So this is probably the fastest turnaround I’ve done, ever, save for maybe a 42 hour filmmaking challenge or whatever, but the story behind this is crazy.
We got the green light when I was in London, and I had to literally drop my weights mid-workout and RUN to the tube and book my ticket as I was on my way to the airport, extremely grateful to air india for having FREE wifi in the plane so I was able to work throughout the flight and then into the next day, I had to get a flight to Delhi instead of Mumbai because there were no flights available from LDN to MUM when I was booking them, no reasonable ones at least.
Me and Vibhu (Director) we ended up working pretty much non-stop after I finally landed in Mumbai, the night before the shoot, I think I never got more than 4-5 hours of sleep in a single shot, but we made the shoot happen, did the edit in shifts and the funny thing was that I didn’t really feel any pressure, we felt quite ready and the process was very natural to us because we’ve done it so many times, it was just that we had to push ourselves physically to get this done on time.
I think this is where you can see why the same people keep working with each other over time, because the clarity of communication and the matching of the wavelength is very important when it comes to projects like these that need to be done extremely fast by all standards.
Finally got some time to do this write up and I just wanted to share a couple of things that I think really helped us out especially on the indie-amateur level that we were working at-
At this level you never have enough of anything you’re basically fighting for the bare minimum, and I feel like the biggest mistake that can be done at this level is trying to work like a normal production. I.e shooting 12-14 hours, having big heavy equipment, intricate shots, tough setups etc.
Usually on an indie level everyone’s working for free in the hopes that the quality of the project will attract future work. But that all goes to shit when you execute it like a real shoot, because you simply don’t have the manpower to do what you’re thinking of and when you look back on the things you fucked up you always think that “ah I wish we had more time to do this and that” which is a very convenient excuse for your lack of understanding about your own limitations.
What you do have that big productions don’t have is time, nearly unlimited time to think on set, time to shoot at the perfect angle of sunlight, time to reshoot, time to improvise.
So that was the idea for this shoot in essence, even if it’s counter intuitive to take another day we ended up doing that, just having that time to think on set without pressure really helped in fine tuning the lighting, the staging the frame, everything.
This bleeds into the second thing that I think we did right, I made a LUT, I wouldn’t even call it a film emulation although I started off making it with that intent, it just ended up becoming its own crazy “look” so the idea was that we’re going to monitor everything over this LUT and make all of our costume, lighting, framing, propping according based on it.
We also had a rule that there won’t be a colour grade, what you see on the monitor would the the final image, just with minor balance adjustments, and I think that really made us work harder to get a frame we liked in the moment.
A huge thanks to everyone for their hard work and time on this.
@isitcinematic@kasturihazarika.official@lochan_barsagade@madhulika.deshpande@romil.krishnani@ssuki0914
So I’ve finally decided to stop being lazy and post more work, i have a HUGE backlog of projects that need to be up on my feed, this was “Fuck another hit” a music video i shot for Angrish Somaiya, very fun shoot, I’d say the thing I had the most fun doing was figuring out a look that would make this project stand out.
At first i was going for more of a deep blacks fight club thing but it just wasn’t feeling “right”, during the process of fucking around and finding out making a show lut i accidentally made the shadows look a bit faded which i hate doing because it used to be a “trendy” thing to do back in 2016, everyone would add a fade to their photos to make them look better, but it actually just worked for this project especially with the location, costume and the way the lighting was done.
Everything indoors was lit with one poly and one arri 300 tungsten light, and a couple of parcans, that was basically all we could afford to get tbh. I wanted to light this way because there was a music video i did earlier where just for one shot i used a poly bounce to light it and i really liked the glossiness of the way it wrapped around the face, so I’ve been meaning to use it more.
Clips from ‘JUNOON’ MV by @semwalmusic (LINK IN BIO)
This project was a special one, stepping into the gangster genre while experimenting with small, controlled set pieces. The idea was to keep things minimal and learn how to execute them well before scaling up.
We took on a shootout scene knowing realism wasn’t possible within our means, so we leaned into film logic and focused on what feels right on screen.
@sooke09 absolutely carried this, her blood SFX work and performance did the heavy lifting! She figured out the body language and the intensity needed which brought the weight the scene needed to feel real. This wouldn’t be possible without her!
Another experiment was building a fight sequence. Shoutout to @lochan_barsagade for helping choreograph it. The real challenge? Making it simple enough for four actors to pick up in just 30 minutes on set (no rehearsals), yet still feel intense on screen.
