Ramgopal Varma might have had a tough time at the box office for a while now. But you cannot write off his latest offering Ice cream as a setback. Although it ran only for a few days, the 90-minute feature, made on a shoestring budget of just under ₹3 lakh made a decent profit for its producers. So how did Varma (RGV in film circles), pull this off?

The answer lies in a low-cost filmmaking model that the director has come up with. This method christened by RGV as Flowcam involves the use of natural light and prosumer cameras that cost less than ₹1 lakh. It cuts down the size of a filmmaking unit from a couple of hundreds to a handful, to be employed at the shooting spot.

Keep it tight RGV’s latest film was made in just six days, with virtually no artificial lighting or even a trolley. Arun Iqbal Chowdary, who headed the technical team for this film, told BL , “Compare our overheads to that of films shot on cameras that cost ₹2 crore. You need a huge crew to prepare the sets. They begin work hours before the shoot takes place, even though the scene might last only a few minutes.”

RGV is grooming a small team of technicians to fine tune the model. Chowdary has just signed on another film being produced in the same model.

The method seems to have caught the attention of young filmmakers, with four of them announcing projects using the technique. Mahesh Kathi, a film critic-cum-director, has just crowdsourced his film project, Pesarattu . He pegged the budget at ₹10 lakh.

Tech lowdown The method relies heavily on prosumer cameras that don’t need big cranes to execute tracking shots. “Usually, you need heavy cranes and a small rail track to pivot the costly, bulky camera as it captures movements from different angles,” says 25-year-old Arun, an electronics engineer who had quit his job in a multinational firm to pursue his passion in films. With help from a robotics engineer, Arun has developed a small, handy frame that can hold the camera firmly as you walk, run or pass it onto a temporary cameraman. “With this, you have eliminated the costs of crew and equipment required to set up a shot,” Arun said.

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