KOLKATA: Despite having witnessed one of the worst ever cyclones in the recent past, Kolkata resumed TV productions in early June. After months of lockdown causing a financial stress to numerous people, a part of the Tollywood returned to the sets. A number of guidelines now have to be followed while shooting but it has given hope to production house representatives as well as others related to the TV industry that they can work in safe ways.
SVF vice president- television Arabinda Dasgupta says that there wasn’t much difficulty in resuming and even productivity had not gone down. He adds that rigorous sanitisation, regular temperature screenings, protocols of social distancing are being followed diligently. Currently, SVF‘s TV division has five dailies on different channels.
While the mandate is 35 people inside the shooting zone as per the mandate, Dasgupta says that they are voluntarily limiting it to 25 people. Moreover, storylines are twisted to avoid physical proximity. It even carried out workshops with directors, DOPs to adhere to social distancing norms while shooting. However, in the case of unavoidable intimate scenes, the plan is to use mannequins. All shoots outside studios are deliberately being avoided to keep out crowding.
Despite all the extra measures, Dasgupta says that churning out new episodes is not taking more time than usual as it has “a fantastic SOP.”
Susanta Das, who owns a production house Tent Cinema and runs Boyhood Production jointly with Nispal Singh Rane, reflects the same tone. Das, who has serials on all three major broadcasters, says that the stricter norms is not delaying day-to-day affairs but rather making it easier for them to finish on time as now they have to wrap up by 8 pm. He adds that the shooting needed to resume given the large number of people associated with it.
Das reassures that they are using sanitisers, checking the temperature with thermal guns and not allowing anyone to go out of the floor unnecessarily and even forbidding crowding at sets to ensure safety.
However, he shares that the new normal is very unusual as shooting needs many people to work closely together on the floor but they are adhering to new kinds of storytelling to ensure social distancing. They, too, will use mannequins going forward if scripts demand intimacy.
Sudeshna Roy, an actor and producer, says that as the shooting for film and digital original content is yet to resume, they are currently working on post-production. She shares that film shooting is not organised like TV serials and cannot be limited to studios. Hence, it needs robust planning which is being currently worked on.
The West Bengal government issued a notification on 30 May allowing shootings from 1 June with a maximum of 35 people. But due to several complexities, it took some time to finally resume the shootings. There was a stand-off between producers and artists forum regarding insurance which got solved later.
