Indie Unbound

To be an Indie filmmaker you need two qualities8212;blind faith in yourself and a rhino8217;s hide.

I had no film school training; didn8217;t have Yash Chopra for father; didn8217;t own a DVD player; couldn8217;t spell Kurosawa or Truffaut; couldn8217;t hold a camera for nuts, or even hold an intelligent conversation on film noir.

All I had was the copious willingness to make an ass of myself, come what may. So, at the ripe age of 31, I entered the alluring world of Indiewood with no baggage and no expectations. Zero baggage forced me to learn things faster and zero expectations helped me scale my mountain of shortcomings with ease.

Once you make the big leap of faith to become a film-maker, it8217;s time to look at your list of can-dos and can8217;t-dos. In my case, my only plus was I could write a bit. And the negatives included my pygmy-sized savings. The options before me were a to write a zara hatke screenplay and pitch it to studios in Mumbai and Chennai or b to write, produce and direct my own short films. I took option one, the easy way out. Six months were wasted. All it took was one moment of frustration. And I took the plunge of writing and making my own short films. After discarding seminal ideas like The Sex Life of an Ant, I chose to weave a hexology of six shorts based on one common theme.

Making short films on G-string budgets is quite an art. You need to tap into your goodwill bank and ask for an overdraft of favours. The one man I always turn to for favours is an angel named Rajesh Bajaj. He came up with an ingenious solution for my low-budget films8212;8216;8216;Shoot with digital and edit it using Final Cut Pro.8217;8217;

The trick with short films is to think of stories or situations that involve not more than three key characters. Once you have good characters, finding good actors shouldn8217;t be a problem, even if money is a constraint. When you8217;re the director, assistant director, production designer, art director and producer, shoots can be maddening. So budget for Murphy8217;s Law. A missing actor, a glaring continuity error, a forgotten shot or something as poetic as rain can turn your dream into a wet nightmare. But your production snafus can be ironed out at the edit table. A patch here, a zoom there, a cut or a dissolve in the hands of a wizard can be mighty tools to stitch together a tightly knit film.

Background music, sound re-recording and look of the film are areas that can make or break a film. Spending money here may be the difference between a good and a great short.

Okay, now that your Indie film is ready, what do you do with it? Well, here8217;s the shocker. There8217;s no market for such films in India. The only honourable option is to hit the film festival circuit. But the catch is that better known film festivals charge a dollar entry fee that might drive you to bankruptcy. So, what do you do? Perhaps the way out is to whip out your begging bowls.

Indie film-making can be a thankless job. For every Blair Witch Project, there are a thousand failures. The only way to keep your spirits afloat is to keep bombarding free film festivals and websites like Atom Films and Trigger Street for potential buyers. I did that. And I am still waiting for my date with destiny.

Anantha Narayan8217;s second short, Amnesia, has been selected for screening at the Digital Film Festival co-hosted by the British Council