The pandemic was a recent global phase where the world stood still, united in solidarity to protect as many people as possible. Businesses were shut down, millions lost their jobs, and death news became commonplace. Every day felt like an unimaginable struggle. However, I managed to secure a project during this challenging time. The client was Courageous Studios, CNN’s branded content studio, tasked with working on a Mastercard project in a village in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district. Naturally, the pandemic made it difficult to get things started, but my teammate Inder Bariya and I took charge of executing the shoot.

In August 2020, Inder organised a team from Hyderabad and Chennai to join us. We began preparing for the shoot, adhering to Covid guidelines. Our clients, Sara Intrator and Shonta Rogers from North Carolina, US, supervised the shoot from their office. We ensured that PPE kits were arranged, vaccination cards were shared, and flight tickets to Visakhapatnam and then road travel to the Guntur district and Narsipatnam village were booked. November was chosen as the filming month.

The biggest conflict that arose during the shoot was that I wasn’t on the ground. Each foreign client had specific requirements that needed constant attention while filming. Since the crew was new and I wasn’t present, we relied heavily on the ground line producers. Although we used LivU equipment to transmit the camera feed directly into a Zoom setup, allowing live filming between the US and India, the absence of a mediator between the clients and the ground team presented its own challenges. 

The shoot involved taking interviews with local farmers, and Darshan Venkat was on camera while Inder Bariya coordinated everything. The language barrier was evident, as Darshan was a Telugu-speaking farmer while the crew was a mix of Hindi and Tamil speakers. This shoot showcased India’s great diversity. Mr. Ramamurthy, the interviewee, often stumbled over his answers because he wasn’t a trained speaker. I felt a bit disappointed not to be on the ground, but budget constraints meant we couldn’t accommodate too many people, especially during such tiring times. The village also had its own network issues, causing a crack in conversations and technical glitches during filming, which we would later learn about. Despite these challenges, the four-day shoot in the villages of Narsipatnam was a success.

Supervising a shoot remotely is as difficult as being on set, requiring control over things you can’t see. Finding a balance between the two is incredibly challenging, especially when communication, network, and logistics are involved. However, once the shoot is complete, it feels like a mountain has been conquered.