Case study:

Below is given a treatment of a documentary film on a young adoloscent boy whose family has a
100 years long movie projector. On Sundays he fits the projector to the cart and has film shows on
street corners. Viewers outside India may have seen the glamour and glitz of
contemporary Bollywood – the largest movie industry of the world, but Little
Flickerman will give them a glimpse of a family living on the margins of this
movie industry and yet, being one of the few remaining custodians of the
early days of cinema in India.

This film will also be an eye opener to the foreign viewers on how semi
educated and uneducated Indians internalize technology and adapt it to suit
their purpose. Ashraf and his father Salim have indigenised every part of the
projector and have no difficulty in keeping it in running condition.

Notice the following points about the treatment:

1. It is written in present tense

2. Though it is written in running form, the transitions from sequence to
sequence are clearly marked
3. The shots in the montage are clearly listed
4. Some key scenes – specially the opening and closing sequence, are
described in details
5. Some anticipated dialogues are also written

With the above details, it becomes easy for the reader to visualize the film in
his mind.

LITTLE FLICKERMAN
REVISED TREATMENT
Expected duration: 56 mins
Characters:
Mohammed Ashraf (A boy 10 to 12 years old, adept at running a movie projector)
Mohammed Salim (Ashraf’s father – a 50 years old man, owner of the projector)
Ashraf’s siblings (Three brothers and one sister)
Ashraf’s mother (A lady about 45 years old, who feels strongly attached to the projector)
Narrator (His presence will be in voice only)
The projector: A 100 years old hand cranked projector

Fade in to a quiet alley. A black cart pops up at a distance. Different parts of the projector pop up
one by one on top of the cart. Ashraf pops up at his seat from where he runs the projector. His
brothers pop up beside the cart. Ashraf starts running the machine. Hindi movie dialogues or
songs are heard mingled with the tick tick sound of the projector. Crowd gathers round the
projector in three to four stages of pop up.

Cut to high angle extreme long shot of the crowd.

C.U of a passers by’s wrist watch. The time is 3PM. The show in the neighbouring movie hall has
just got over. A crowd comes out. The matinee show is about to begin. People are filing in. A
house full placard is hung over the ticket counter.
Cut to C.U of Ashraf’s hand turning the wheel. Cut to the projected images. These are slightly
scratched out, slightly distorted images of Bollywood blockbusters – boy chasing girl round a tree
or hero throwing villain down a cliff. Stars of Hindi movies can be recognized swiveling their
hips to the accompaniment of a song.

A short montage edited to the beat of the song. Images of the projected movie are intercut with
Ashraf’s intent expression while he’s running the projector, row of heads peeping througjh the
black curtain, expressions of the viewers who have stuck their heads through the curtain, the
crowd gathered round the cart and back to the images of the projected movie.

The projector cranks to a halt, the song goes hoarse and stops, the projected image becomes still.

Title LITTLE FLICKERMAN appears.

The title flickers for a while and then fades out.

Heads pop out of the black curtain. The crowd begins to disperse. Ashraf’s brother passes an old
tin coin box around. A few one rupee coins fall in the coin box. A little boy slips away without
paying. Camera follows the tin can through the crowd.

Ashraf’s father comes and checks out the money. He picks up a coin from the coin box and gives
it to Ashraf’s brother. The boy buys a sweet for himself and a cup of tea for his father. Father sips
the tea and reminisces about old times. He says that he has been running this machine since the
age of ten. His father raised him running this machine and he is raising his family of two
daughters and four sons. Ashraf is his second son who primarily runs the show these days.

We see Ashraf packing up and moving the cart to the next lane. As Ashraf and his brothers push
the cart, they pass by a movie hall. Posters of latest Bollywood movies come into focus in the
background. All this time Ashraf’s father’s voice is heard.
We cut to Ashraf’s father who has just finished his cup of tea. He throws the earthern pot in the
dustbin and gets up. By now the matinee show in the movie hall has just got over. The evening
show is about to begin.

A few persons of the locality say that the black cart comes in to the lane every Sunday. The
children of the locality rather look forward to it.

