Technology helps you tell your stories. You blog about your heartbreak, upload the photo-tale of your latest trip on Orkut and crib about your boss over instant messaging. Some, like 14-year-old Saya Date, go ahead and make a movie. Still in secondary school, Saya, a Pune resident, used a basic DV handicam, a gift from her parents, to make a one-and-a-half-hour film on what one would call her first brush with reality. The plot next door is a version of an incident that took place in her life. “The story revolves around a girl who returns to India from the US. A slum close to her house is demolished. But the slum-dwellers do not get rehabilitated. She and her friends then get together to save their homes,” says Date. Rakesh Kaushik is a 26-year-old looking for a job. But between doing the rounds of offices for interviews he found time to do what he always longed to. “I always wanted to tell a story and tell it through this medium,” he says. So one day, he decided to create his own version of a good film and shelled out Rs 10,000 to finance his six-minute-long film on infatuation.They are no aspiring Satyajit Rays or Ram Gopal Varmas but across urban India, a few youngsters are putting the tales of their lives on celluloid, never mind that the audience does not run into large numbers. The easy availability of editing software like Digital B, Window’s Movie, portable cameras and the Internet have also triggered this surge of amateur filmmakers who pan their cameras to capture moments, lives and sometimes just thoughts. Archana Iyer from Ahmedabad may have done a course in audiovisual production but her professional ambitions were not in the picture when she used her vacation to shoot a film on one of her six dogs. Inspired by the classic Black Beauty, she decided to swivel the camera on her favourite mongrel, Gypsy and make an eight-minute film. “It talks about how stray dogs can be brought home and adopted,” she says. Once the film was shot, she distributed it among friends while her father pitched in by taking it across to Maneka Gandhi and other organisations for animals. For some, making a movie is becoming as fuss-free a creative outlet as writing. Dr Ravindra Godse, a surgeon based in Pittsburgh, switched to filmmaking after writing a novel. His two short movies I am a schizophrenic and so am I and Dr Ravi & Mr Hyde have received good reviews in the US. “I always wanted to make a film and I wanted to prove that movie making is neither costly nor time consuming. I made both films in five days,” he says. Having practiced medicine for eight years, he wanted to tell a story about a doctor trying to make a movie. “When it started looking like mid-life crisis, I latched on to it because that is a universal subject,” he says. The 87-minute film was shot in a standard definition DV at 24 frames per second. “Making films has always been easier than showing them around. But now with Internet and Google sites where you can just upload your film, viewing too has become easy,” says Godse, who took a film course in US before making his film. Sometimes the freshness of approach of these novices moves critics. Anil Sadrangani, a Mumbai-based freelance journalist shot a three-and-a-half-minute film Dim on two Muslim women discussing the problems of renting out a place in Mumbai. Besides being screened at Shri Aurobindo Film Festival this year in January, the film was also on the final list of New York Film Festival last year. “My friend helped me script the film and I shot it on the HD camera my parents got me way back in 1987,” says Sadrangi. All he had to do was edit it on Windows Movie software and upload it on Buzz18.com. Soon the film had 9,000 hits and was an instant success. “In fact another friend just shot a film on her phone and put it through an editing machine, it was that simple. All she had to do was upload it,” adds Sadrangi.The art of the perishable. It’s as easy as that. Now all you need is a story to tell.
