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And the interviews-

Raghav Arumugam, writer -director

Q1) What is Odyssey for you?

Odyssey is a very personal project that we wrote specifically for the actress, Khyati Trehan. It’s about a journey. The basic idea is taken from one of the many Hindu stories of creationism, which is that the whole world is a dream of Vishnu, which is why everything around us is an illusion, or Maya.

Thus, Everything is nothing, And the Beginning is the End. And that is tale of the Odyssey.

Q2) How is Odyssey different from any other film?

Well, it doesn’t make sense. What I mean by that, is this film is a very open ended project, it gives the viewer a basic idea of the world and those who inhabit it, but the meaning is up to you to decide, there are many levels in this film, some people watch it and take away one level of understanding and some people will take away 42. It’s different because it doesn’t tell you what the story is, it lets you discover the story for yourself.

Q3) What was more difficult to be- a director or a writer ?

I don’t find either to be difficult, since I truly enjoy making films. Being your own Writer/director allows you a whole lot of freedom you wouldn’t normally get when working for someone else. Of course, having said that, there is a whole lot of pressure of taking the responsibility for the entire film on my own shoulders, it’s my vision and my own execution, so if the film turns out to be total trash and I’m unable to visually communicate my intentions, I cant blame the writers or producers or anyone else but me.

Q4) What kind of challenges did you face as a director?

For a film like this, where the story is about an idea, an emotion, its difficult to find tangible objects and locations that will successfully communicate that. There are a lot of sets and backgrounds that we created completely out of scratch on the computer because we simply couldn’t find real locations that would fit our requirements. That was a big challenge, to make the CGI so seamless with the real so that it communicates the same level of emotion we are trying to achieve.

Also the special effects in this film are some that we haven’t ever tried before, so doing those took a good amount of my time.

Q5) How long did it take you to complete the entire movie ? After all the hardwork and efforts, you expectations ?

We wrote, planned and set up everything within a week and filmed in the following week. This was in the summer. Then the film fell to the back burner because the special effects were becoming more and more complicated as we started working on it in post production. We shot the title sequence in four different ways until we got the one that we used in the final film.

We sort of let the project sleep for a while and worked on other things, built our abilities to the level that we needed for this film and then returned to it last month. By then we were confident we knew what we wanted to do with this film and then we just sat down and pumped the whole thing out. It’s been a long journey, but I’m happy with what we have, and this will be a stepping stone to bigger and more ambitious films in the future.

Dhruv Ganguly, Writer

Q1) Who came up with the abstract idea of Odyssey and how did you put it to words?

     

We didn’t really put it into words, it was Raghav’s idea to start with a face painting video. He’s done one before called Happy Faces and he wanted to do another. We sat down over the phone for an hour and a half just talking about it, working out a story from an elemental and creationist point of view. We had a whole different story in the beginning, with a bunch of various characters and complicated but beautiful story, the thing with that story was that it had no basis, we felt like we needed to create the world the story inhabits first, so we ended up heavily simplifying it and the plot fell into place organically.

Q2) How difficult was it to write a film that is focusing on a visual and emotional narrative rather than an actual plotline?

If you’re keeping a sort of distance from the world and having an existential premise, you have to count on basic elements and emotions and one strong feeling of omnipotence, there was no question of a story. It was an awesome exercise for us to bring it out. It has to be simple enough to create a world, and have her interact with things that are two steps above primeordeal.
What was tough was to get past the ideation point, at the ideation point we came up with everything she goes through, all the emotions and ideas we wanted to express. The problems arose when finding locations and sets and visuals ideal for the emotion we wanted to portray

Q3) How would you define Odyssey for our readers?

It is a chronicle of emotions of the mortal versus the omnipotent. The lack of emotion as far as omnipotent is concerned, a sort of bland expression leading to creation, the juxtaposition of what the omnipotent otherworldly person expects after creation.

The whole point of the thing is birth and rebirth, and then we moved slightly beyond that to a dreamlike existence, creating a world, making it beautiful, then turning it into a nightmare, and then snapping out of it.

Q5) How was the whole experience of working on Odyssey ?

Pretty easy going actually, the writing process was simple for me, and Raghav did most of the technical work.