DiSwitch off your mobiles! Silence! Action! As first assistant director (ad) Reema Kagti's voice rings out on the mike in the middle of a lush green tea estate in Mauritius, a hush falls. Amitabh Bachchan careens down, grabbing a little boy who has just been run over by a truck. Suddenly a head pops up. Cut, screams a furious Kagti whose slight frame, military fatigues and buzz cut belie her tremendous stamina. An ad scurries down to remove a starstruck tea-picker while another submits himself to a stream of harsh reprimands.

In an island paradise where even Aryan Vaid is a superstar, the month-long shoot of Honey Irani's Armaan was described in awed terms as American-style filmmaking. Bound scripts two months before the shoot, call sheets with the cast and crew reporting for duty at 5 a.m., lock-ups (in effect controlling pedestrians from gaping at the antics of stars), daily progress reports and a wardrobe supervisor with a bagful of tools (a mini-fan, needles threaded with the colours of the day, a footwipe, even a two-sided tape for a sari), the film had everything usually missing from a mainstream Hindi movie.

SOUND ENGINEER NAKUL KAMTE Charges Rs 10 lakh per film. Has done: Bhopal Express, Lagaan What to watch out for: Let's Talk, Bokshu, Bus Yun Hi, Armaan, Kyun Ho Gaya Na Pyaar.

HAIR STYLIST AVAN CONTRACTOR Charges Rs 10 lakh per film. Has done: Akshaye Khanna's hair in Deewangee,Humraaz. What to watch out for: Armaan.

CINEMATOGRAPHER RAVI K. CHANDRAN Charges Rs 30 lakh per film. Has done: Kandukondain Kandukondain and Kannathil Muthamittal. What to watch out for: Koi Mil Gaya

VISUAL EFFECTS MAN PANKAJ KHANDPUR Charges Rs 20,000 for complex sequences. Can go up to Rs 60 lakh for a film. Has done: Lagaan, Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham.

COSTUME DESIGNER ARJUN BHASIN Charges Rs 10 lakh per film. Has done: Monsoon Wedding, Dil Chahta Hai, and Twentieth Century Fox's surprise hit, Swimfan What to watch out for: Makdee, Armaan, Boys

More than anything else, it had a young and energetic crew, inherited largely from Farhan Akhtar's Dil Chahta Hai and Ashutosh Gowarikar's Lagaan. Young enough to call the Armaan director Aunty (she is Akhtar's mother) and energetic enough to ride home from dinner in a biscuit van, these men and women are changing the face of movie-making technique in Bollywood. They are also transforming its sensibility. Take 42-year-old former harmonica player Nakul Kamte, the fine sync sound engineer whose strict code of silence on set is unearthing subtle depths in hitherto loud actors. Or Avan Contractor, a 29-year-old stylist, who has made it cool for male stars to have hairdressers. No longer are they in awe of stars or happy to blend into the background props.

"About time too,'' says Chennai-based Ravi K. Chandran, who worked on Dil Chahta Hai and is now the cinematographer for Rakesh Roshan's spooky Koi Mil Gaya. When he talks of ramping and lighting experiments, mainstream producers do not question the potential expense, even if it means air-lifting equipment on location. One word from the 40-year-old was enough to give S. Ravi Verman, his assistant on Mani Ratnam's Kannathil Muthamittal, a break in Armaan. "All I had to do was to send a copy of Jayraj's Santham which I shot in 12 days. The director loved it and I was on,'' says Verman who began life waiting tables in Chennai restaurants.

Increasingly, producers realise that it's important to use good technicians. Sailesh Gupta, director, Rave Entertainment, co-producers of Churaliya Hai Tumne, says corporate accountability demands it. "The idea is to complete our film within 160 days and make a product with good sound and picture quality which will sustain the multiplexes,'' says Gupta. With Rave planning 15 multiplexes in Uttar Pradesh over the next five years, he believes more producers will bite the bullet on guerrilla filmmaking.

Like Shaad Ali's Saathiya, produced by Bobby Bedi's Kaleidoscope. Shot in 70 days, the average age of the crew was 25. Siddhartha Luther, the second ad on the film, recalls how they even drew up a schedule of the local trains and shot accordingly because one of their locations was next to the station and the noise would interfere with sync sound.

