Lessons from a shoot

(Something I wrote last week. Thought I'd post it on the ACJ blog because I know we have some filmmakers here -- Ram)

If you have two weekends free, you can sign up for a filmmaking course. I did, and our batch of 22 students passed out on Sunday.

Of course no art can be learnt in two weekends. But what courses such as this one do is give you an introduction that you can build on. They also put you in touch with people with similar interests.

This particular course, which costs Rs 3,500, is favoured by software engineers, but our batch had a diverse mix of college students, animators, graphic designers, techies, sales and real estate executives, a human resource consultant, and a couple of NGO activists.

The course is conducted by ACTor Productions every couple of months. Siddharth, who has studied at Rajeev Menon's cinematography institute in Chennai, and Rabi Kisku, who has produced and directed a digital feature film, gave lectures. Both have an IIT background. They have now moved to full time filmmaking.

The boyish faculty was enthusiastic, and so were the students. Siddharth spoke about lighting and camera angles, and quoted movie actress Suhasini who said cinematographers are often the smartest people on the sets. Rabi taught a couple of modules on direction and editing.

After two days of lectures, they divided our class into four groups. Each of us had to produce a three-minute film. After discussing a couple of other story ideas, our team decided to go with a song I had attempted to write and record. Our choice was a music video.

Baare sakhi, hoova kadiyuva (Come beloved, let's steal flowers!) had romantic nature images, and I suggested we should shoot it on a couple working in a city office. It would be ironic, I thought, to have them dream of stealing flowers, when in reality they would have to pay through their nose at a florist to get any. Similarly, they could sing grandly about crossing the seas when they couldn't even cross a puddle or a busy road.

We went and shot our film at a village called Raogodlu on Kanakapura Road. Inside Bangalore, we got some crowd scenes at Basavangudi and Jayanagar.

We learnt several things in the course of the shoot. The first was that an incompetent technician could undo everyone else's good work.

When our team played back the footage, it looked bleached and jerky. It turned out the camera guy assigned to us only knew how to shoot wedding videos.

That problem was solved when the organisers offered us a camera and a different cameraman for a reshoot. We drove up to the picturesque village a second time, and shot the film with a slightly different crew.

The lesson we learnt here was that we had to employ the same cast and get them to wear the same costumes if we wanted to mix and match footage from two shoots.

And we had to be wary of pretty frames. We tend to be impressed with almost everything we see through the lens, and end up capturing scenes that do little to tell our story. In the process, we lose precious time (and raw stock, if working with celluloid).

The most important lesson was that we had to do rigorous paperwork before we set out. On both days that we went to an outdoor location, we gave in to the temptation of composing and shooting scenes on the spot, forgetting altogether that we needed specific images to make our story go forward. Spontaneity helps, but if it isn't accompanied by planning, it can ruin a film.

And when we tell a story, we need our actors to do scenes that don't always show them in a flattering light. If everything turns out cheerful and pleasant, we end up creating something that either looks like an ad, or is too trite to hold anyone’s interest.

We also have to train ourselves to think in images and avoid the obvious. Matching our shots with the words makes the film hopelessly literal. (If the song talks of a horse, we don’t really need to show a horse on screen).

The student films were shown and critiqued on the last day. I liked the one about a day in the life of a telemarketer. Our music video wasn't disliked, but the irony hadn't come across sharply enough.