Find Your Passion & Film it!

Originally Posted by Vinay Pemmasani

My Previous piece of writing, “Marriage of Movie & Money: Death of Innovation Creativity”, might have left you with a feeling “What the hell is going to happen? What Now?” Well, that’s a million dollar question. I have no clue about what young film makers would try to do to survive such demolishing situation. However, in this writing; I am going to tell, what I think they should do.

Today, streets of Los Angeles, London, Mumbai and even Hyderabad are full of Short Film screenings. Times have changed. This is no more an era of aspiring film makers, dreaming about working as assistants, hoping to would become a director SOME day. Today, the trend allows them to buy a camera, play around with it, find an enthusiastic team, make a short film, amaze people with their thoughts and prove their talent. Being in such an opportunistic world, would eventually tempt young film makers to cook up a story and film it in rush. Well, this is the problem.

James Cameron, being a profound lover of science fiction and sea life, spent 3000 hours in the deep Atlantic Ocean & was a member of NASA advisory board, before making Titanic, Terminator & Avatar. He spent millions of dollars & years of hard work in creating performance capture technology, to film Avatar. He originally loves all those creatures we see on the planet Pandora, some of which actually exist in deep oceans. Such immense passion reflect in his science fiction movies, which make the whole world spell bound, without even having any stars.

A 13 year Orthodox Jewish child made an award winning war film called “Escape to No Where”, he turned out to be Steven Spielberg. After facing difficulties in school being a Jewish & going through his father’s the World War-II experiences, he was interested in showing that extremely emotional & sensitive content during war, on silver screen. This resulted in making him the king of genre “WAR”. He has also received two Oscars for his War films, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.

His passion about human psychology, special effects & film making techniques can be seen in his every film ever made. He is the best user of Visual Effects. Name of this University College London guy is Christopher Nolan. His passion in special effects reflects in his very first 3 minute short film, Doodlebug, and he was unstoppable in his latest Bible for Visual Effects, Inception. 

I find SS Rajamouli, an ace director, as a person with outstanding sensibilities had an urge of telling stories from his childhood. Filming action sequences backed up with highly emotional content is his weapon to amaze audiences. He introduced visual effects to TW on a big canvas (MD), made a movie (MR) without a star hero and grossed 30C, and now again filming a movie called EEGA with huge CG work involved without a big star. Passion & confidence.

Shankar is a director with great human values and the only Indian director with fantastic taste in fantasy & special effects, which can be seen in his every movie. He made the most expensive Indian film in 1998, where he used brilliant visual effects at that time, which was India’s pick for Best Foreign Language film for Oscar. His recent epic, Indian “I, Robot”, is still the highest grosser of Indian Cinema. Such is the nature of having passion, which builds confidence and reflects on silver screen.

However, this is exactly the problem is with young film makers. If a film maker love a specific subject matter, be it a simple drama or action or sci-fi or adventure or comedy or romance or even patriotic, he can be the best at telling it. He can convey the feelings and sensibilities of that story at his best, only when he has passion for that subject. Only then, he can actually tell a fresh original story, that the audience wouldn’t have seen anything like that before. However, when he has no passion, imagination and idea about any specific subject, the story, and eventually the film, turns out to be routine and unoriginal.

This is why I believe young Film/Short Film makers should stop writing Stories and making Films/Short Films in rush. Yes, they should just stop trying to be something having nothing to convey. Out of 100 short films (Indian) I see every day, 90 of them revolve around a guy, girl and their tragic or comic love stories, without minimum standards in Camera, Sound etc. Only 10 films are actually touching other genres with decent standards. This surely is because of lack of depth in knowledge and passion in other genres, which is really worrying in the internet world. “Know what you’re passionate about, find your interests, and film them. They would eventually turn out to be very original, exceptional and makes you stand out.  You should be the captain of the ship. All the stars and productions houses will be behind them sooner or later, as it’s been proved several times in case of above film makers.”