On The Grid: Music, Motion, & Street Culture Through An Anonymous Video Creator’s Lens

@trufflefriesandcholula3 is a Bangalore- and Kerala-based videographer whose DIY montage-style videos document contemporary urban life through fast-paced editing, handheld footage, music-driven cuts, and close observation of everyday moments. Beginning with a phone camera and basic editing apps, his work moves through neighbourhoods, friendships, public spaces, train rides, street corners, and nightlife, using fragments of ordinary life to build emotional narratives around youth culture, community, restlessness, nostalgia, isolation, and urban life.

In the 1920s, Soviet filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov started treating editing as the actual language of cinema. A shot by itself meant very little to them. Meaning emerged when two unrelated images collided with each other. Kuleshov demonstrated this through what later became known as the 'Kuleshov Effect' — the same expressionless face could appear hungry, grieving, or emotional depending on the shot edited next to it. Eisenstein pushed this further through Soviet montage theory, cutting together workers, machines, crowds, faces, smoke, trains, collapsing structures, and fragments of movement to create rhythm, emotion, and political meaning through association. 

Newsreels, propaganda films, documentaries, music videos, advertisements, experimental cinema — all of them absorbed montage in different ways. In India, one of the most inventive people working with this technique was S.N.S. Sastry at the Films Division. At a time when government documentaries had a reputation for sounding stiff and instructional, Sastry brought speed, humour, irony, still photographs, abrupt cuts, layered sound, freeze frames, and visual juxtapositions into nonfiction filmmaking, with 'And I Make Short Films', 'I Am Twenty', and 'Yes, It’s On'.

A lot of that editing language now exists inside short-form video content on Instagram with film edits, anime, sports, concerts, or celebrity footage around music and dialogue, but also an entire culture of vlog-style personal montages documenting train rides, weekends with friends, flea markets, holidays, café-hopping, and ordinary days. Alongside that, many creators also use montage for personal storytelling, stitching together unrelated clips, found footage, street visuals, voiceovers, old recordings, and fragments from daily life to build small emotional narratives or fictional moods through editing itself, not unlike videographer @trufflefriesandcholula3 based between Bangalore and Kerala. 

The artist started making videos on Realme Narzo 50, editing entirely on InShot without a laptop, PC, or professional software. He borrowed phones and cameras from friends, cousins, and his girlfriend for a few hours at a time, transferred footage back to his phone, edited there, and returned the devices. Even after getting access to better gear later, the process largely stayed the same. That DIY beginning still shapes the way he approaches videography now — fast, instinctive, lightweight, and built around whatever is immediately available.

His videos sit somewhere between observational filmmaking, music-video editing, and personal montage storytelling. Music is a strong structural element in the work, with cuts, zooms, transitions, camera movement, and pacing often built directly around rhythm and beat changes. The frames move through kids in neighbourhoods, friends hanging around, crowded local spaces, street corners, train stations, rooftops, late-night city footage, and passing interactions. A lot of the camerawork is handheld and close-range, using quick cuts, with graphics, overlays and exceptional editing all done on Inshot. The videos are very slice-of-life, but often high-octane in their editing style. Over time, he has also experimented with different formats, pacing styles, and tonal shifts.

Across these videos, recurring themes of contemporary urban life keep surfacing — friendship, youth culture, public spaces, boredom, movement through the city, fleeting joy, community, restlessness, and everyday life in Indian streets and neighbourhoods. Alongside the fast-paced montage work, there are also moments where he touches upon personal uncertainty, isolation, nostalgia, internal conflict, and what it means to be a human being that feels everything around them. 

Follow him here.

If you enjoyed reaading this, here's more from Homegrown:

Hooliganism’s New Music Video Featuring Subodh Kerkar’s Art Imagines A New ‘Land Of Love’

Horses, Highways, & Haunted Romances: 5 Homegrown Music Videos To Watch This Month

How Director Ryan Shah Brings Culturally-Rooted Emotional Resonance To His Music Videos