City filmmaker shoots VR movie on 150-year-old home 

BENGALURU: As the city grows, it feeds a nostalgia for all things lost. A Bengaluru-based filmmaker tries to capture the life and emotions of septuagenarian as he dreads and awaits the impending demolition of his 150-year-old ancestral house in Kolkata.

Sairam Saguraju, the filmmaker says, “The soon to be demolished house is the film’s editor Sreya Chatterjee’s ancestral home in Kolkata. When she first mentioned that her house is going to be brought down, I immediately proposed the idea of documenting it through VR (virtual reality).” The protagonist of the film is Kalyan Kumar Chatterjee and his interviews hold the film together. Sairam adds, “It’s a nostalgic trip that celebrates the romance of old world Kolkata. It brings out the loss one feels when urban landscapes change and make way for the new.”

The VR exhibit is an amalgamation of the real and virtual worlds. Once viewers enter the specially designed enclosure, they use VR headsets to port themselves to the world of Chatterjee. Sairam says, “The design of the enclosure is inspired by the ancestral house that features in the film. Artist Poornima Sukumar helped me build the enclosure.”

He says it was a crazy experience shooting for the film. “Especially in the madness around Howrah,” he says. As the VR camera has a 360 degree field of view, even the filmmakers must hide themselves while the camera rolls.

Sairam has been working on VR films for more than two years now. He says that VR must be treated as a new medium altogether as it requires its own cinematic language and grammar that VR artists like him are developing the world over. “While technical difficulties of shooting VR can be overcome with time, it is the art of storytelling and the usage of ‘presence’ that is unique to this medium,” he says adding, “For example, visual forms such as photography, painting and cinematography are restricted to the boundaries of a frame.

In VR, the viewer enters the frame to inhabit the creation and interact with it.” Even 3D films are restricted within a frame. “VR provides a different experience altogether,” he says. Though a VR film involves investing in technology, Sairam says, “It is not prohibitively expensive to shoot in VR, I would say it costs roughly twice as much as a conventional film.” But post-production is taxing. “The hours of work on the post production increase multifold. Significant share of your brain share is spent in ideating for VR, a skill that one develops over time with the medium,” he adds. Sairam Saguraju had exhibited his film at the RoundGlass Samsara Festival, held at UB City.