Raunak is an extremely gentle and pleasant guy. He has a tendency to care and pamper people around him. And is a very emotional lover too! Karuna the lucky girl, is an equally gentle & fun loving spirit. She wears a sweet smile all the time and is terribly emotional towards her beau. One heck of a lovey dove couple i say 🙂
R & K are friends, lovers and partners since almost a decade. They never formally proposed each other, yet their wedding dates are reaching near. Raunak thus thought of surprising his love with a formal proposal amidst their friends. Raunak approached me for an intended shoot of his proposal.
He had seen my work in his cousin sister’s (Kashmira’s) wedding. And had very vibrant image of what all he would do and how i would shoot Karuna’s expressions etc. We went over conceptualizing the entire play for more than 2 weeks. He stays at Mumbai and thus all this went on over phone & mails.
He could spare only weekends for a visit to Pune while K lives in Pune and its a routine for him to spend weekends with her. Yet we met on the Ganesh visarjan weekend to scout the spot where we would stage his plan. A lot of things went haywire in terms of timelines and availability. When i say availability, everyone involved were tied up with different commitments including the couple, me, their friends and so on.
It burned down on us to make it all happen suddenly in a day’s notice. And boy we did it! 🙂
Since this was a complete surprise to Karuna (only), so half of the people involved (including K’s brother 😛 ) had to work behind stage. Me included. I was hiding behind a tree in a way that i can shoot into K’s face. R was concerned only about me getting her precious expressions 🙂 While i had burdened myself with much more than that. The experiments i had in mind was something i never tried before. It was impossible to shoot while K had clear visibility of tree in front of her where i was hiding 😀 Still caught few shots (with half the frame covering tree). Shehh!
Thats when some miscreants appeared and spoiled the entire plot. We didn’t want to get into a fight ‘coz the purpose of our get together was something very tender and beautiful. So without spoiling any of our mood, we went to the next spot me & Raunak had finalized. By now Karuna came to know about the entire plan…obviously!

As the saying goes “whatever happens, does for the better”. The rascals who showed up to ruin our initial plan did us a huge favor. ‘Coz now i was out of the hiding and could shoot them freely from all angles i wished to. And there was no fear of some surprise being disturbed.
Yet…our dude went ahead & blew Karuna’s mind out! There were multiple moments when she was about to break into tears. He however held her together. It was all so beautiful!
Here’s how i saw it 🙂

 

Editing alone took 8 days (i was playing with a completely new set of toys this time…from a Mac machine to new editing software). Though i had done a video before (R’s cousin’s wedding), but that was the first ever. The audio went bad in there and was too disappointed by the trial. Like his cousin (Kashmira & groom Bharat) Raunak too supported me immensely and very patiently with everything i wanted to experiment.
It was such a pleasure being a witness to this amazing love scene unfolding. Poured all my heart into making this simple love story! And i am aware that they absolutely loved it 🙂
Cheers to their vibrance, brilliance and candid love!
Bravo Raunak & Karuna! 🙂
❤