A Kentish Town film maker's debut short has won an experimental film award and been accepted for the Cannes World Film Festival.
Jasdip Sagar usually works in special effects for blockbuster movies like Terminator and Iron Man - blending real, green screen, and computer generated images to create a realistic effect.
This summer, the philosophy and film graduate decided to write, produce and direct his own film, which plays with what is real and what is set up.
Made For Reel was shot in August in Camden, Kentish Town and Hampstead for under £10,000, and explores notions of identity and the quantum physics idea that reality is one thing when observed, and different when unseen.
"It was quite spontaneous, I didn't have any ambition, I did it super quick over evenings and weekends," he said.
"I thought it would be fun if the camera crew got involved with what's happening in the scene. It starts as a pranking film, but they have a change of heart and decide to make a real film about the identity of Camden, and then dig deeper into the identity of people."
The 60-minute film features both actors Bhasker Patel, Lucy Speed, and Mark Silcox, and 'real people' including Camden residents, a builder, an artist, Amy Winehouse's cousin, and a founder of fashion brand Cyberdog.
Sagar explains: "We were asking what is it about a person or a place that doesn't change? Is there something about Camden which is unchanging despite all the recent commercialisation? It used to be Mods, punks and rockers, now it's become a spectacle for tourists, and less real in that way."
His film making process followed the idea that "consciousness changes things, observing something changes it."
"People don't know what's set up and what's real, and that's deliberate. It's a combination of both. I had a very rough script, sometimes I didn't tell them until the day of filming that for example, they had to be a depressed Goth and I was going to ask them some questions. I didn't want to think about it too much, to see where it would end up."
By neither sticking to his script, nor observing the unedited 'rushes' until he was in the editing suite, Sagar allowed the film to "flow organically, wave-like, to keep it pure."
"Being spontaneous and improvising is key to the whole quantum physics idea that if you don't look at what you are doing, you end up observing something interesting through the lens of the camera."
Made For Reel won best experimental film at the London Movie Awards and has been selected for the Cannes World Film Festival, which hosts monthly screenings and hands out awards to highlight emerging film talent.
Sagar is starting a new film in January and has "so many ideas" for films. He says: "You can do things with just an idea and very little money, and it will happen."
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