Dayanand Shetty and Aditya Srivastava recall shooting for the 111 minutes single-shot episode and setting a world record; former says 'Cameraman had to carry a 37 kg heavy steady body cam for the shoot'

CID's 111-minute episode holds a world record as the whole episode was shot in a single shot. In a recent podcast, Aditya Srivastava and Dayanand Shetty got candid about their experience and detailed how they shot that whole episode with the whole CID Team.

It wasn't something thought about, we had a 90-page bound script and we used to do 20 pages each day and lock it. Then we had a dry run and it was settling in within 2 hours but ultimately, it was destined to be 111 and that is how the episode got set in 1 hour 51 mins.

Singh Sahab always wanted to shoot a single-shot episode. His popular Marathi show 100 had a single-shot episode and Shivaji Satam was playing the lead there too. So he thought that even in CID we should shoot an hour-long single-shot episode. Then he came to know that there was a world record for 88 mins docu-film which was a single shot. Then he decided to break it by 2 mins so started writing an episode of 90 minutes duration. And then the script turned out to be 111 minutes long.

We reached Lonavala on October 1st and all of us locked the first 20 pages. We rehearsed all the lines and how the scenes would be. We did that for 5 days and completed the whole script. Then on the sixth day, we only did a run-through of the whole location on how the shoot shall happen, we choreographed all the camera moments and blocked everything for the actual shoot.

The whole question was who would run with us holding that heavy camera for 2 hours as it was a single shot shoot. It was a 37kg body cam that the camera person had to carry on their body and roam with us. Nitin Rao was the one, who took up the challenge and shot it for us. He also shot Main Hoon Na's song in single-shot. He is a marvellous steady cam operator.

We then showed Nitin everything that was choreographed for the shoot and Singh Sahab was with him all the time to guide him whether he had to take left pan, right pan shot or what for the scene. Singh Sahab was guiding, but to hold on to the camera was Nitin Rao. After two hours, his whole body was shivering and what an amazing work he did. He didn't leave the camera even for once.

We did make mistakes, forgot the mobile in the shot and the camera could not cut. So someone would slide in the phone when the camera was panning. So the camera would be on once and shut only after the whole episode was shot so we had to navigate through it and even give our scenes in that one shot.

There was one mistake in technicals, where KK ji was sitting with bandages on and he narrated what had happened. When he says, 'bahar se koi aaya' the camera pans towards the corridor and that was the only window he had to remove the bandages and come in the flashback look. So when the camera panned, he went to sit without the bandages but that reflected in the mirror so that was a technical error that got rectified later.

On the 6th day when we were practising, we had a cut after achieving footage of 35 minutes because of that error. Then there were a few more errors at 8-7 mins gaps. But then on the final day, we did do it quite seamlessly. All of us had a lot of responsibilities on our shoulders the mistake shouldn't happen because of us. If the error comes because of me, then 100s of people were there so all of us were prim and proper.