Insta series arrives in Kannada with fresh challenges

Insta series, a new trend in storytelling, is catching on. 

An Insta series is a regular web series but it is shot vertically and each episode is about a minute and a half.

The episodes are posted as reels on Instagram and follow a storyline. Dramabox, a Chinese company, was one of the first to introduce this format. 

Flying Dose Films, a media house based in Bengaluru, has launched Kannada’s first Insta series titled ‘It’s Not Working Out!’. Episodes are posted every Tuesday and Friday. 

‘It’s Not Working Out!’ is about a couple who, after a break-up, continues living in the same apartment. Isha (Nidhi Hegde) is from Pune while Prithvi (Arun Bharamannavar) is from Dharwad. They are both fans of A R Rahman. As they set new rules, the show focuses on the emotional challenges they face while moving on. 

Shot on 9:16 aspect ratio to suit the mobile phone screen, it is a character-driven film. Traditional cinephiles may find vertical cinema irksome, but shooting vertically is difficult. As screens get narrow, focusing simultaneously on aesthetics, characters and their emotions becomes a challenge. 

Show creator and cinematographer Madan Kumar says, “We realised we may not need so much lighting and design. So instead we decided to invest in a cinema camera so that we could have a lot of freedom in post-production.” 

They shot it vertically on a Canon C400, classified as a cinema camera 6K RAW. “Even if there are any mistakes, or if we need changes in the framing, we will have the freedom to play around in post-production,” he says. 

The challenges were new. “When we have to show more people, it is fairly easy horizontally, but shooting it vertically becomes a challenge,” says Madan. Composing multiple shots within a small-time frame also posed a challenge to the team.

The series was initially written for a web series. Madan and his team watched some English Insta series to understand the format. Season 1, currently playing on their Instagram handle, is not even 30% of what they had written, he says.

In terms of writing, it is different from a traditional series. “There are no exposition shots at all,” he says. “In a typical date scene, we have a shot of the characters getting out of a car, another to establish the space. When they meet, there is some awkwardness before the conversation. To show all this, we need more than a minute and each reel on Instagram can only be 90 seconds long,” he explains. 

That is why they decided to start the scenes in the middle, and chose a regular concept. “The gaps can be easily filled in by the audience,” says Madan. The team focussed more on the characters, their body language and emotions. “Here the writing got tricky,” he says. He found close-up shots more important in this format. 

“The entire series will come up to 45 minutes and when it’s complete, I believe it has the potential for binge watching,” Madan concludes. 

Look up the series @flying.dose.films on Instagram.