Start date
2020-12-10End date
2021-09-30Language
EnglishNotes
Presented at :
• Tagore International Film Festival, India.
• Port Blair International Film Festival, India.
• Lift-Off Sessions, California, USA
• Noble International Film Festival, India.
• Cineaste International Film Festival, IndiaResearch statement
Background: This short experimental film utilises mobile filmmaking, DJI gimbal techniques, screengrab, and editing to explore mobile filmmaking during the COVID-19 lockdown. The film based on our six-year-old daughter Pariza, is an attempt to capture how a child viewed the COVID-19 crisis. Documenting her make-believe world within the house fourwalls, and the limited trips to park/reserve, the film captures Pariza’s reaction to the everyday happenings during the 2020 lockdown. The film explores how Pariza makes the lockdown period a defining moment for self-growth, understanding and learning.
Significance: The film engages with concepts surrounding loneliness, belongingness, connectedness, resilience, and family bonding. This was an experiment to assess how effective mobile filmmaking is, and how smart phone-based editing tools help in giving film a shape, and how this can be used within classroom environment (as opposed to the traditional style of filming). Online connectivity is also a key element that is explored, by capturing classes, celebration of various events, and connectedness with family members and friends based abroad via zoom and WebEx. Methods such as mobile aesthetics, time-lapse, static locations, and autoethnography are also explored.
Contribution: The project started as a classroom discussion when students were asked to explore smartphones as a tool to make a documentary during the lockdown, and I took upon myself to do the same to enable further understanding of the medium, and to be able to guide and help students effectively as to how to utilise mobile filmmaking.
The film contributes to an understanding of how smartphone-based filmmaking can become an alternate to traditional style of filmmaking (that is dependent on professional gears), and how to effectively use app-based editing. The film has been screened in various film festivals, it has won the best documentary film award in two and is a finalist in the Lift-Off sessions California.Publication classification
JR1 Recorded/Rendered Creative Works – Film/VideoScale
NTRO MediumExtent
MP4 FileRecognition, awards & prizes
• Tagore International Film Festival – Winner – Best Short Documentary Film
• Port Blair International Film Festival – Winner - Best Short Documentary Film
• Lift-Off Sessions, California – Finalist (via audience voting).
• Noble International Film Festival, India – Official Selection
• Cineaste International Film Festival, India – Special Screening & Panel discussionPublisher
Vikrant Kishore & Kirti SehrawatPlace of publication
Melbourne, Vic.
