Hyderabad: Shot by 23-year-old Aneesh Chaganty, Seeds is a journey of a man to India to surprise his mother and share a good news with her. The two-and-half-minute film was shot in 10 days in different locations, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, Singapore and India.
“I studied Google Glass and came up with the idea overnight. The aim was to find out where Google Glass and storytelling can merge,” says Aneesh who studied Film and Television Production from University of South California. He adds, “I drove 20 miles to pitch the idea to my producer. We wanted to come up with something that is feasible and going to India and shooting did not sound feasible, so I wanted to meet him personally to pitch the idea.”
The filmmaker also has his own reasons for coming back to South India to shoot. “It was feasible for me because I had my family in Hyderabad. I always wanted to tell a story in Hyderabad but never got a chance earlier. Now that I got one, I knew that I could tell the story in a way that no one told before. Whenever people in the West think of India, they think of Jaipur, Taj Mahal, etc. Not many of them have seen the southern India before. That’s one of the reasons why I picked it.” Aneesh also had immense support from his family who helped him with the locations.
“My mother, Subha Chaganty, who runs a company called AppEnsure keeps coming to Hyderabad on business trips. I also have many relatives in Hyderabad and I am an annual visitor. The scene where the man meets his mother, even that was shot in Hyderabad at my aunt’s place. We also travelled in and around Bheemavaram to shoot the village sequence.”
The shooting however had its own challenges. “I was a one-man crew sporting a Google Glass and travelling around, shooting the journey. The video is all about the interactions I have with people I meet on my way and these were not actors, but real people. Shooting the train sequence was also a challenge as the next stop was 20 minutes away and we had to wrap up before that. And if we missed that, we would have had to wait for more than 10 hours for the next stop.
Moreover, we shot that at 5 am. But in the clip we had to make it look like we shot in the night,” he says. Aneesh had also made a promise to himself that he would not show anybody who has not been informed about the shooting and hence we find a few blurred faces in the video. “Whoever is a part of the video was informed that they were being shot. I explained the whole concept to them and took their permission. And the ones who did not know, we blurred their face,” says Aneesh.
The young filmmaker states that the response has been so amazing. “I am overwhelmed with the response and it is certainly something that I did not expect. My phone dies almost thrice every day with the amount of mails and messages I get. People are reaching out to me and telling me that I made them miss home and moved them to tears,” he says.
