I have built software since school, and I have loved acting for just as long. The first one paid, so it became the job. The second one stayed a Saturday thing: a decade of rooms above pubs in north London, doing scenes for six other people who also loved it.
The maths of that ambition never worked. A friend of mine spent eighteen months raising the money for a short film. Nine minutes long. Thirty-one thousand pounds by the time the sound mix was paid for. It played at two festivals and now lives on Vimeo with four hundred views. He is not a failure. That is simply what it costs to put moving pictures in front of people, and it is why the industry belongs to whoever can survive the wait.
What the quote actually looked like
Before I built anything, I priced a music video properly, because I wanted to know what I was measuring against. Not a favour from a mate with a camera. A real one, the kind that would not embarrass you next to something on television.
- Director and DoP, two days: $6,000
- Camera, lenses and grip package: $4,500
- Two locations with permits: $5,000
- Lighting and a gaffer: $3,500
- Hair, makeup and wardrobe: $2,200
- Two supporting performers: $2,400
- Editor and colourist: $5,000
- Composer and session vocalists: $8,000
- Insurance, catering, transport, contingency: $4,000
Around forty thousand dollars, and that is a modest version. I have seen the invoices on bigger ones. The number is not the point though. The point is the eighteen months in front of it, spent asking people for money to make something nobody had heard yet.
What I actually did instead
I wrote a song called Dil Pe Dastak. Urdu lyrics, my own, about a man who cannot say the thing he needs to say until it is very nearly too late. I generated the recording, then spent four days rewriting lines that sounded like a machine describing love rather than a person feeling it.
Then I broke it into twenty-eight scenes. Each one got a written prompt: the shot, the camera move, the wardrobe, the light, what the actor is doing with his hands. I generated each scene, watched it, and threw most of them away. The ones that survived, I cut to the song.
Total spend, including the subscriptions and every failed generation: under two hundred dollars. Total time: eleven days, most of it evenings.
Where it fell apart
I want to be honest about this, because the people selling these tools are not.
Faces drift. You describe the same man in scene four and scene nineteen and you get two brothers. The fix is boring and manual: you write one locked description of each character, down to the jaw and the hairline, and you paste it into every single prompt, changing only the wardrobe. I have a file of these. It reads like a police report.
Hands are still a problem. Any shot where somebody grips something, or gestures, or holds another person's fingers, is a coin flip. I ended up writing hand instructions into every prompt, mostly telling it what not to do.
And the model has no idea what a scene is for. It will give you something beautiful and completely inert, a person standing in gorgeous rain feeling nothing. You have to know that it is inert. That is a judgement, and it comes from having watched a lot of films and having stood in a lot of bad rooms above pubs.
The part I keep thinking about
I did not put a crew out of work. The version of this that employed nine people was never going to exist, because I was never going to raise thirty-one thousand pounds for it. What existed before was nothing. What exists now is a film.
That is not true for everyone, and I am not going to pretend it is. If you shoot corporate video for a living, something is happening to you right now, and it is not fair. But for someone doing this on evenings and weekends, the choice was never between a machine and a crew. It was between a machine and silence.
The barrier was never talent. It was forty thousand dollars and eighteen months of asking.
Why this turned into a company
I showed the video to a friend who was getting married. He watched it twice and then asked, quietly, whether I could do that for him and his fiancee. Not a video of my story. Of theirs.
That is Sureela. You send two photographs and a few lines about the people involved, and a person writes an original song about them and cuts it into a film. It is the same process I used, done properly, by someone who has already made every mistake in it.
An Indian wedding runs for days and is built entirely around music. Until now the choice was hiring a composer or dancing to somebody else's song. It should not cost forty thousand dollars to have one that is yours.