Fnding a footing in the film industry can be challenging. Abhishek Jain came up with a unique idea to enable his story to stand out.
Abhishek has directed Dinga, a film he plans to release in the first week of December. This is his first movie as a director. He has earlier worked for the film Loudspeaker, which was a comedy “about what happens in a family if every member decided to speak on his/her mobile using the loudspeaker.”
BENGALURU - KARNATAKA - 03/11/2019 : Film director Abhishek Jain, who is made movie on cell phone, in Bengaluru on November 03, 2019. Photo: K Murali Kumar / THE HINDU
He then explains that “ Dinga is the name of the dog in the film,” adding that he was inspired by a true life story. “I read online a few years ago about a man who is ill and was told he did not have much time to live. He puts out an ad online asking people to adopt his pets (five dogs). Inspired by that post I wrote the story of Dinga. But, I gave my protagonist a few eccentric views.”
He explains how the protagonist, who has cancer, and knows he is going to die makes it his mission to find a loving home for his pet, Dinga. “However, he has a few conditions. He wants the horoscopes of the dog and the man who adopts him to match. He wants their blood groups to match. He demands a separate room for his pet and also that the meat for the dog be bought from certain places. Whether he finds such a home for his pet or not is what forms the story for the film,” says Abhishek.
The filmmaker adds that Dinga has another speciality. “It has been completely shot on an iPhone X. The reason was that we wanted to be the first to make a film using this technology, which has improved by leaps and bounds and leads to brilliant visuals. Earlier, there was no way to fix a cinema lens to your mobile. We had cheap lens, which were available online but the quality was bad. For our film, we attached cinematic lens to the phone with a special technology provided by a US based company, Best Grip, that resulted in great visuals. It is a grip cage, to which cinematic lens was attached and we got a high quality film in Dinga.”
Abhishek also believes that the future of cinema is in smartphone filmmaking. “It is still not popular, but will soon become a trend as it helps save money. You do not need a huge unit, a large infrastructure or many people to handle your camera.” He says he found it difficult to convince people to come on board though, when he said he was make a film with his phone. “I do not come from a film background so I decided to make a film that would trigger curiosity in people and bring them to watch my film. When they heard my idea and story, no one took me seriously.”
As the film progressed, Abhishek realised that making a film on a phone was not all that easy. “The budget went quite high. The film cost us a little over 50 lakh. Normally you need at least 150 people to work on a regular film set, here we were down to 40 on a daily basis. We also had to come up innovative ideas to shoot the film. For instance, for crane shots, we did not use a crane. Instead we chose a bullock cart and made the cameraman sit on it and we got our crane shots. For trolley shots, we used a remote toy car. The phone with its lens was attached to it. This was controlled with the remote and voila! we got our trolley shot.We used the same technique for our underwater shots too,” says Abhishek.
The only disadvantage, shares Abhishek was that the film shoot took 32 days, when he thought he could be done with it sooner. He states the reason as, “ We could shoot only between 6 am and 10 am and from 4 pm to 6 pm as camera sensors would go weak in bright sunlight. Hence, the number of days increased, but I believe as days go by and technology improves, phone filmmaking will also get cheaper and become a trend.”
The film stars Aarva and Anusha along with Abhishek Jain. It is written and directed by Abhishek and produced by MR Madhusudhan.
