Dheer Momaya of Jugaad Motion Pictures is an “empathetic producer” and a provider of “tender visual design” in the video credits of singer-songwriter Prateek Kuhad’s latest release ‘Kasoor’ — which has over a million views on YouTube. It was director Dar Gai’s way of injecting a little fun for her team who had sifted through over 500 crowdsourced videos sent in by fans as well as comedian Kunal Kamra, singers Jonita Gandhi and Kavya Trehan and actors Jim Sarbh and Zoya Hussain.
Momaya says that the complicated emotions that we see up-close in the music video were prompted by questions that Gai sent out to the participants, based on her own interpretation of the song. ‘Think about your first love’, goes one question. ‘Your hardest break-up’, is another. You almost forget this is phone and laptop-camera footage. The concept, he says, stemmed from the fact that right now everyone is looking at each other through a digital screen.
- Use an object for framing and focus: “You have to touch the exact points on your phone to get the exposure right,” says Vasu Dixit. “I learned from my wife [Bindhumalini] to place an object where you’ll be taking position, lock your focus and exposure and take the place of the object.” On auto-focus, the phone often adjusts moving objects in focus.
- Post-production: Dixit points to DaVinci Resolve and Adobe AfterEffects for pro-touches, but also quicker effects available on apps like InShot. “A basic edit can be done with iMovie as well.”
- For editing ease: Rohit Singh Bhau recommends Adobe Premiere Pro as an easy editing software, that allows him to play around with layers. He adds, “I also like using vintage VHS-type filters like VHS Glitch Effect. It hides a lot of noise from phone videos.”
- Embrace the limitations: While shooting on a phone can be easy, it can also come with limited features. But both Sunderrajan and Dixit agree that all limitations can be used to advantage. ‘Akele’ used a lot of in and out of focus shots. “A music video is the only place where you can experiment. Some technical flaws can become intellectual symbolism,” Sunderrajan says.
The newest music videos to emerge during the pandemic, despite repeated lockdowns curtailing movement, are an exercise in creativity. While some singers continue to have minimal involvement in the process, leaving it up to the experts, many are releasing either animated or lyric videos, or recording material on their mobile phones. Of course, such phone-shot videos are by no means a new phenomenon. Pre-lockdown, rapper Divine’s music video for ‘Jungli Sher’, was shot entirely on an iPhone. For artistes like progressive rock band Coshish, it would have been considered a strategic partnership to create footage on a phone. Pune-based post-rock band Aswekeepsearching teamed up with OnePlus over three years ago to create tour performance videos (although none of their music videos were fully shot on a phone). In January 2020, they released a video for ‘Aitbaar’ off their 2019 album Rooh , completely shot on OnePlus phones.
Storytelling over tech
Today, there are examples a plenty. Kolkata rock band Pelican Shuffles had a really fun video featuring animal companions for their song ‘Foolish Beings’, while Ritviz’s video for ‘Thandi Hawa’ is also crowdsourced as fans and dancers show off their moves. Mumbai rock band Pull called on their fans to give them footage from their pre-lockdown travels for their new music video ‘Ticket’. Composing duo Rahul Kannan and Kaushik Ramachandran released ‘Akele’ on June 23, a minimal yet hopeful track about the future. Hosted by media platform Terribly Tiny Tales as part of their ‘Songs from Home’ music series, a monochrome video portraying home life was filmed by Srinivas Sunderrajan and Prerana Manker (of Mumbai-based Enter Guerrilla Films). While it was shot on a 2017 model Google Pixel 2 XL, Sunderrajan (also known as Vaas, bassist for hardcore band Scribe) says he’s “old school” enough to want to put it through an editing software like Final Cut, which he downloaded on an old laptop.
A still from Prateek Kuhad’s ‘Kasoor’
Sunderrajan has previously worked on music videos but had been focussing more on films. All he used was a selfie stick, experimenting with focus and frames to tell the story of ‘Akele’. “I think phones are the perfect thing for lockdown. It works much better than a drone or any other camera you may not have easy access to at this time. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t 4K resolution. At the end of the day, it is what you want to shoot,” he says. Ramachandran, an old friend of Sunderrajan, admits he did have some convincing to do for the project, but the track itself drew the filmmaker. “If it’s Vaas, I don’t care even if he’s using a Nokia 6600. Because I know he doesn’t need a camera or technology to tell a story,” the musician says of their long-standing friendship.
Momaya says the medium of filming has never mattered much to the team at Jugaad either, whether they use a DSLR camera or drones or big sets or even visual effects. “It is always the story and the concept, and really, the attitude that lends itself to a certain type of treatment,” he says.
- Swarathma’s vocalist-guitarist and filmmaker Vasu Dixit says, “The only way we could all shoot in a similar format and resolution was through our phones. We know more than half the people would also likely watch this video on their phones. Plus, I’ve observed that when you make a horizontal video, many of us are too lazy to make it full-screen to watch. I myself do that sometimes. To keep it simple and apt for the medium, we shot it vertically.”
A one-off experiment?
Bengaluru folk-fusion band Swarathma’s heartfelt new song ‘Mushkil Mein Jeena’ also feature the band members (and their families) in a DIY music video. They shuffle through cue cards with lyrics, making a simple idea effective. Interestingly, Swarathma caught up with an already increasing side-effect of phone shot videos — the vertical viewing format (see box). Also based in Bengaluru, Jammu-origin artist Rohit Singh Bhau released a Dogri song ‘Kelli?’ (‘Why?’) in April, with a VFX and filter-adorned video.
Unlike the amount of planning and storyboarding that goes into a regular music video, Bhau tells us that shooting free-range on the phone allowed the conceptualisation process to be “on the spot and a lot of fun.” He adds, “My roommate, Oran Brahma, shot it with his Android phone, mostly at dawn to avoid people. I had to do a lot of experimentations with the overlay graphics and stop-motion animations.”
A still from Swarathma’s ‘Mushkil Mein Jeena’
At present such music videos work for indie musicians on a budget. But production houses might see it as a one-off, not wanting to be limited by a phone. With Jugaad often busy with movie projects, Momaya says they’re “very selective” about the videos they do, not just due to budget demands, but also the constraints of the format. “Then there are the caveats, especially with the bigger labels. Their singer needs to be featured, so you can’t tell a story which is completely independent of the artiste,” Momaya says. Nevertheless, this is the team that also put together Kuhad’s ‘Cold/mess’ and shot on phone for producer-singer Ritviz’s ‘Raahi’. Momaya recommends flexibility when it comes to shooting. “The videos we’ve designed are around the limitations that we faced during the pandemic and the Indian version of lockdown. We wrote these stories lending themselves to be shot on anything. We try to find what fits best for that specific time,” he concludes.