The results are so spectacular that producers don't blink when Kamte, National Award winner for Lagaan, charges Rs 10 lakh for every film. He brings to his work a quiet efficiency. A look at his roster of yet-to-be-released films is impressive: Ram Madhvani's Let's Talk, Shyamaprasad's Indo-US production Bokshu, Raja Menon's Bus Yun Hi, Armaan and Samir Karnik's Kyun Ho Gaya Na Pyaar. As more producers choose sync sound, avoiding dubbing, actors are being forced to concentrate on the characters they're playing. Kamte couldn't be happier: "With no distraction, it's changing the way they perform.'' Madhvani agrees, calling him a pioneer in mainstream cinema. "He has the power to nix a scene if the sound is not right,'' he says.

The new broom is also sweeping the closets clean. Designers are now reading the script and fitting characters into clothes that breathe of real life. Like Arjun Bhasin, 28, who has worked on Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Swimfan, Twentieth Century Fox's surprise teen hit in the US. He's the man who gave the Dil Chahta Hai short shirt to the nation-he even shopped for Aamir Khan's personal wardrobe while shooting in Australia. He also ensured that each of the actors in the film was accessorised to perfection: Akshaye Khanna was given an old wind-up watch, Saif Ali Khan a digital diary and Aamir Khan a Bulgari. "My job is about trying to create a world within the film, giving each character a place, time and age group,'' he says. Bhasin is now working on Armaan as well as on the songs for Shankar's Tamil film Boys.

If the New York University graduate seems a happy misfit in Mumbai, try Contractor. Trained at Toni & Guy and Vidal Sassoon in London, the curly haired, languid Edwina Scissorhands is a far cry from the barber-turned-hairdressers that Bollywood is used to. She styled the stars in Dil Chahta Hai and went on to become Khanna's hairdresser in Humraaz and Deewangee. Since then, she's also styled Bobby Deol's hair and worked on the cuts of the entire cast of Armaan.

When it comes to visuals, Pankaj Khandpur of Western Outdoor has quite a following too. Whether it is blowing up a TV tower on top of a hill in Mission Kashmir or getting the coin to fall just right in Lagaan, the computer graphics wizard is the man Bollywood is increasingly calling. Having turned a hobby into a profession, he has done extensive work: choreographing the maple leaves in Mohabbatein, performing the fire sacrifice on Jackie Shroff in Agnivarsha and removing wrinkles on the faces of Jaya and Amitabh Bachchan for the flashback in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. "We really are the unsung heroes,'' he says.

So is Chetana Prabhu, the 43-year-old production designer of Saathiya and Armaan. As production designer, the former restaurateur learnt her craft on Mira Nair's Kama Sutra. For Saathiya, which required three specific houses, Prabhu went into several homes, shot hundreds of pictures and then assembled the sets. For Armaan, Prabhu's converting the exterior of the Savoy Hotel in Mussoorie into a hospital and matching it with the interiors shot in Mauritius and Film City.

Her detailing is both authentic and aesthetic, a tough-to-get combination in Bollywood's bizarre bazaar. And her work profile is exhaustive: she conceives the visual look of the film, decides the colour palette, draws up the budget, buys the props, works closely with the art director, costume designer and cinematographer and supervises the set decoration. "My job entails not just dressing up the sets but also every frame," says Prabhu. "It's very new to the film industry where the art director usually does it all.''

It is this spirit of adventure that unites the new breed of film professionals. They're not in it only for the money-though that is welcome. Kamte does as many low-budget independent films as he does big-budget productions. Chandran lives in the same flat in Chennai that he did 15 years ago while Bhasin says he'd rather do two films a year he's proud of rather than several. And you better believe their dedication: Bhasin wanted Bachchan to have a soft, loose look on Armaan but found the appropriate cardigan only on a private visit to Amsterdam. For Monsoon Wedding, he didn't even spare his mother, raiding her wardrobe for decade-old silk saris.

A Bollywood heroine wearing that? It's coming soon.