Here is a short video I created along with my coworkers celebrating the craft of the everyday located around our office in Mumbai.

We had a limited amount of time to plan (2 days), shoot (1 day) and edit (4 days), but those constraints ended up making the process a lot of fun. At one point there was going to be a series of hand-carved frames in each shot highlighting the craft, but that became just impossible to execute and (as expected) drew a huge crowed.

Five of us got into a Toyota van and ran around the city for a day filming carpenters, frame wallahs, a paan wallah, a juice wallah, garland wallahs, and a sugarcane wallah. We used my 5d mark II camera and a host of lenses (18mm fisheye, 35mm f2.0, 50mm f1.4, 70-200mm f2.8 non-IS) in a pretty stripped down rig. I didn’t even have my Zacuto Z-Finder with me – so there was a lot of zooming in to focus and stopping down so the depth of field wasn’t too shallow.

It would have been nice to have a shoulder rig, which would have stabilized any moving shot, but we had to content ourselves with locking the camera down on a very lightweight tripod. This ended up being a blessing since we could set up and strike the set quickly, but also meant that we had to really strip down and constrain the shooting style.