As the crowd files into the movie hall for the next show, Ashraf and his brothers gear up for
another show in an adjacent lane. By cutting from the crowd outside the hall to the crowd of
urchins around Ashraf’s cart, a comparison between the two clienteles is made apparent.

Slowly it gets late. The shutters of the shops are pulled down. The street becomes quieter. The
time on a passersby’s wrist watch shows 9PM. The evening show crowd disperses from the hall.
Ashraf’s family also start packing up.Ashraf, his father and his brothers with the cart cross a busy
street to come home. We see them from across the street. Our view gets blocked by a passing
vehicle.

Fade out.

Fade in to Ashraf’s home.

Late morning. Ashraf’s home – a small crowded room The projector is seen in suggestion in the
foreground and daily chores of the household are witnessed from the POV of the projector.
Ashraf’s mother is busy cooking, her sons are walking in and out of the room. It seems to be a
special day – some kind of a festival. All the brothers are dressed in traditional finery. Mother is
cooking a special meal. Ashraf’s youngest brother hovers round the oven and smells the aroma of
the food. Ashraf too is dressed for the occasion. He sits down beside the projector, very near the
camera. An off voice from behind the camera strikes a conversation with Ashraf. The
conversation proceeds something like this:

Off voice: What is your name?

Ashraf: Mohammed Ashraf

Off voice: What do you do?

Ashraf: I study
Off voice: What else do you do:
Ashraf: I show movies – on Sundays

Off voice: Really! What movies do you have? Show me

Ashraf takes out a can from the trunk. He opens it to check the name. He keeps the can on the
bed. He takes out another can and then another.

Soon a heap of film cans get collected on the bed.

Ashraf and his brothers jump up on the bed. Ashraf pulls out a can of film reels. He examines the
reel against the light. A surrealistic image of the film strip, superimposed on the window bars and
view outside the window is formed. His brothers join him and open up the other film cans. They
start examining the film strips against the light. A criss crossing of film strips is formed against
the window, the light shining through the myriad images. Ashraf and his brothers rattle off the
names of all the movie stars visible in the film strips. One of the strips is a song sequence. Ashraf
breaks into this song His brother starts dancing to the song. The others join in and it becomes a
big jambouree. The film strips are seen flying all over the room in slow motion. Ashraf dances in
slow motion along with the film strips. The sequence ends in a crescendo.

Ashraf is seen spooling back the film reels with his spinning wheel. His father and mother are also
around. They begin to narrate anecdotes from the past. Ashraf tries to recall his first try at running
the projector.

The off voice, who has by now befriended Ashraf, asks him how the projector runs. Ashraf
explains his own understanding of the mechanism of the projector. The off camera voice, to have
a better understanding of the projector, asks him to do a drawing. Ashraf obliges. It is a rough,
slightly comical drawing. It keeps building up or modifying as he explains on. The off camera
voice keeps asking him tricky questions and he tries to explain them in his own language.
Through this delightfully comic conversation, it emerges how a boy with little education has
internalized a complex technology.

Ashraf’s father can’t recall when the projector came into the family, but he clearly recalls how
this silent projector was converted into a sound projector. As the father speaks of the sound
mechanism, Ashraf shows it in the projector. Ashraf’s drawing of the projector appears again and
here the sound mechanism gets added on. The drawing gets animated and Hindi film dialogues
are heard. Cut to Ashraf turning the projector and the same dialogues continue on the sound track.
Ashraf turns on the lights of the projector. His father explains how they use improvised lenses.
Ashraf shows how two lenses are fitted in a tube. His father says, the lenses used for hall
projectors will be useless for him and they are too expensive.

Ashraf’s off camera friend asks him whether he has been to the projection room of a movie hall.

