When city girl Komal Agarwal downloaded a WhatsApp forward that was sent to her by an acquaintance, she was pleasantly surprised. It was a video that she had worked on herself, just two days ago! The next thing she knows, the video had 3,16,884 views, within a week. The video is a part of the campaign Common Sense Kee Baat, a series of Public Service Announcements made by a team of filmmaking enthusiasts, headed by Hamza Ali and Komal Agarwal. The video in question takes on the subject of mobile phone addiction, in a light vein.
Hamza and Komal founded Cubic Productions, a unit that provides a platform for filmmaking enthusiasts to display their skills for free and build their showreel. They have previously made short films, but this is their biggest project yet. Hamza, who was always interested in filmmaking, says, “I’ve assisted in a few Tollywood films and make ad films for a living but, I wanted something to be my own. I met Komal, a freelance MC, at the shooting of a TV show. We shared the same interests and decided to start Cubic Productions. Since she is from the theatre and mass communication field, she gets volunteers for scripting and acting and I get the technical guys for the music and lighting,” says Hamza.
Interestingly, the eight one-minute PSAs are done on a maximum budget of Rs 2000 and the video that has been trending needed no money at all, apart from the basic equipment. “Komal and I are very socially conscious people and we wanted to question the things that many Indians do, which shouldn’t be done. We’ve addressed issues like public defecation, love for family and general respect towards people. We didn’t want to be preachy in our videos so we used light humour and sarcasm to make people realise what they already know. We limit our production cost because we work heavily on ideating and scripting. The eight videos that are uploaded are usually the product of 80 ideas,” he says.
So have they got any backlash for joking about a serious illness like fits in the video? Hamza is honest. “We’ve collaborated with the Logical Indian for the other videos but could not for this one as we were bound to face backlash on a website that is more serious in nature. We collaborated with pages like the Idiot’story and Just Hyderabadi things to increase the reach of this video because the audience here will take it in a light vein — the way we intended it to be,” he adds. The team has also worked on a PSA for the Telangana Government on drunken driving, which will release soon.
