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| Purnesh |
I was reading a book by Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Sin City) when I came across his famous line: If you are thinking of making movies, stop thinking and start making. This line almost slapped me a zillion times for not being proactive on my since-childhood dream of film-making. And so to start making movies, I again began to think on how to start.
First, I bought a newly-released Canon camcorder; wrote a short film script; spoke to a few friends at work; and began to shoot with them. And then, I watched the raw film on my laptop, all alone. Frankly, it was very bad. Silently and sincerely, I gave up my plans to pursue film-making. I thought its not my cup of tea. But what I failed to realize was that Robert Rodriguez mentioned in his book about the several poor short films he made before making a festival-winning one. And he made more than 30 short films before venturing into his first feature length film (El Mariachi).
A month later, I came across an attractive poster of New York Film Academy (NYFA) Film course. Now, let me go back a bit here. I have always believed that Art must come naturally to a person; it cannot be learnt. Learning Art, I considered, was a crazy rich-mans time-pass. Coming back to the poster, I felt this course belongs to crazy people. But just out of an unknown curiosity, I explored about it on net. Its a short evening program, which lasts for three months. The location of the institute was near Universal Studios. And out of nowhere, the instinct to shell out a few bucks and spare the evenings for three months took over. The keenness on film-making crept back and within a month, I was sitting with seven others in the NYFA class.
My colleagues were from different countries. Dominique was from Switzerland, Florin from Finland, Claudia from Germany, Dana from America, Mike from Armenia, George from Mexico and Nagaraju from Hyderabad. Yah! There was another Indian in our class. He, like me, works in IT and is passionate about films. It was exciting being in the same class with people belonging to different cultures, but having similar passions. We Indians had an opportunity to share our viewpoints with them and they shared their viewpoints with us. Though initially there was a strange feeling of indifference, but that was just because of the newness, which soon died away the moment we worked together on our assignments. The mutual understanding and cooperation during the following days just proved how much Films can bring people together.
For three months, having gone through the course-work and assignments in Screenplay, Cinematography, Lighting, Continuity, Editing, Production and Direction, I realized that Art, not only in films, does have a Form, an Architecture and a Technique to create. Learning Art began to make sense. And Learning Films made even more sense because .. how can I say this.. the feeling which one gets while commanding Lights, Roll-Camera, Action to the crew is .. Man!!! You just have to be in that situation to really understand the feeling.
