After over a month of focusing on the animatic (storyboards in motion set to music), and weeks of additional camera, puppetry and lighting tests, I began filming ‘Ramkali’, the short excerpt of my feature film ‘Risalo’ for my Hand Made Puppet Dreams Micro Commission. It is a daunting task. I always wanted to film with the actual Rajasthani puppeteers, Puran Bhatt and his group and work with a crew, but this is the way to move forward.
Every morning I put in a few hours before work. I categorized shots by difficulty 1-4 and am starting with the 1s. I've found that shooting with the camera (Sigma FP) at its native ISO (in this case 3200), with aperture set to how much depth of field I want and variable ND filter to bring the exposure down to 0 on the camera gives me grain free images that I can color grade later. The Mamiya 645, medium format lenses are beautiful to work with, and a few Aputure lights, some cheap soft boxes and I’ve got what I need to tell this story.
I even managed an overhead shot and one with a slider and rack focus. It is actually a lot of fun and exhausting work to create these shots and come up with creative ways to make each of them possible.
