Sides & Smileys :)

Every morning on a film set has a particular smell to it. Between the good mornings, the rattling of lighting equipment’s and the crackling noise of the setting boys running around shifting furniture, the nervous rustling of a crew finding its rhythm before the first shot. And somewhere in that controlled chaos, a stapled piece of paper would find its way into your hands.

Your sides. The days script.

For those outside film production, sides are a short version of the day's script pages the scenes you're shooting that day, trimmed down to a pocket-sized printout. Every department head, every actor, every assistant carries one. It is simultaneously the most practical document on a set and, I discovered, one of the most quietly expressive ones.

Her name is Rucha Dalvi. She is 22, from Malvan — a small coastal town in the Konkan that most people know for its fish curries (she’s vegetarian btw), and fewer people know for producing quiet, determined young women who show up to film sets and simply get things done. On Red Flags, Rucha served as our clapper AD. She handled the clapperboard, the iconic slate you see snapping at the start of every take — and she was also responsible for printing and distributing the sides each morning to the entire team or at least the HODs. A logistical task. Administrative. Easy to overlook.

Except she did something that no production manual asks for.

Every morning. Without fail. A small face drawn next to a name — and somehow, that changed everything. On the top right corner of my copy, next to my name 'Ritesh Ramaiah' there was always a hand-drawn smiley. A small, slightly lopsided smile with two dots. The kind of thing a child draws in the margin of a notebook.

And yet it got me attention me every single morning.

I don't know exactly when I started noticing it consciously. But at some point, picking up those sides and seeing that little smiley became a ritual within the ritual. A quiet anchor at the start of a loud day.

Then one day it wasn't there.

Just my name. Clean, typed, impersonal. No face in the corner.

And I — a grown man, a director, someone who spends his days making decisions about lenses and blocking and emotional arcs — spent a portion of that shoot day quietly asking himself: Did I do something wrong?

That is the power of a small, consistent gesture. Its absence is louder than its presence. The smiley had become a kind of moral weather report and on a day it rained, I looked inward before I looked outward.

There was also a day I did not receive my sides copy at all. And I noticed. And I wondered. The next morning it arrived with the smiley back and something about that felt like a verdict being returned.

After the shoot wrapped, we were sitting around with our lead actor 'Sukrit' the kind of easy, deflated relief that settles over a film crew after the last shot. Conversations about what was hard. What was good. What surprised you.

And he brought it up himself. The sides. The smiley. He had been watching for it too. He had felt the same pull when it wasn't there. The same quiet self-inventory.

Neither of us had said a word to each other about it during the shoot. But we had both been living inside the same small emotional grammar that Rucha had created entirely without being asked to.

People outside film often imagine that sets are run by directors. They are not. They are run by trust and the elaborate, invisible architecture of people doing their jobs so that you can do yours.

Rucha never missed a morning. The sides were always distributed. The scenes were always logged. And on top of all that, she was drawing tiny faces next to names on printouts, creating a daily ritual that nobody asked for and everybody quietly needed.

I am writing this blog to document the making of Red Flags the decisions, the discoveries, the mistakes. But I wanted the first entry to be about Rucha. Because she is the reason I understand something I didn't fully understand before we started shooting:

Leadership doesn't always come with a director's chair. Sometimes it comes with a stack of photocopied sides, a ballpoint pen, and the quiet confidence to draw a small smiling face in the right-hand corner of someone's morning.