The entertainment industry is one of the worst-hit sectors due to COVID-19 lockdown. The pandemic has made the industry suffer a lot of losses. In the last two-and-a-half months, shootings have halted, shows have gone off-air and movie releases have been postponed. But now, finally, the government has given green light to the entertainment industry, given that the production units will follow a new set of guidelines, before the commencement of shooting.
The Executive Vice President of Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Telefilms, Tanusri Dasgupta in an interview with Spotboye said, “We are actually in the preparing stage now since the time we got permission to go on-floor. We will be working with a much smaller crew than we ever have. So less output for sure. Television in the past years has seen some great production scale and we have pushed all boundaries. Most of those have to be scaled down or one has to find alternative ways to achieve glamour shots”.
She added that the team is planning on talking simpler visuals with social distancing, lesser actors per frame, less complicated sequences, no physical contact. Shows will have simpler narratives which are easier to execute as we did in the early days of ‘Shanti’ and ‘Swabhimaan’. The process has to begin on paper first, but it’s exciting because the content will be king then.
Balaji Telefilms are hoping to go on floors by the end of this month. The shoots for all the shows will start around that time as well. Explaining the precautions that the team is going to take, Tanusri says, “There is a 16-page document, which are the SOPs, that has come in from government and Balaji is implementing all those SOPs as rules on the sets, like sanitization of set thrice a day, changing of masks every three-to-four hour, temperature checks, providing gloves to everybody, there is a nurse on-call and social distancing will be maintained.”
