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Pre-Production

Writing. Storyboard. Casting

No. Of Days: 30

Softwares used: Studio Binder

Origin of an Idea

The idea of making a film "PAINKILLER" is incepted in my mind while taking a medicine. The idea of narrative was to generate film like a maze with subjective point of view. Rather than being above the maze, watching the characters making wrong turn, the audience would look into the maze. Making wrong turns with them. Finding blind allays with them.

The whims of the complete story was to make subjected to the Protagonist's mind and I think that was something which gave me the idea of generating a world inside someone's mind to make a feel of reality or somewhere which matters.

The Journey

Scripting

02/11/21 to 24/11/21

Storyboard

25/11/21 to 28/11/21

Casting

29/11/21 to 2/02/12

The period of time from first draft written to Final draft was about 22 days, which includes Character Development, World Building, Story writing and Screenplay writing.

Click here to download Pdf for final draft of Painkiller

In the previsualization stage, we first scouted locations and then with taking a real set locations as a reference Arun Naruka and me made the storyboard.

Most of the casting was done on the basis of auditions, except the two lead protagonists of the film. They both were considered and taken in by looking at their there past projects.

Visual Language

1/1

Writing the Protagonist

At the beginning stage of scriptwriting, I wrote all the side characters to make the world building strong and then I wrote our Protagonist. Writing Maya was very challenging to me because at first I visualize my protagonist as a Male leading character. Then by the suggestion of the Actors I made that character a female leading.

Most of the inspiration for writing this type of character came from the Shutter Island's phenomenal character Andrew Laeddis. So my idea was to bring that type of character with some some concept she's centralized about and from that I came with a concept which can run both the plot and the character throughout the story, which is "Sometimes you need one kind of pain to kill another".

During the production stage of the film we improvise script most of the time to make that character natural to the environment we build and created the plot which was challenging to follow but thrilling to know that what happens in the end. Even the series of shots were arranged in such a way that it updates the characters relations with each other and the McGuffins throughout the film.

The most exciting part was to introduce the protagonist with the world of PAINKILLER and the entrance of the character was written with the feel and concept in Noir Genre.

MAYA

Construction of the world

As a writer developing a world is the most exciting thing and painkiller in no exception. From the Beginning, I focused myself to write side characters and motifs to bring the strong base for the construction of world building.

Building the World for a short script or short film was really a challenge because the idea was to give a clear view of the world to the audience from the very beginning of the film and to counter that challenge we started the film directly from the core location, which was THE WHITE ROOM.

The every motif was written in such a way to promote the flow of story, even the writing of the scene THE EMPTY CUP was written to incept the doubt inside the Audience's mind and questions the true nature of the projections?

The budget of creating the world for painkiller was very limited but that was the beauty of having constrains. It helped us to re-work on the script several times, along with talking to the actors. I guess that was the vantage point from where I looked to the story and made the perfect combination of grounded reality with uncanny feeling.