The film opens on an invoice printing itself out of a strip of green light, a line at a time. Brand identity, three rounds. Additional revisions — seven of them. IGST at eighteen percent. Then the line I kept circling back to the whole time I was working on it: the GST has already gone to the government. Twenty-seven thousand rupees paid out on money that never came in.
That’s the detail that made the piece worth making. Everyone knows what a late payment is. Fewer people say out loud that you can be taxed on income you’re still waiting for, and that waiting quietly turns into lending.
So the opening does almost nothing. The cursor arrives, sits on SETTLE NOW, and never presses it. What moves instead is the counter in the corner — forty-seven days overdue becomes forty-eight while you’re watching it. I wanted the first thing you felt to be the one thing in the frame you have no control over.
After that it’s mostly arithmetic. A red chart climbing a day at a time from the due date, then the same shape run backwards in green until it hits zero. Four payout rails cycling behind one sentence. A ledger of clients scrolling past with the overdue rows tinted pink. I held the palette to two colours the whole way through, one green and one red, so that you could watch it with the sound off and still know which direction things were going. Everything else is near-black, small type, and a few loose digits drifting at the edges of frame.
The invoice on screen is billed from my own name. I don’t know that it changes anything for someone watching. It changed something for me.