Hahakar: What My First Film Role Taught Me About Storytelling

A reel gives you 60 seconds. A film scene gives you whatever the story needs — sometimes two minutes, sometimes ten. That difference sounds small until you are standing on set on your first day, and the director calls for a third take of a two-minute scene, and you realise that the energy you put into every 60-second reel will not survive the kind of sustained arc a film requires.

'Hahakar' was a Gujarati comedy feature, and my role was a supporting one — enough to learn the craft without the pressure of carrying a film. What I learned in those early days on set reshaped how I think about performance, even in the short-form work I had been doing for years.

The biggest shift was internal. On Instagram, you are performing to a camera that is essentially you — the angles are yours, the timing is yours, the edit is yours. On a film set, you are performing to and with other actors, and the camera is someone else's eye. The scene only works when everyone is present at the same time in the same way. That kind of ensemble responsiveness is a different skill entirely.

Comedy on screen is more fragile than comedy in reels. A reel's edit can rescue a mediocre take — cut to the reaction shot, tighten the rhythm, drop a music sting. A film scene has to work in the room first. The laughter from the crew during a good take is the most honest feedback you will ever receive as a comedy performer.

What Hahakar gave me, beyond the role itself, was a respect for the patience that filmmaking requires. Every detail — the costume, the lighting, the exact position of a prop — is a deliberate choice. The education was in watching those choices being made, understanding why each one mattered, and beginning to develop the eye that eventually made my brand content sharper and more intentional.

The experience also confirmed something I had suspected for a while: the skills that make short-form content work — the read of an audience, the economy of a gesture, the precision of a pause — are exactly the skills that translate to screen performance. The formats are different. The fundamentals are the same.