LIGHTS. CAMERA. ACTION!
A movie shot on an iphone, a twoperson crew and real streetscapes — technology is allowing ambitious filmmakers to attempt dream projects on shoestring budgets and with little support
indoors without any extra lighting,” he says. “I then used this process extensively in [the Netflix series] Sacred Games too, where many indoor shots were done with minimal lighting.”
Similarly, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s S Durga, the critically acclaimed film released in February, was shot with a Sony Alpha Digicam, in actual streetscapes and natural light.
“But with filmmaking becoming easy, it has also resulted in some lazy work,” Shedde warns. “A background in solid story-telling, combined with modern technology and techniques would be an ideal situation.”
TANGERINE
The posterboy for this kind of guerilla filmmaking is Sean Baker, the American whose 2015 film Tangerine was a turning point. Not because it was the first to be shot on an iphone (it wasn’t), but because the 88-minute feature told a compelling human tale of two friends, transgender sex workers, celebrating, arguing, fighting about a cheating boyfriend / pimp, and setting out in search of him.
Tangerine shone on the festival circuit, premiering at Sundance, being nominated for the Best of Next award there, and going on to show and win at festivals around the world. The film is now on Netflix, and one of the phones used to shoot it has been preserved and displayed at the museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which holds the Oscars).
It was Baker, in fact, who inspired Sharma to take up the iphone. Sharma was at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles in 2015, where Baker was on the jury. “I heard about what he had done with Tangerine and it struck me that I could use the iphone too,” he says.
In addition to slashing costs, the phone camera frees the filmmaker from the baggage of elaborate set-ups.
“Normally we would have to pay or make elaborate arrangements to shoot at a café, for instance,” says Sharma. “But when they saw our small crew and mobile, they just let us do our scenes.”
Shooting in a slum, he adds, the arrangements were so minimal that no one really noticed them. “At one point, some cops arrived because they’d heard there was filming on, but when they saw just four people with a mobile phone, they left.”
This is not to say it’s easy going. Das of Village Rockstars took four years to write, shoot and edit her film. “There is so much information available on the internet, which I used to teach myself,” she says. “But my kind of minimal budget and technique may not work for other stories.”
She’s echoing Shyam Benegal when she says that. “Only some stories can be told with a device like an iphone,” says the veteran filmmaker. “It’s like the haiku and the epic. They’re both effective art forms and one can’t replace the other. Which one works best depends on what the artist has to say and what effect he wants to have on the audience.”