Personal Projects

My personal projects serve as my creative fuel, encouraging me to believe in the creative process beyond the corporate realm. Even when working on ideal projects is not always feasible, these personal endeavors propel me to push creative boundaries in all my professional work. My ultimate goal is to inspire not only clients but also fellow creatives in my circle.

Appearance at Film Festivals

• 2019 37th Montreal International Art Film Festival

• 2019 Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema

• 2019 Palm Beach International Film Festivals

• 2018 Kinetoscope VR Film Festival Seattle

• 2019 + 2018 + 2017 Official Selection San Francisco Dance Film Festival

• 2018 Official Selection in/Motion Chicago’s International Dance Film Festival

• 2018 Downtown LA Film Festival Official Selection

• 2017 Finalist for VR content at Technology Documentary Festival in Seattle

• 2017 Finalist for VR content at Cinequest Film & VR Festival San Jose

• 2017 North Bay Art & Film Festival (NBAFF)

• 2017 Finalist at NYC Independent Film Festival

• 2017 Finalist for VR content at Technology Documentary Festival in Seattle

Flower + Dance

This immersive video with kaleidoscopic quality was actually a product of reusing a raw footage for an office video wall. It is amazing how certain constrictions can pave way for a surge of inspiration and the video called Flowers + Dance encapsulates this notion. We had shot this video while working on a project for Art Basel and it was during that time, that we had the opportunity to work with some very talented dancers from San Francisco Ballet, Smuin Ballet and ODC Dance Company. Through symmetry and radial pattern, we were able to blend the warmth of yellow and coldness of blue and yet strike a balance between them. We created an aesthetic that could have a hypnotic effect on the spectator. 

The client was dazzled by the piece and that was not the end of it. It was accepted for San Francisco Dance Film Festival and Chicago Sans Souci of Dance Cinema and was felicitated as the award winner at Marin Country International Festival of Short Film & Video.

The Gods of Dance

Role: Creative Director / post production

I was always fascinated by photographs of ballet dancers caught in mid-air as if they could almost allude us into thinking that they can fly.  I wondered what it would be like to see their movement laid out in slow motion. Sometimes, the ideas in your mind are incidentally met by similar opportunities in real life. I got the chance to work on a project with a renowned Ballet Dancer, Pascal Molat who was retiring later in that year. I wished to film Pascal and his friends and the occasion seemed pressing because of Molat’s retirement. I did not want to miss out on that opportunity. So on a self-funded project, with a slow-motion camera, I decided to rent a derelict Train Station in Oakland and spend the afternoon trying to capture the movements of the ballet dancers. 

I was dissatisfied with the result, everything was a brown tone and decided to put it aside for a month. I gave it some more thought and tried to slow down the footage a little more. A movement of one or two seconds was stretched out to a minute and it gave it a dreamy quality. Every twirl or even a movement of the wrist was almost flowing in a way that would have the spectator’s eye hooked to the screen. It almost had a psychedelic effect. I changed the daylight footage into a night setting which gave it an antediluvian look because the old, dark background contrasted with the ballet dancer’s white costume. This contrast of darkness against the purity of the white made it look like something out of a fairy tale. 

The result is quite evident and has been shown to the world. The footage was created into a VR film. We had a show opening at the iconic Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco and the film has been accepted to multiple Film Festivals around the world. It was also projected at The Great Wall of Oakland a 100ftx100ft projection installation in Oakland’s Uptown District.

Exhibition of my work at the Phoenix Hotel Chambers

The Gods of dance in VR film

Role: Creative Director / post production

I wanted to try out something new with my previous film The Gods of Dance and so I decided to recreate it in VR. I wanted to test my boundaries and see how the film would look like in a VR environment. The film had a dreamy quality because the movements of the ballet dancers were captured in slow motion. I took the advantage of having the black background due to which it not only looked en but I was also able to place the film into a VR environment. The God of Dance was lauded for the experimentation and received at the San Francisco Film Festival and the Seattle VR Festival. One of the comments was that the film looked better in VR than in the traditional Film Format. 

