Intezaar, a short inspired by Brooke Bourgeois’ cartoon

The little over four-minute video (http://www. youtube.com/storytellermenon) has a youngster starting his day during lockdown with black coffee and going about doing his routine that looks relentless. “I came across Brooke Bourgeois’ illustration in The New Yorker recently. I reacted to it in different ways. It was thought provoking in a lighter vein. The cartoon had a couple skiving on a couch, with a caption that reads, ‘The apocalypse movies never mentioned all the sitting around’. Me and my team were looking to do something in the lockdown, and this inspired us to come up with Intezaar,” he tells DT Next.

Completely filmed in black and white tone, Vijay says that the colour palette is the best way to describe the mood. “All of us are going through the same routine every day with no light at the end of the tunnel. Even in the last frame, he looks at the street from inside a closed gate, which indicates that the world isn’t quite ready yet. Moreover, Intezaar doesn’t apply only for the lockdown. It could be related to any pandemic even in future. So we ensured that we shouldn’t make a film with masks and sanitisers and make it look clichéd,” adds Vijay.

The team shot for Intezaar for a couple of days. “The video features Sumvith Chodavaram. The camera has been handled by Smrithi Amarendran. We needed a perfect track that could blend well with the theme. Rao Hamza Hayat gave us the music from the US and Darshan Karunamurthy based in Singapore, and currently in Chennai, handled the edits. We did this on a zero budget and out of goodwill no one charged even a dime,” he reveals. The video went on to catch Brooke’s attention and she praised the team for their effort. “That is the biggest thing. I am glad she liked our work,” he concludes.