COVIDiot Positive: Saad Khan and Danish Sait's short film in quarantine is sick!

An assassin climbs up the stairs to enter an apartment. It's lockdown time and the building is eerily quiet. He's been paid to murder a his client's ex-wife, who lives there with her current husband. Now the woman and her husband seem to have taken social distancing a level higher, by isolating themselves in different rooms and talking to each other by shouting, standing on either side of a wall that separates them. Now, why are they distant? Will the assassin end up committing the murder? We are not going to tell you the answer to either of these.

But this is how the plot of the short film COVIDiot Positive progresses. Did we mention that the six-minute-long film, written and directed by Saad Khan, was shot completely in isolation? Starring Danish Sait, Vamsidhar Bhogaraju, Disha Madan and Saad himself, the clips were shot by all the actors separately, at their homes and were later edited into a single film by editor Arjun Choudary.

"It took us six days to make this film, right from writing the script," says Saad, who wrote the screenplay in a day. "Danish and I have been doing a lot of live videos since the lockdown began. We thought of introducing more characters here and inviting more artists," he says. Saad then emailed the final script to the actors and the editor and discussed the rundown over a video call. "Following this, all the actors shot their respective portions. I had asked them to send shots from two different angles to make the editing look seamless," he says.

"This was a zero budget film. Nobody made any money here," says Saad, who hopes to create more such content in the future. "I love challenges. Thank god for Google Drive, Hangouts and Zoom calls, we could coordinate it well," he says. The entire film is in monochrome, to make it seem like the film was shot in one single location.

Danish, on the other hand, believes that the film reinforces the fact that 'art has no borders'. "Making a film in isolation was something that one would have never thought of. I found this really exciting," he says. Danish also tells us how he discovered a new talent while shooting the film. "My apartment's security guard shot the video for me. He was so excited and was such a natural. He was immediately on board to shoot the video," says the Humble Political Nograj actor.