Getting the gritty aesthetics of Sold was a challenge, says cinematographer

Kannada

film

Sold

, starring Danish Sait, Kavya Shetty, and

Shivani Ballakuraya

, is hitting the theatres this Friday. Ahead of the film’s release, Sameer Deshpande, the cinematographer of the Prerana Agarwal directorial, tells us that the main idea was to stay true to the subject.

“This is a serious story, so you have to be careful of the treatment. You can't treat it the way you treat anything else. It should not be exploitative or demeaning. You have to keep that in mind and portray the world in a way that seems realistic while keeping the drama and the emotions of the story intact.”

He shares that the idea was to give it a gritty feel, without making anything look too flashy or overdramatic. “We knew if we used smooth camera movements, the audience wouldn't connect with the subject matter. So, we gave it a handheld feel and approached it in such a way that it feels we are showing an unsavoury aspect of society. We treated the visuals in a way that the seediness and the idea of a dangerous world came through. Everything we worked on was to achieve that,” says Sameer, who’s been in the field for over a decade.

About the challenges of shooting in live locations, he notes, “In a live location, you have to deal with a lot of real-world elements that are not there in a studio set-up, where everything is in your control. Here you get the texture and pattern of the world. When you shoot in a run-down place, you have 10-20 years of the world wearing it down and that comes through. There are limitations to how much we can light up the place, so it maintains a sense of reality. It's all about being true to the subject matter. At no point, should you feel we have made something unreal.”

Dressing down locations
Pooja Ramesh, who did the production design for Sold, shares that she has never done something so grounded in reality before. “The main set was Nayak Exports, which is a basement where the kids were being held. I had to research a lot of brothels, war basements as reference points to create it from scratch and then age it to look like a rundown space. Besides that, we created a firecracker godown, where children were working, also from scratch,” says Pooja who added that she had to dress up over 20 other locations to look like they are worn down. It took her three months to prep, find references, go on recce and get the inputs together to make sure the set looked as real as possible.