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Garage Stories, creative hackathon

Garage Stories, a creative hackathon where four teams crafted four short VR films in just 48 hours. I provided creative direction and guidance, helping them to effectively convey their stories in the VR format.

A talk at the Design Gurus Summit about the future of VR

Tracy Sydor/Portraits in motion

Role: Creative Director / post production

I came across Tracy’s work on Facebook and was mesmerized by her beautiful photographs. They delved into the lives of artists and portrayed them through an individual lens. She recreates surreal portraits of famous people and crafts everything from the background to the wardrobe from the scratch. She builds a space of her own and her portraits can take you back in time. I wanted to capture her approach towards storytelling and for this very reason, I recreated it through my video and brought her portraits to life. The artists represented were able to move and breathe, but the most important element was being able to capture their passion and faithfully represent what drove them towards art. 

“A Tango in San Francisco” A VR film starring Pascal Molat

Role: Directed / post production

I got the opportunity to work on a project with the renowned ballet dancer Pascal Molat who was retiring that year. I had mentioned that I was working on VR and he was interested in collaborating on a project about how came to San Francisco. So we came up with a script and picked our places to shoot his story. That was the first time I worked with a professional dancer and it still remains one of the most memorable experiences of my professional career. It gave me perspective and a better understanding of what an artist goes through in his life. The film was exhibited at multiple film festivals around the world and was one of the pioneering VR Films made at the time. 

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Little planet, Golden Gate Park

I had noticed a video made by someone who had used a VR camera made out of 6 GoPro. I was fascinated by it because it was the coolest thing I had seen in a while with no CG effects. I decided to get my GoPro and spent a week shooting around the rolling skating area at the Golden Gate Park. The roller skaters were intrigued by it and wanted to find out more about it. I encouraged them to get close to the camera and interact with it. This was shot around the time of Halloween, so they all had their costumes on which made the atmosphere more lively. 

Little planet, San Francisco

I had noticed a video made by someone who had used a VR camera made out of 6GoPro. I was fascinated by it because it was the coolest thing I had seen in a while with no CG effects.  I spent a week with my GoPro rig shooting around the most iconic places of San Francisco in my car and scooter. What I find really amusing about this kind of content is that you do not really know what you’ve got until you get into the computer. This gives room for creativity and allows space for exploration and experimentation. 

Me x 7!

Virtual Reality (VR), the current catchphrase in the tech world that is giving people a lot of opportunities to experiment with filmmaking. I was playing around with my VR GoPro and I ended up making an immersive 360° video with multiple versions of myself in the space. A camera that can shoot video at 360° degree means that it can capture everything within its view and this is something that I decided to use to my advantage while taking the entire space into consideration. With VR, the creative possibilities are infinite and I wanted to test them out on my own and see where that will take me.

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Infrared time-lapse of the French Countryside

French countryside and Alps with its vivid landscape is an ideal place to shoot Time Lapse but I wanted to experiment using infrared photography which I had seen before. Infrared photography has the potential to augment visuals and make them aesthetically pleasing. It is used for landscapes and this is why the pictures in this film have an otherworldly quality to it which makes it look almost surreal. As a photographer, I felt that Infrared made me focus more on the details and I was able to see the landscape in a new light. 

Surreal Landscape

Being able to experiment and test myself is what I appreciate about my personal projects. They provide a window for my creativity to exist without any limits. This film brings together various shots taken across San Francisco and uses Time Lapse to represent them in a surreal way. The landscape blurs and gives way to another setting. There is no defined sense of boundary as everything is fused into each other and there is no way to mark where one part of the film starts and where it stops. At the same time, there is a sense of harmony that can only be found in surrealistic artwork that delves into your unconscious and gives way to a different kind of expression, as seen in the film. 

My Pollock 

I splattered real ink in my bathtub and created an interesting piece of animation with it. I decided to label this as ‘My Pollock’ after the name of American painter Jackson Pollock. He advocated Abstract Expressionism, an Art movement in the early twentieth century. He left us with his legacy in the form of ‘Pouring’ and it got picked up by pop culture. I was playing around with the contrast of black ink against the white background. I made an artistic network with the help of black ink and let the patterns create their magic through animation.