'The makers don't shoot in chunks, it is all in one go with all the characters visible in the frame. This set-up is different from the general shooting style.'
'To execute this, everyone needs to be well prepared.'
With two very successful seasons in the past, TVF's beloved series Kota Factory is back in its third season. The show has branched itself into an interesting chapter in the lives of its characters, one of which is Jeetubhaiya, a no-non-sense, wisdom-spewing tuition teacher, essayed by Jitendra Kumar.
Does Jitendra feel any nervousness about entering into Kota Factory 3?
"A certain amount of nervousness is nice because it keeps you motivated to do your best," he tells Mayur Sanap/Rediff.com.
"This anxiety is about how you will sync with your director and the writer's vision for the character. Personally, I find it's good for me to feel that nervousness."
Directed by Pratish Mehta, Kota Factory season 3 moves towards D-day as it focuses on the final examinations of its student characters, Meena, Meenal, Vaibhav, Vartika, Uday and Shivangi.
Jitendra says he prepares to get into his character by revisiting old episodes of the show and that helps him to get around with the character traits of Jeetubhaiya.
"The new season comes with new scenes, so to search that familiarity and perform becomes the task. To ease that, I revisit old episodes to re-learn character traits that we previously set in the first season," he shares.
Jitendra feels that even though playing the same character for third time is easy, to shoot for Kota Factory is "never easy" because of its one-long take shooting style.
"The makers don't shoot in chunks, it is all in one go with all the characters visible in the frame. This set-up is different from the general shooting style. To execute this, everyone needs to be well prepared. This is one stressful aspect of shooting for Kota Factory; it was never easy," he reveals.
When asked if he happened to meet his character of Jeetubhaiya in real life, what would Jitendra tell him, the actor says, "I would ask him how to deal with the nervousness that comes right before shooting a new project. I want to know if I should leave it or continue with it or maybe find a new way to deal with it without hampering the quality of my work," he says with a smile.
Premiered in 2019 on the YouTube channel TVF and later on Netflix, the series is set in the city of Kota, Rajasthan, which is known for its coaching centres that prepares students for entrance exams to prestigious engineering colleges like the IITs. The show was criticised for lacking a nuanced perceptive of the parents of the students.
Jitendra, who has been an ITT student himself, says the decision of not representing the parents's point of view is a deliberate choice by the makers.
"Maybe the makers didn't want to put the parents's perspective because the life for students is such that they get disconnected from their parents in Kota," Jitendra says.
"Because of this disconnect, they start managing things on their own at a tender age. I have been in Kota myself, the place is all about students and their teachers. Whatever parents's involvement is there in real life perhaps that didn't fit into the story."
