After winning accolades for their film Ghost of the Golden Groves, Aniket Dutta and Roshni Sen are back with a new project — a music video for the song Wholeness and the Implicate Order by the London experimental group The Lost Dinosaur. While Aniket has directed it, Roshni has produced the black-and-white project, which is on YouTube now. “Space is an important theme for all our projects, be it outer space or the constrained individual space forced out of the Covid aftermath. Coming out of a prolonged lockdown where everything seemed unreal, working on this video was like a lucid dream experience,” says Roshni.

Aniket gives The Telegraph a lowdown on the genesis of the video and more...

What was the starting point for this video for Wholeness and the Implicate Order by The Last Dinosaur?

Well, Jamie (from The Last Dinosaur) and I were talking about doing something together for a long time, which didn’t work out back then as we were busy with Ghost... through 2018-19. And when he finally finished this song, the pandemic was here.

Did you get a brief from The Last Dinosaur?

Jamie really likes the otherworldliness of our film-making, which he wanted to connect to his track.

What were your thoughts when you heard the piece of music for the first time?

This is not exactly the kind of music I’ve worked with before but the grandeur of it (especially the mix) really grew on me.

How did you visualise it? What did you want to communicate through the video?

The track shares its name with a book by quantum physicist David Bohm and the first thing that came to mind was to add a multi-dimensional layer to the video. So I borrowed a character from my debut feature who lives in a different dimension. Also, going through the Covid pandemic gave us a good opportunity to self-reflect. It’s a scenario where one sometimes has a physical sensation of dreaming it all... I’ve tried to capture this mind-body dualism through the video.

After Ghost of the Golden Groves, you go back to black-and-white here. Why?

They watched our film (Ghost...) last year at Leicester Square and wanted to make a black-and-white project with us primarily. We actually wanted to do something in colour.

How was it written?

I had created a moodboard and a short treatment with the characters to begin with. Later we brought in more cosmic and ominous layers to it with some amount of improvisations that we achieved on set and in the post production.

We see a house of memories. Tell us about the storyline?

It’s a narrative of two characters from different dimensions who are stuck in the same house, waiting for some sort of a galactic alignment to summon each other.

Scenes dissolve into one another; there’s a fan with two blades. Tell us about the visual themes and cues?

The main idea was to explore the intersections of the two characters from two different dimensions and also to bring out the memories that are stuck in the house through generations. I was interested in transmitting this collating of dreams, planets, jellyfish and memories, which for me manifests aesthetically and structurally.

How was it like shooting during a pandemic? Where did you shoot?

We shot in a building located in one of the old neighbourhoods of south Calcutta. It was a strange yet interesting experience... of course there were constraints with limited crew, sanitisations etc but this is probably the future. We shot in July on one of the no-lockdown days.

Tell us about casting Rupsha Guha?

She has a very versatile look that is quite timeless, which I think was a good fit and also she managed to retain a deadpan expression throughout, which along with the masked character, and all the other elements blended into the space we intended to create.