Over two collections (entitled The Great Unwashed and Stumble Asleep) that cover the walls of the Matthieu Foss Gallery in Mumbai, he has used unique crops and the same set of subjects to explore the Indian male form as well as the idea of such men’s dreams.

The two collections of photographs are in turns poignant, dramatic, documentary and slightly troubling. They possess a two-sides-of-the-same-coin quality that prompts the viewer to want to see more while simultaneously making them want to avert their eyes.

The Stumble Asleep pictures are framed as perfect squares and arranged along one length of the gallery as slashes of pictorial narrative that tell a story over multiple frames (almost like a storyboard for dreams). Even a cursory examination quickly reveals how easy it would be to re-imagine what the ‘dreamer’ in each narrative sees, simply by changing the order in which certain pictures are presented.

While the tall frames of The Great Unwashed series are impressive and eye-catching I found myself repeatedly drawn to the strung-together narratives of Stumble Asleep. In the embedded video at the bottom of this post I’ve attempted to draw other parallels and contrasts in his works by showing frames from the two collections side-by-side. It all adds up to a fascinating set of pictures that put a fresh spin on the way everyday India has been photographed.

Mr. Charuau’s work is on display at the Matthieu Foss Gallery until 30th September, 2010.

What is amazing however is what the man has done with it.

Resting on its side, as if unable to take the weight of its own structure, in the vast exhibition space at Gallery Maskara is a large skull fashioned after the deformed skull of a girl child who was not allowed to live. From afar, this skull looks like some bejeweled approximation of the diamond-studded brain cage made famous by Damien Hirst. It is only upon closer scrutiny that one realizes that the artist has sealed urine in small bags (also sweat and tears by his own admission) and each of those bags forms the pixels that add up to the three-dimensional surface area of this memorial to the unwanted (and often rejected) Indian Girl Child.

This is pretty powerful stuff.

Elsewhere in the cool confines of Abhay Maskara’s dramatic exhibition space on 3rd Pasta Lane in Colaba we can see Mr. Pandey’s repurposing of cigarette butts to make a beautiful floral arrangement (again requiring very close examination to identify the origins of the raw material); and other pieces made with blood, discarded bank notes, sugarcane and expired chocolate.

Entitled Shelf-Life, Prashant Pandey’s solo exhibition runs at Gallery Maskara until September 26th.

Do yourself a favour and make the time to go see it.

The cinematography is amazing, the performances are uniformly good, nice writing, the score wouldn’t be out of place in a big budget Hollywood movie and the makeup effects and colour grading are just of a very high standard.

Not entirely safe for work (or very young kids) but the rest of you, load this bad boy up now!

And in case you’re wondering, yes that is Rider Strong from Boy Meets World.

This nifty little tool really makes wonders happen with the not very good pictures taken with the iPhone’s camera. it is an inexpensive app and the fun you can have with it justifies the cost several hundred times over.

New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco.

These are the cities we visited to shoot Bollywood biggie Anjaana Anjaani. A crew of about 70 people (Indian and American) were employed in the actual making of the movie itself and I was a single, solitary person responsible for documenting the process of making this big ticket production starring Ranbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra.

From the very beginning I was certain that I wanted to capture the imagery in a way that did not make it look like interlaced ‘video’. I wanted a filmic look to the ‘behind the scenes’ footage as a way of differentiating my work from all the other similar products that inhabit the bonus DVDs of most major Bollywood productions these days. By the middle of 2009 the chatter surrounding video-enabled DSLR cameras was becoming deafening and as luck would have it, the Canon 7D came out a couple of short months before I would have to embark on my sustained journey with more people than I had probably hung out with in my entire life.

The Canon was not my first choice but when I got right down to comparing online video footage of the auto focus-enabled Panasonic GH1 and the (manual focus only) 7D, turned out that I really liked the picture quality better on the latter camera. So that is the one I got.

And the Rode VideoMic on Philip Bloom’s online recommendation for capturing sound.

All I had were a kit lens and a 50mm 1.8. That is it. I shot with the camera in snow and rain. Took it to parts of the California and Nevada deserts apart from the cities of NY and SF. It served me very well and I think I might have had to turn off the camera twice for fears of overheating in the two months I was States-side. I’m proud of the footage I’ve captured and the first ‘videoblogs’ went online on Bollywoodhungama.com and Eros Entertainment’s Youtube page last night (August 18th, 2010).

The movie opens on September 24th, but my work is already out there for people to watch and react to. I’d love it if you took a gander and told me what you thought of it all. Also, added below is a short touristy piece I made from my early days in Vegas.

I’ve used the Canon 7D to shoot a ‘behind the scenes’ documentary on a major Bollywood movie (Anjaana Anjaani; releases 24th September 2010).

I’ve used the same camera on a video feature for CNNGo.com, a few short documentaries I’ve made in Mumbai and on a short film for my friend and colleague Anand Sivakumaran. With the lenses out of just the Canon stable it is possible to generate gorgeous images straight out of the camera. With third-party lenses, additional kit for the camera and some efficient colour-grading software there are very few reasons for the independent filmmaker to consider wasting significant resources on shooting her film on actual film.

Yeah yeah yeah! I’ve heard all the arguments for acquiring on film and how video ‘just doesn’t look like film’. You know what? Get used to it.

95% of a film’s lifetime is now destined to be based on digital delivery – be it DVD, Blu-Ray or digital downloads. Television premieres, VOD (video on demand) and most other ways that audiences will watch a movie DO NOT INVOLVE PHYSICAL FILM! So why the hell are you wasting so much time, money and effort to strike that first physical print?

As any studio executive or producer will tell you, the real costs are in promoting a film. If you are an indie, every dollar, pound or rupee you save on acquisition can then be pumped into informing your audience about the release and/or continued run of your film in a multiplex near them.

Pay your final respects to film and understand, that acquiring on 35-mil stock is soon going to be a creative choice i.e., because the filmmaker was going for a certain visual aesthetic. For the rest of us, there is digital.

This is a good thing

We made a short video covering the premiere of the latest staging of the play The Game starring Alyque Padamsee and Sabira Merchant.

This is my first commissioned video for CNNGo.

Shot on the Canon 7D. Audio captured with the Rode VideoMic.

It was fun to shoot. And it took me back to some of my earliest days as a radio journalist, when I used to cover city events for the Tuesday evening show.

In 2000, I was riding my scooter southwards from my home in Santacruz, when, right around the petrol pump near Siddhi Vinayak temple the word Thrillpill popped into my head. Still riding, I decided that a thrillpill was the opposite of a ‘chill pill’. It should fill you with excitement.

Since then I have operated my design (and now film) business under that name.

I gave my business identity website a new look today. It is the exact opposite of anything fancy. It simply showcases some of the work I have done in the very recent past. Because if you’re coming to the Thrillpill Film + Design website it is because you’re curious about what these guys are about.

We are about making cost-effective entertaining, engaging content. We have spent ten years gaining experience so that your needs are met in a timely manner, on schedule and within budget.

We hope you like what you see. Actually, we know you will.

DOP/filmmaker/DSLR champion Philip Bloom posted a challenge on his website wherein he invited people to make a 90-second short film featuring a single object. As my response to this challenge I picked a humble coffee mug. As you will see in the film, the mug is beautifully graphical in its design.

This was a fun challenge and I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any further challenges Mr. Bloom might put out.