Break Your Own Record

A newly opened CrossFit gym in Model Town, Delhi, got in touch wanting a video to show off the space. Can we shoot on Sunday for a few hours and hand over an equipment and property video the next day? They’d probably spoken to a few content creators and influencers, so they set the budget at around twenty thousand rupees, a little under three hundred dollars.

I remember reading that and doing the quick math every filmmaker does. That number was roughly what we might pay in a single day just to rent gear and support. And here it was meant to cover everything, the creative, the crew, the camera, the lights, the sound, the travel, the edit, all of it.

The easy answer was no. Someone out there would shoot a straightforward fitness video for that, or less. That's just the market. But I didn't want to walk, for two reasons that had nothing to do with the budget. We were trying to break into commercial narrative work, and we needed someone to take a chance on us for our first proper brand film. And I thought we could actually help this man, if he'd let us.

So instead of talking about his equipment, I started asking about his customers. Who were they. What did they earn. Where did they live? Which phone did they carry, which app did they spend their evenings on. He got visibly confused and stopped me. Why are you asking all this? You should be asking about the gym, about the facilities, about how you'll make them look good.

That was the moment everything turned, for both of us. I walked him through why the questions mattered, how a film that understood his customer could do far more for his business than one that just showed off the space. And to his credit, he listened. He got curious. He wanted to know what kind of film could actually grow his gym, and that openness let both of us do something neither had planned to.

It cost him more than he'd expected, and that was not a small thing. This was during the pandemic; gyms had been shut for six months, and he had no certainty about the months ahead or whether his existing members would even return. He backed us anyway.

Abhimanyu Aneja wrote a narrative that hit exactly the right chords, the kind of thing the owner couldn't say no to once he heard it. Then we went looking for someone to carry it on screen and found Vanee Kaur. As we talked, her own life began to reshape the film. She was raising a seven-year-old, running a home, and still carving out the time to train. We rebuilt the storyboard around that, a woman finding a piece of the day that belonged only to her. Suddenly, the film wasn't about a gym at all. It was about consistency and about breaking your own barriers regardless of what your circumstances look like.

Then the second lockdown arrived with a single day of shooting left. The whole thing sat frozen for two months before we could ask Vanee for one more day with a skeleton crew to finish what we'd started.

The title ended up meaning more than we intended. Vanee's character was breaking her own record on screen, and off screen,we were breaking ours, our first real brand commercial, made for almost nothing, held together through two lockdowns because a gym owner in Model Town decided to trust us.

Looking back, this is the film where the way I work now really took shape. The instinct to start with the person watching rather than the thing being sold, began in a conversation with a confused gym owner who wondered why I wasn't asking about his facilities. I've been asking those same questions ever since.