My first DSLR short film : The Scent (Learning and Experience)

Sitting at the sunset in the school where I am a teacher I was itching to start creating movies with my new DSLR. I was too curious to know how it’ll look like. I approached two other teachers – a science teacher and the art teacher and told them that I want to make a short movie just to test the camera and also do something creative. Thus – the Scent was born !

The idea was by K. Ramesh , our science teacher, extraordinary human being, and a published haiku poet. He gave me a haiku like story of a blind man and a stranger. I immediately decided to go ahead with it. The result is below.

The Scent from Shashi Bhushan Singh on Vimeo.

My learnings from my first movie :

1.)    USE MANUAL FOCUS AND MANUAL EXPOSURE : One of the biggest mistake I made was that I decided to use Auto exposure and Auto focus for the entire movie making. The camera kept rotating for a long time before it could give me a good focus. The exposure was different for each scene as the sunset colors were changing in the sky and natural light itself was diminishing. As I progressed the movie shooting, the camera kept increasing ISO as the light was reducing. The result was that I had some shots which were either Over/underexposed and others were grainy because of high ISO.

2.)    DON’T IGNORE Composition details :

Can’t hate myself enough for leaving my camera bag and a prop (a wooden stool) in the composition. I forgot to remove it from the frame. It was sheer stupid mistake on my part but it helped me learn about how such stupid things can actually spoil the impact of some shots.

3.)    Focus and Expose before pressing record :

I know this is like the most idiotic thing to say but I did learn it through my first movie ! I kept pressing record before auto exposure and focus. Infact at times I half press the button to get better focus/exposure while recording. The result was I had spoiled some really good shots and my poor actors had to re-take it couple of times. I also had tough time editing the movie because of these mistakes.

4.) DON’T use all resolution you got :

Knowing that my Canon 600D can do FULL HD ! I went for full HD while I’d have never even seen this movie beyond a 32inch LCD screen ! I did not have good editing software or computer to take care of such huge files. Pain for no use at all ! I could have done a HD or even lower resolution shot and got almost the same result in much less time with much much less labor. Now, I usually shoot my films in HD mostly except some shots where I'd prefer Full HD. This makes life easier with all the resources and softwares I have.


Overall, I enjoyed making the first movie with new DSLR technology. It was fun and lot of learning. I liked that I was able to create the continuity with a single camera by using it at different angles. I liked composition in some shots. A great beginning to this exciting journey ! Lets see what awaits...