This one really pushed us, and it wouldn’t have been possible without everyone who showed up🙌
Credits :
Directed by 🙌
DOP : @blankedoutasf
Cast : @sooke09@theaviraljoshi@dafcsid@rudra_shrivastava._@kuly_anshpandey02
Assistant Cinematographer : @namanism_
Colored by @colorkaar
Associate Director/ Costume & Makeup : @sooke09
ADs : @theaviraljoshi@akashkharwarrr
Edited by @isitcinematic@blankedoutasf
Gun props : @dafcsid
Sound Design : @sommaiya_
Gaffer : Sonu Gupta, Govind
Lightman : Ranjeet
So it’s about time I posted stuff about Ajnabee, this was at the time one of our more rushed projects, but it felt quite easy to do I’d say. Mostly because I like shaping outdoor natural light and I actually like planning my shots around the sun, the simplicity and the speed at which you can shoot makes it appealing to me I think.
We used a Komodo for this one, I wanted to do a test shoot but to make a lut but there was just no time for that so I downloaded some sample clips and makes a lut based on that, honestly I really like the contrast curve of that lut but not a fan of the way it handles certain colours and the way it skews certain hues, but for the project it worked, this is also the first time I think we’ve had an actual colorist who gave us his own input and his own version.
I really enjoyed that whole process because my original lut was quite contrasty and seeing my own footage in a more softer refined grade was a really nice experience, it also made me realise that I haven’t really developed that look and I’ve never really experimented with it enough to make it my own.
Maybe next time I’d probably work on the lut with a colorist, develop the look and shoot it my way? Which usually tends to be more moody and contrasty but maybe that developed look could balance it out.
We also tried a projector setup that I’ve been thinking about for a while, I think it’s one of the most beautiful shots I’ll ever take, the fabric draping and sticking to his face with the projection of the other character as he yearns for her, I think it really just brings everything together.
Another sporty thing I directed, I don’t really have much to say about this one except that the team we had from Revolio which was @jaikhanna_ and @aksmouli (Molly) were pretty exceptional, couldn’t ask for a better team if I tried, shot by @ojas_jain obviously, the guy who is sick of me not finishing my D-cuts.
With this project I think we shot a lot of really good stuff that I want to cut down for a D-cut someday because it’s just been siting there, and the footage is pretty much gold. One of the challenges we had during the shoot I’d say was that because none of our actors were actually athletes but we had to make it look like they were, we ended up playing around a lot with movement and slow shutter to give it that high octane energy.
I think this was shot on Venice? With anamorphics ofc, I forgot exactly which ones though.
Sporty stuff almost always is kind of like a spray and pray situation I think, you shoot as much as you can and then the edit is really what makes it come through, but I’d say as long as you have a couple of “slow” moments, like slow hero shots that linger, those are the ones that really take it over the top.
Felt like the right time to start updating my Instagram with work again, too many new people have followed me in the past 3 months so to all of you, this is just me rambling about the project and what I learned from it. Instagram really compressed the hell out of these images.
We shot this commercial doc-ish founder story for WXM, @ojas_jain shot it and Prathu and Rohan were the amazing star producers, ads, whatever I needed, absolute gems that I’d love to work with again.
The shoot itself was quite straightforward and simple, I’ve had some experience with docs before so nothing new was found there I simply did what I’ve seen before tbh and it worked, we had a lot of revisions in post, and there was a version which was a super emotional version and actually made one of our line producers cry when he saw it. It was actually really powerful, maybe I’ll be able to finish it and show it to people someday.
If I recall correctly we shot this on FX6’s, and I was actually quite impressed by it even though I hate it now (for reasons unrelated to this project)
There’s so much footage/scenes that didn’t end up making it to the end product which I am kinda sad about but oh well, we take our wins.
Directed by me if it was unclear lmao
A couple of stills from Manzilein Visualiser, was a pretty fun shoot on a boat, was crazy hard to keep the camera straight with the boat rocking but managed to do that somehow. Made some improvements on my workflow where I get to see an image that would be close to the grade while shooting, I swear by it now. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to shooting Rec709 and then experimenting in grade, would rather just create a look and get a monitor LUT and make all my exposure adjustments off of that and really commit to it. I feel like now I’m actually getting the most out of my BM4k.
just some pictures I thought came out good, trying to finish my 36 pictures film roll though, somehow that’s taking way longer than I thought because I’m really making it count, excited to see how they turn out though once I’m done with them
