3 Indian Cinematographers Who're Breaking Narrative & Visual Frontiers Across Filmmaking

The air was thick with anticipation. Narrow lanes in Chennai aquiver with sounds of vendors haggling, children playing and the distant hum of traffic. Second-unit cinematographer Shelly Sharma loped through jostling bodies, her Red Gemini with Master Prime lens observing an intricate dance of daily survival. Plastic matkas in hand, a throng of women patiently queued up as the water trucks approached in a shapeshifting mirage of sweltering heat. "I remember getting on top of the dispenser and shooting from multiple angles, tracking people's expressions," Sharma confides. "You cannot recreate these moments in a studio set-up."

Spy thriller web series The Family Man, streaming on Prime Video, finds itself at a unique intersection of immersive long takes, real locations and the fluidity of handheld camerawork under director duo Raj & DK.

The Blink Of A Moment

With roughly 270 degree access to the live set, Sharma and DOP (Director Of Photography) Cameron Bryson acknowledge the vicissitudes of how much can go awry if there's not enough synchronicity between the image-makers. Subverting time and space, the masterfully choreographed single take in the shootout scene of Episode 6 (Season 2) will guide you through the police station, betraying a claustrophobic sensation of being trapped and the adrenaline of thinking on your feet.

Sharma was seated atop an old school crane, following the action on the ground, only to lift up and pan towards a balcony where the camera would be carried by the DOP in a nimble handheld manoeuvre.

"Cameron and I really had to be in sync with each other to be able to pass the camera in the middle of the shot while gunshots were being fired," Sharma explains. "I remember there was a shake but I think on the third or fourth attempt, we were able to pass it seamlessly."

Feeling An Organic Rhythm

Although in-camera stabilisation prevents the sensor from getting too shaky, Sharma recommends gliding into the flow of the story during handheld sequences. "Once you know what your characters are supposed to behave like at any given moment, your body just automatically takes that shape," Sharma claims. Her latest project, Gharat Ganpati is a family drama that deviates from her handheld comfort zone towards sturdier, well curated movements on the Panther Dolly.

You can follow the behind-the-scenes of The Family Man on Sharma's Instagram story highlights here.

Trapping The Characters With Motifs

Gehraiyaan, a feature film directed by Shakun Batra, incorporates poetic longing that speaks more to what the characters are experiencing rather than their actions. "Sometimes an actor does something or the light moves in a certain way," Kaushal Shah puzzles over how he comes up with 'texture shots'. The young cinematographer depicted this gloomy, adulterous drama on a Sony Venice camera with Master Anamorphic lenses. His phosphorescent yet gravely muted colours and moody silhouettes thrust us deeper into obfuscating darkness that subsumes the story. Allowing an emotive impulse to drive his composition, Shah holds the characters hostage, contracting space with a tight focal length of 75 mm or isolating them from the pale of society with awkward top angles, allegorical reflections and poignant close-ups trained on body language .

"Alisha, the character, is in a position where she has to take decisions and we show that the city's pitched against her," Shah clues us in. "That's where the reflections embody her dilemma." Comparing meticulous prep during pre-production to net practice in cricket, he believes that a good director allows his players to help plan the shots but also leaves some room for inspiration to seep in. Batra's methodical approach of shooting mock ups in advance with an iPad found its match in Shah's conceptual flexibility.

Leaving Room For Spontaneity

Deferring more to how a shot was feeling rather than looking, the DOP was always on his toes for unexpected reveries like the time he noticed actor Siddhant Chaturvedi's shadow linger upon a curtain while setting up his lights. It just amplified what the scene was trying to convey as opposed to showing his face during the dialogue. "Once instinct kicks in on a film set, you need to be aware of the magic that can happen," Shah quips.

The Unpretentiousness Of Monotony

In symbiosis with the indie production house Jugaad Motion Pictures almost since its very inception, Aditya Varma's genre-defining music videos like Liggi and Sage gather moments of infinity — like stealing fire from the gods — making them seem more like sequences from a feature film.

Exploring the toxic, unabashed peculiarity of modern relationships with an almost polaroid-like immediacy, most of Varma’s oeuvre remains impressionistic in nature. His forte lies in finding cinematic splendour in the commonplace, like his long-time favourite Rima Das or the recently deceased Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, beguiled by all that transpires around him even after the camera has stopped rolling.

Just Indie Production Things

As soon as Varma got the call from India-based Ukrainian director Dar Gai about shooting a 16 mm rendition for Prateek Kuhad's Cold/Mess, he was enthralled by the possibilities. Having minimal experience with analog before, his childlike wonder was unbridled. The Arri SR3 camera they rented was also missing a monitor therefore hours of workshopping and rehearsals with Gai before the shoot turned out to be indispensable. "Everything was run and gun," Varma recollects. "I also went to pick up costumes one morning from Jim Sarbh and Zoya." The film rolls they could afford were limited and having spent most of their budget on equipment, the tightly knit team shared their responsibilities, with various departments bleeding into each other in collaborative euphoria.

For the operatic underwater moments, Varma initially envisioned using his own Fujifilm camera but the rig wasn't properly sealed so he had to fire up a GoPro 7 instead. Colour correcting this mixed media footage to maintain the visual grammar of bleary blues and atmospheric saturation, the DOP also felt confident editing the final output by himself. He was in love with the process, staring at his screen for hours and using film flares as natural cut points to punctuate the montage with much needed commas.

The Era Of Instant Gratification

With doom scrolling becoming emblematic of fickle consumer behaviour, the miracle of music videos condensing time while keeping the audiences hooked is not lost on Varma. "It's so difficult because you have to make them feel something within three minutes," he explains.

Every frame must guide the narrative forward, so it was critical that he got to know his actors better, holding space for them to breathe and traverse entire lifetimes with each other between retakes. Contravening the sterile professionalism that mainstream filmmaking insists upon, Varma believes it is inevitable that he must be friends with the cast and crew, so his work accrues humanistic value beyond just paying his bills.

Tectonic Shifts

An eerie phosphorescence infiltrated our homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a country that is easily the world's second largest market for smartphones, when rollercoasters and cinema projectors creaked to a deafening halt, effusive OTT (Over-The-Top) subscriptions ushered in an epoch of personalised screen time. Democratising visual storytelling, direct-to-streaming releases have become more pan-Indian, toppling the Bollywood oligarchy — compelling young filmmakers towards experimentation in form as well as subject matter.

With Vishal Bhardwaj's Fursat becoming India's first musical to be shot on an iPhone 14 Pro, other technological interventions like motion capture and VFX have unfurled the horizons of fictionalising farther than anyone's wildest expectations. Consequently, the conspiring cavalry of real locations, poetic imagery and short-form content is catapulting our storytelling juggernaut into the next generation.

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