Underwater photography, then underwater videos. Now, this creative mind is busy shooting his first feature film
He is literally taking the plunge in to what he loves the most — taking breathtaking underwater videos. Bengaluru boy Bhushan Bagadia, an underwater videographer shot a music video for Randolph Correia and to his surprise VH1 picked it up to play this month on their television channel every hour. And that’s not all. He is now shooting for his first feature film as a cinematographer. “It’s Kanika Batra’s film titled Project Papa about a father and daughter and is currently being shot in Bengaluru. We have finished 28 days of shoot already,” says Bhushan.
A film-making student from the New York Film Academy and the NYC School of Visual Arts who trained and worked with an underwater film production house called Liquid Media in Koh Tao shares his story. “VH1 was going to launch Randolph’s first EP as FUNC called BEAST. When he told them about this video he was working on with me, they decided to wait until it was done, as the idea was exciting. I shoot a lot of underwater marine life, but through all my diving and shooting I’ve always liked shooting people underwater. It’s an intriguing juxtaposition when you show a person doing something as comfortably underwater that they would do on land. Since I came back to Bengaluru from Thailand, I’ve shot a variety of concepts underwater.”
When one thinks of underwater videos the most common thing that comes to mind is the marine life videos or diver videos. So what’s unique about his underwater videos, we question the ace videographer and he states, “The unique thing about this video is that it has none of that, but it has a bit of the world on land as we know it with the only difference being that the water engulfs the artist instead of air. The idea for underwater videos comes from the love of shooting people underwater. This video was a product of one such shoot. I was shooting Randolph for Contraband for their digital campaign and while shooting, we randomly shot a bit of video. It was so good that we shot more for another two days and had some great content for a music video.”
Recalling a fun incident, Bhushan adds, “Every time I shoot a concept underwater, there had been some damage done. When I shot Randolph for this video, he had to sacrifice his old electric guitar, when I shot Ricky Kej for my photo series Suspended Passion, we sacrificed two old mixers, an old laptop and some other stuff, but we didn’t throw those things away, but kept them as props for the next shoot. It’s interesting to note how different people behave underwater.” Talking about the challenges, he admits, “One of the challenges got us to try something that later became an advantage. We were shooting in a swimming pool in Mumbai. The only two days we had scheduled for this after great difficulty due to Randolph and my schedules, got rained out and the sun decided to hide. We were about to cancel the shoot when I remembered I had an underwater video light. The light worked so well that we shot for the next four hours and the video today was made with that night footage.”
