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Digital Cinema - A new revolution in film making
Harish Mattur

Films - Everyone loves them. From multimillion-dollar Hollywood films to the multi crore Bollywood flicks, everyone is fascinated by the medium of cinema. They wish that they could make a film one day. Today making a film is not just a dream. It has turned into reality thanks to the advent of digital video cameras. You can write your own scripts, choose a location, cast actors and begin to shoot a film. You can edit your film on a computer and then burn a VCD or a DVD. A digital film can be of any duration. You can make a 1 - minute film as well as a two hour-long feature length film. Independent filmmaking is very popular worldwide. Making a film without bothering about financial constrains is indeed a dream come true for a lot of filmmakers.

Last year a friend of mine, Naveen Sunag based in St Petersberg, Russia wrote to me asking about the possibility of shooting an English film in Bangalore. I replied to him instantly, I mailed him saying that Bangalore is the best place to shoot the film. Six months later he came to India. He spent two months writing the script in Pune. After the final draft he came to Bangalore. In Bangalore it was not difficult for us to find the locations he wanted for his film. We finalised the location in two days. Then we began casting the actors for the film. Most of the actors we cast had never faced the camera before. The next question was, in which camera do we shoot the film? The camera rental shop owner had brought a brand new camera couple of days back. When we saw the camera we decided this is it. The camera we chose was Canon XL1S, the best camera to shoot a digital film. Our cameraman was the very experienced Ammasandra Shivu. He is based in Mumbai. He has worked for a lot of Television serials Documentaries, Ad films and also Independent films.

We began to shoot the film on 27th of April. We had five locations, six actors and a crew of five. The main lead of the film Meru was played by Rajendra Ariga. An engineer turned fulltime actor, Rajendra had the experience of working in a digital film before. His love interest in the film Megha was played by Meghana Gaonkar. I had worked with Meghana earlier, so I knew her potential. She suited the character of Megha perfectly. Her sister's role of Leena was played by Veena Shetty, a painter by profession she was acting for the first time. She worked very hard on the sets so that she could improvise in each and every scene. We shot the film for five days continuously. When Naveen brought the eight dv tapes to my editing table, he had a sense of satisfaction. A sense of relief you will see on each and every directors face after he finishes his film shoot.

Editing the film on my Avid was a whole new experience for me. I had not edited a feature length film before. Naveen gave me a lot of freedom to edit the film. From the first edit to the final one, I enjoyed the whole experience of editing the film. Just before the final cuts, we had to do the dubbing. After one week of shoot two weeks of post production the film was complete. Naveen named the film DISCONTENT YEON. He plans to send the film to film festivals in Europe. The film can also be transferred to 35 mm for a theatrical release since it was shot on a 3 CCD camera.

Our journey in digital filmmaking continues with two more English short films this year. As the independent filmmaking culture is getting popular day by day, the prospects for digital cinema are very bright in India. There are so many talented story tellers out there. Its time for all of them to realise their dreams. Its time for all of them to make a film, a digital film.