Daniel Newstead was feeling pretty burnt-out before his trip to India with filmmaker and friend Danny McShane.
The result of the trip was the short film, ‘Waiting For Postcards’, and a whole new perspective for Daniel, aka Omegachild a local music producer. “[Danny] teaches film and I teach music production, so we met each other that way. We actually became flatmates and then he decided he was going overseas, and I decided I'd had enough so I was like 'yeah I'll come with you and bring my gear',” Daniel says. “He was up for whatever, so that's how it came about.”
"[Our guide] snuck onto the army barracks and we stayed there."
The pair didn't go to India planning to make the film. Rather, Danny was looking to travel for his own reasons and Daniel needed to get away for awhile. It wasn't until they returned to Brisbane and Daniel quit his full-time job that the project came together. “[At] the start of the film it sounds like I'm complaining a lot about first-world problems. But when you do get out there and reflect on what you do have you feel pretty lucky. The main thing is getting back to basics. We visited all these towns with people living simple lives, and they're happier than anything. Probably happier than a lot of people I know here, who are just slaving away, going for the career thing and all that.”
Daniel and Danny booked their flights and a couple of nights in a local hotel and that was it; they were determined to throw themselves in the deep end. After visiting the standard tourist destinations, they got help from an unlikely person. “We actually did the tourist thing for a while, but we got really frustrated after awhile. Then we met this dude from the army in Delhi and he was like 'I'll take you up to North India'. Just this random army dude.
"So he drove us up to North India and he snuck onto the army barracks and we stayed there and then he found us a driver, Ashuk, and got us all the gear because it was winter. We weren't even prepared, we thought it was just hot in India, but no it's like minus 15. He got us all this equipment and it was all cool.”
With the trip taking two months, the pair were constantly surprised at western misconceptions and the amount of random happenings that occurred. “It was weird ... People always talk about snake-charmers but they're really hard to find, so it was a rare opportunity. But while he's slapping it around, he's also probably drugged it and ripped its fangs out, so it's not that dangerous. He'd obviously trained it to stand up, and it wasn't violent or anything like that. It was just his way of making money. It was a cool opportunity to record and make a song out of it. We had a lot of moments where we'd record some sounds and I would make some electronic music around it.”
The Dan’s ventured to some of the most detached places they could find, with one of the most isolated being on a mountain peak. “Probably on the way to Dharamsala, at a place called Triund. You had to drive halfway there, and trek the rest of the way up. But because it was the middle of winter, it was completely snowy. We managed to get as far as we could, and there's this one dude who lives right at the top there and he owns a chai shop, and it's like the oldest chai shop in India and he just lives up there. So that was probably the most isolated because we were the only ones up there, and nobody really treks up there. It was actually pretty stupid to try and trek up there, but we made it.”
