One Small Window

In a break from my usual, I’m adding a few photographs processed with the Plastic Bullet app for the iPhone.

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.

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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.