A new trilogy of short films titled QSQT (Quarantine Stories Of Quarantine Times) by The Script Room is now available to watch on the Humaramovie channel on YouTube.
The three short films tell the stories of ordinary citizens at home during the nationwide lockdown to curb the COVID-19 pandemic these past few months.
The three short films that make up the QSQT trilogy are titled Essentials, Extension, and Losing It and feature a cast that includes Vijay Maurya, Sanjay Dadhich, Vishal Capoor, Muskaan Khubchandani, Akashdeep Arora, Chirag Malhotra and Kunal Malhotra.
The shorts were written, filmed and produced remotely, using a skeletal crew at home, with the government’s physical distancing rules in mind. Composer Karan Kulkarni has scored a title track for the trilogy, while the casting was done by Casting Bay.
Ayyappan Raj, The Script Room’s co-founder, said of their latest project, “Thanks to our friend Tushar [of Coconut Films] for calling and saying that his brain is getting fried and can we do something exciting. We got the entire team together on Zoom and immediately started jamming on stories.
“We had a lot of ideas, thoughts and we shortlisted three plots that will be easily executable, given the lockdown constraints. And we clearly stayed away from very serious, social-purpose kind of narratives and chose light-hearted, insightful stories of the lockdown, more true to our personality as The Script Room,” he continued.
His colleague, Rajesh Ramaswamy, another co-founder of The Script Room, said, “Instead of writing general stories and shooting during lockdown, we thought we will write stories about the lockdown itself. The execution has its own share of ridiculously hilarious stories. Like, to begin with, casting meant not just the cast, but also their house, their willingness to direct themselves, the kind of equipment they have, the speed of their internet to transfer the files, everything had to be considered.
“It is the shoddiest, crude, organic way of narrating a story, the shaky camera, the bad lighting, the odd angles... it had its own charm. The same reflects in the titling and the music. We kept it raw and intuitive. These may be the stories told with the highest level of restrictions. But we've never had greater fun than this,” he said.