No cuts or edits: Single-shot film achieves artistic landmark

When Delhi-based Hemwant Tiwari decided to make the film Lomad (The Fox), he planned to do it in a single shot.

The camera stops rolling only after the entire one-and-a-half-hour-long movie has been recorded. The first attempt was a failure as the memory card ran out of space after 88 minutes. However, Tiwari and his team, whose lead actors as well as the cameraman are FTII graduates, got it right the next time.

Lomad is now travelling the festival circuit and has won awards at the Seattle Film Festival and the Central Florida Film Festival, among others.

In 2014, a Hollywood film, called Birdman, had been edited to appear as a continuous shot. Tiwari’s inspiration, however, for this venture was Alfred Hitchcock. “The only reason I wanted to make a black-and-white single-shot film is that I wanted to give the audience something different. The focus and precision we required made this a challenging process,” he says, adding that Lomad is the world’s first black-and-white single-shot film.

Lomad is a thriller that revolves around a man and a woman who meet at a certain location. They had an affair in school and have found each other after a decade on social media. Both are married and almost strangers but, as they try to create some magical moments, things take an unexpected turn.

When Tiwari wrote the script, he was not planning to make a one-shot film. “I just wanted to write a story that has twists in the plot. As it turned out, Lomad needed no elaborate sets but it played with time zones,” says Tiwari, who is a trained actor from Barry John Acting Studio.

Tiwari stressed not on the shoot but on rehearsal, going through the scenes with the cast and crew for several months until “everybody knew the choreography”.

“The film involves some running and falling. In order to have slow motion in some parts, we shot the entire film at 48fps instead of 24 fps as is usual,” he said.

Cameraman Supratim Bhol, a graduate of FTII’s class of 2008, says that when Tiwari first called him with the concept, he thought it was a joke. “We had to pursue this project in a dedicated and disciplined way so that we could achieve it in one shot. The practice and perfection did not involve only the actors but also the technical team. Only a close-knit team, which was really willing to undertake the effort, was allowed with the filmmaking. Finally, while sitting inside a makeup van, we were overjoyed to see what we have achieved,” Bhol added.