot behind him changed. Feels pretty obvious, doesn’t it?
The filmmakers must have sat down and deliberated on how long each shot should be displayed for. They must have also attempted to gauge whether that decided duration would be too much or too little. Furthermore, all scenes must have an underlying dictating rhythm, fast or slow to make the audience feel a certain way.
This is where some sort of intuitive inclination and practical experience comes into play. You can never really know if everyone will perceive something exactly the same way and, hence, all you’re left with is a calculated guess.
Due to my lack of experience with this, I decided to use an underlying song that dictated the rhythm of the film. In all cases, that particular song was chosen because it tied in well with the overall narrative of my month. Over time, I got better at syncing the audio with the shots that I took and they flowed into each other quite well. Sometimes, I knew exactly where a particular shot was meant to go and, other times, random shots fit in well with the rhythm of the song.
Inspired by Alina Khatri, who had decided to undertake this year-long journey with me, I experimented once with instrumental pieces too. For 7/12; July 2022, I used a piano piece, titled I Just Love You (Reimagined for Piano) by Roo Panes & Philip Daniel. I realised that even without lyrics, the rhythm was maintained. Words or no words, a film must have shots that are rhythmically in sync with one another.
Is the story a by-product or the guiding force?
When I first started the project, I’d decided to arrange my shots in a chronological order on a timeline and hoped that a communicable story would emerge. In the first month (January) itself, I realised that this wasn’t the case.
A month means that a series of events took place. Some fed into each other, while others were independent. Human beings are incredible at identifying patterns and if you think hard about it, you will almost always be able to find a way to summarise your month.
When I used to review my footage at the end of every month, I could clearly see an overall theme emerging. Some months were majorly about being alone (January, February, April & October), some were about falling in love with places or people (March, July, August, September, November) and some were about finding a balance between the different elements of life (June & October), etc.
This theme would then dictate the film of that month. The music had to match the theme, the rhythm had to match the theme and the placement of shots had to match the theme; all in a powerful attempt to accurately convey my felt experience of that particular month.
Often, while making these films, I would realise that I was getting anchored to events that happened towards the end of the month. During those times, I had to remind myself to remain objective and view all collected footage to arrive at an overall theme, instead of everything revolving around the most recent experience. The only exception I made was in September when Alina moved out & my film for that month became only about her.
What makes up my life’s happy & sad moments?
This learning wasn’t something that I had initially anticipated. However, the data was just there & I could not stop myself from conducting this analysis.
In a way, this project has recorded my experience of an entire year. As mentioned before, some months were better than others and now I had visual proof of what happened in those months. In an attempt to make sense of the events that took place in a month and what the overall theme was, I went through all 30 minutes of compiled films to jot down the major events in each of them.
April was the saddest month for me, followed by January and February. I arrived at the conclusion that if I stay with myself for too long without being in the proximity of another person, even if their presence is temporary, I tend to feel isolated. This learning about myself was conflicting to me since I’ve always loved to stay & live alone.
When I looked at my happiest months (which were March, November & October), I realised that these months had the optimum amount of all the different elements that make up my life. I was still living alone but also meeting people. I was working and I was resting. I was exploring the city that I was in and still made time to be with myself.
This is a learning that I wish to take forward into the next year. When it feels like you’ve done too much of something, do the polar opposite. Too much time alone? Meet someone. Worked too much? Do nothing. Fed up with the city? Go somewhere else. Meeting too many new people? Spend some time alone. I think Ellen DeGeneres has summed this up perfectly in her book, Seriously … I’m Kidding:
“My point is, life is about balance. The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The pina and the colada.”
Every month has good & bad days.
My mum has a saying that I was always quite dismissive about, but now I realise that weirdly enough, it makes some sense. She says, “everyone has the same quantity of good & bad things in their life, almost as if you’re destined for 100 units of good things & 100 units of bad ones. Where life works differently for everyone is how they’re distributed along one’s timeline. Some get all the bad things at once, while others get them in a phased manner”.
When I analysed each film of every month, I could see good and bad moments in every single one of them. In some, the good outnumbered the bad, whereas, in others, the bad outweighed the good. Simply put, life is always going to be a combination of the two; some days will be good and some will be terrible.
Often, when we’re having a bad month, like I thought in April, we forget that there were still some scattered moments of happiness. All it took is for someone to consciously observe them, like I could because of my April film.
This project gave me something to go back to when it felt like things just wouldn’t come out of the gutter. There was always a silver lining, a happy moment hidden in the haystack of sad ones.
Did I meet the goal that I originally started out with?
I began this project to communicate with 5 friends and hoped that 2 other people who used to be a part of my life would also see these films.
Turns out, over the past year, these films racked up a total of 1200+ views, with each one being viewed by 100+ people on average. One hundred people. I originally made these for seven.
Although I do not know most of these anonymous people, some of them were people who follow my work on Instagram and had been religiously following these monthly films.
It was nice to see that people were excited to see someone else’s perception & experience of life, even if the person was a complete stranger to them.
As for the 7 people whom I started this project for, they followed the films almost routinely. One friend took me by surprise. She had been following the films for the entire year but knew that I was hesitant of continuing the project next year. She went back home, watched all the films, jot down her favourite moments from each one and gave them to me as a letter in response to all of my letters. This was quite a sweet gesture.
However, I realise now that conversations require an exchange which a film was not able to facilitate. I had hoped that seeing the films would be enough for a conversation starter but, unfortunately, they were not. The most I would get was, “oh, this was pretty” or “oh, bad song choice”.
Films and their audiences exist in a sort of impermeable dichotomy. A filmmaker makes and the audience sees & mildly reacts. There is little room for a constructive response from the audience. Simply put, I was writing letters but receiving none in return.
Therefore, no. This project did not meet the original goal of staying connected to my friends. Although it did offer me quite a bit: seeing my life over a year, understanding what constitutes happy & sad moments, exploring filmmaking as an expressive medium, etc.
Do I plan to continue this project?
Unfortunately, no. 12/12; December 2022 will mark the end of this project for me.
Apart from the failure that is discussed above, this project has also been extremely taxing. Reviewing about 80–100 shots at the end of every month, carefully picking a song and then making it all come together; all bound by a strict timeline has been an arduous process.
There were also moments that just couldn’t be captured on film. I was either in an environment where pulling out a phone was not appreciated, or the action was happening too fast or the experience just wasn’t tangible enough to record.
Visuals & sounds, by themselves, proved to be a little weak in attempting to communicate someone’s perception of the world. In the end, they were just visual stimuli with an abstract storyline connecting them together. The problem with visual stimuli? Everyone perceives it differently.
This is probably why a film must also have acting, direction, script, dialogues, etc. to bring the audience closer to an intended perception.
What next then?
This past year has been a year of great public-facing vulnerability for me.
I spent a lot of time writing, fearlessly sharing my work experiments and talking to mentees, old friends & new acquaintances. While public-facing vulnerability was a courageous step for me, it was also exhausting & unfulfilling.
I tried sharing my perception of the world, without fully exploring it myself. In 2023, I wish to undertake a journey inwards, rather than avoiding it by taking a journey outwards.
If Anurag was to end this article, he’d probably say:
“This is my truth. What’s yours?”
And I think that’d be quite an apt end to leave you with.
I hope that this article has inspired you to take up a personal project in 2023. I wish you are able to explore & communicate your experience of life.
To all the people who responded to my films, I’m incredibly thankful to you. A special thanks to Alina Khatri in particular, who decided to embark on this year-long journey with me. You can view her 2022 in films here.
For all the people who touched my life in 2022, thank you.
