FRANK Water came to Omni to produce a film that demonstrated the impact of access to clean water and sanitation has on rural communities in India.

With a total budget of under £6k, our brief was simple - no talking heads and work with and be respectful of the local community.

Our aim was to tell a story that required no dialogue, a film that helps capture both lives before and after the community has access to clean water and sanitation, and demonstrate the knock-on effect this has on freeing up girls to be able to go to school and women to start small businesses.

Although this is an intimate portrait of an individual, we had to ensure that the message reflected the wider issues around a lack of access to water. The message being that this isn’t just going to happen if we do nothing, but it can be as simple as this if FRANK water is able to keep developing local partnerships and developing water projects.

Our fixer in Warangal knew the communities that FRANK Water worked with and proceeded to see if they could find a girl who would be interested in playing our lead. We received audition footage from several girls from the ideal village and Kavitha was a stand-out favourite with everyone - her personality and attitude simply leapt off the screen. 

With a crew of two (Darren Finch Director/Producer & Tim Fok Cinematography) we flew out to India for 10 days and spent 5 x consecutive 15 hour shoot days with Kavitha, her family and her amazing community to produce a film that we are all incredibly proud of.

The idea from the start was to ensure we could 'stretch' the footage and use it across multiple campaigns and platforms. We secured an hour with BBC's Anita Rani (Springwatch, Strictly etc) who is one of Frank Waters patrons. We shot a piece with her to enable us to extend the footage and produce another edit that became the backbone of the FRANK ‘6 hours' campaign.

In addition to this we also then put together another cut that played with the messaging and hero-ed the cinematography.

One of the best results for me personally is we were able to pay Kavitha's family the equivalent of 8 months salary to help us on our shoot week, with the money going towards the wedding and dowry of their eldest daughter.