BENGALURU: Filmmaker Sharath, who is known to be a trendsetter after his zero-budget, zero-profit film, Steya, is now coming back with yet another unique concept. His next, is a continuous-shot film meaning that it has been shot at one go. While such films of two-three minutes length have been attempted, this is one of the few seven-minute-long short films that has been done, claims the final-year Mechanical Engineering student.
In addition, only five people are behind this film – two actors – Aditya Bharadhwaj and Nitya Joshi – two behind the camera – director Sharath and his assistant Chaitra Jois, and background singer Vaishnavi Shankar. The five-member team completed the film in just two days, including the post-production work. The team has spent over `10,000 for the film.
The film was shot over and over again (from beginning to end each time), ten times to be precise, before they called it a day. “While shooting such films, from camera angles to actors’ positions, everything has to be perfect. One single mistake – from technicians or actors – we have to re-shoot everything again. We took 10 takes and it was a learning experience,” says Sharath referring to the challenges.
Apart from direction, Sharath has scored the background music and has done DOP as well. His inspiration, he tells us, was from a one-shot feature film, Victoria, that he had watched at BIFFES ( Bangalore International Film Festival) last year.
“The movie struck me so much that I came home, downloaded it and watched it several times. Every time I watched it, I watched it for different reasons – sometimes for direction, for acting, for cinematography, for camera positioning and more. I started thinking on those lines and hence came up with Shubham. In fact, this happened when we were working on a different film,” he says.
Lead actors Aditya Bharadhwaj and Nitya Joshi have been active in the theatre scene for a while now. While Aditya has faced the camera a couple of times, it was a debut for Nitya. “I must say such movies can happen only when there is a good understanding between the team members. A few expressions can’t be repeated and if there is a mistake from anyone of us, the shot is dusted. We then to re-shoot everything from the beginning again. It was a great learning experience as an actor,” Aditya says.
For his co-star Nitya, her background in theatre had prepared her this. “On stage, we have scenes for more than 10 minutes and each and every expression and move is noted. This, I say helped me a lot. I was given the script in the morning, we rehearsed for half-a-day and shot it in the second half.”The film about a couple and thei relationship issues, is likely to be released in a week or two.