Cut to the projection room of a multiplex theatre. Ashraf is seen here. He is specially dressed for
the occasion, but in spite of it, he is a bit of an oddity in this sophisticated, high tech milieu. He is
a bit awe struck. His candid reactions are captured. He sticks his face to the glass window and
looks below to the galleries. He comes out of the hall, walks past the booking counters, the movie
posters and the crowd filing into the hall. The off camera voice asks him to take his seat at the
food court. Varieties of food pop up at the table in front of him. Off camera voice strikes a
friendly conversation with him – about his studies, the games he likes to play, his friends and his
future. As Ashraf speaks, glimpses of his everyday life are seen. Glimpses of Ashraf’s life come
in stark contrast to the milieu that he is now in.

Ashraf relishes the food and speaks. At one point of time, he goes into a reverie. Camera zooms
into the close up of his eyes. A plaintive music is heard on the sound track. We cut to his point of
view – and lo and behold! Ashraf’s black cart is seen bang at the center of the shopping mall.
People are busily moving around it – not noticing it. People’s movement is captured in slow
motion.

An abrupt question from Ashraf’s off camera friend jerks him back from his reverie. The black
cart is not seen any more. The movement of the crowd becomes normal.

Ashraf gets up to leave. He walks past the movie posters, past the shops and out into the street.
The series of tracks continues on the street, capturing movie posters pasted on walls, movie
hoardings on bill boards and general scenes of the city. The track shots are a little blurred and one
shot dissolves into another. The music builds up as the tracks continue.The series of tracks ends at
a place called Murgi Hata from where Ashraf’s father buys rejected movie trailers and clippings.
At Murgi Hata the music ends in a crescendo.

Ashraf and his father are seen buying some film reels. Ashraf asks his father to buy an Aamir
Khan film. They come home and load their projector with what their latest purchase. Ashraf’s
father demonstrates how they use cellotape to join the song sequence of one film with the fight
sequence of another and prepare their own concoction.
Ashraf’s father Salim takes the projector out of his room and down the stairs.

Ashraf and his father are seen pushing their cart along various streets and lanes of Kolkata. Off
voice keeps showing Ashraf various landmarks from the history of cinema in the city - the ground
where a tent was set up and the first film was screened, the first movie hall of Kolkata, the place
where the Pathe Freer & Co. office used to be and traveling exhibitors like his grandfather used to
buy their scrap films from. Most of these landmarks have been transformed beyond recognition.
They dissolve into drawings of what they used to look like in olden days. One of the drawings is
of a man sitting with a projector on a bullock cart. The bullock cart is moving along a village path.

Ashraf is informed that traveling exhibitors like his grandfather have been singularly responsible
in spreading the popularity of cinema among the masses.

Ashraf is seen on a bullock cart with his father. His father says that he used to go to village fairs
with his father. He narrates some of the incidents that happened in villages. With his narration,
there is a montage of images projected from his projector on various surfaces – mud walls, brick
walls, dilapidated wall of an old palace, street corner with political posters on the wall, a wall in a
shanty town and so forth. The images projected range from old black & white films to
contemporary films. The montage ends with the film just purchased at Murgi Hata.

A fairground. Ashraf’s movie cart is placed amidst other attractions. He is competing with toy
vendors, food vendors, giant wheels and merry go rounds, magicians and beggars. He is cranking
away his projector. Little boys and girls have gathered round the cart, vying with each other to get
a peek at the show. Off screen voice asks Ashraf what he would like to be when he grows up.
Camera zooms into his face and goes out of focus. We see him running a projector at a multiplex,
at the embroidery factory like his brother, we see him suited and booted, climbing the steps of his
house – his cart lying unattended below the staircase. Most of these visuals correspond to his
conversation about his future plans at the food court in an earlier sequence.
Camera zooms in on the cart. The colour of the shot slowly changes to tainted brown. The cart
gradually gets dusty and worn out. Useless things pile up on it in dissolves. This transformation is
accompanied on the sound track with a sad tune from a popular Hindi film.

Abruptly the tune stops. The visual comes back to its normal colours, things dumped on the cart
vanish, the projector pops up, Ashraf enters frame and pushes the cart out of frame. In a top angle
shot, Ashraf is seen pushing his cart through the crowd and vanishing into the crowd.

- Treatment developed by Subha Das Mollick