Pawan Kumar

Short Films

I guess short films are a good way to start your career as a film maker. Short films are mostly low budget stuff and one learns a lot when working under constraints. Short films demand more creativity and can take you to places. I started doing short films to test my skills, but luckily these films got me more.

Blind Date

This is my most recent short. I had this idea lingering in my mind for almost an year. It kept going through revisions quite often. And then one day I heard a piece of music and I was determined to make the movie for that music. And like always things started falling in place. My production company bought a HD camera, a friend helped me get the location, I had 2 actors in mind and I got them. We spent about 4 hours at the location and got some 55mins of footage. Edited it into a 3.5 mins film and then after repeated watching and feedback, I cut it down to 2.5mins. The film didnt turn out to be the way I had visualized. Reasons being I didnt get the location I had in my mind and lighting created some issues. Some shots turned out to be better than what I had thought. I thank my friends for helping me make this. Spent almost nothing. The film was shot in HD, so it was all in the system on AVCHD format. That caused a little bit of problem because none of the editing softwares are supporting that. Finally I found Adobe cs4 and it worked fine there.

When compared to all my other short films, this one has better cuts. Basically my film grammar has improved a lot. I can take the right shots and plan it well in my head. Its very important to run the edit pattern in the mind to shot from the right angles, otherwise you’d end up having all the wrong shots and not knowing how to edit them. And if your actor hasn’t performed well and you dont have better takes, then on the editing table you can do some tricks and make it look like they have done what you have asked for, in few shots my actors had not given me what I was looking at and it worked on the editing table. I love the HD camera, one can do wonder with it.

A Short film about money

This film is way too experimental. It has some lagging moments and confusing cuts. Most of it was deliberate and some of it was because there was no other choice. I don’t want to speak too much about the film. A watch will only take away 8.5 mins of your life !!!

A Perfect Day

This was my first short film. MAM movies Mumbai organized an event called ’101 movie making’, the deal was that 101 filmmakers would make a 5 mins film each about a given NGO in 101 hours. I liked the challenge and thought I could also put myself on test. I was given Spastic Society of India. The clock started ticking, everything right from idea to shooting to casting had to be done in those 101 hours. I had borrowed a Panasonic 3ccd handy camera, bought 2 min DV tapes, got some of my friends to act and used their houses. In the day I would shoot and in the night edit it. The movie was edited on FCP machine. I had spent about 250 bucks on the movie, thats it.  At the 100th hour I submitted the DVD. A week later we were called for the screening of the best 25 movies of the lot, the movies were screened in a multiplex, I was told that the makers of the best 25 would be informed before hand, and I was not informed. So I sat there to see how others had done their movies. To my surprise mine was the first movie that was screened, when I saw ACTor Productions logo on the big screen my eyes became moist. It was a moment I’d never forget.

Dreamcatcher

While I was teaching at a college in Bangalore I came across the Ability foundation 1 min Film competition. I told my students to make a film each and apply for the competition. The college had a sony pd camera and Adobe premiere editing system. During some free time i came up with a concept and took the camera out and shot some footage and edited the movie on their system. The topic was ‘Celebrating Diversity in Disability’. I submitted my movie and it made it to the finals. However the movie also got me selected for the Talent campus at the Osians Films Festival. It was a fully sponsored trip to delhi for the festival with a whole lot of workshops to attend for free. When I made the short film I was not expecting any of this. All you interested ones should apply for Talent Campus, it happens every year. An experience not worth missing.

Beginnings and Endings

Over confidence could be dangerous more importantly fruitless. I got into the mode of thinking that short films could be made on the fly, yes they can be if the script is like that. I decided I am gonna make a 30 min film. An adaptation of my play Honey Lets Break up. I got two good actors, I had 2 other friends to help me out. Took the camera and a car and started shooting. I had completed the detailed screenplay but I didnt have the budget to make it the way I had written it. So I started replacing everything in the script with whatever I could find. We shot for about 4 days spending about 1500 bucks. And when I started editing I realized my mistakes. Fiction movie making requires planning. There is something called film grammar. Never compromise on what the script requires. If you dont have the funds to make it, then go back to scripting and see if you could tweak it to the budget you have or wait for the budget to arrive, but never ever compromise. The script will be beautiful but not your film. This experience taught me that I have to get back to training and thats how I started working with Yogaraj Bhatt. A teaser trailer of the movie -

3 – A short film

This was done by a guy called Lijo. I was only acting in it. He had some budgets and he also had a vision as a director but I think his script was weak. And I was way too young when this happened. Technically this is my first film, This is the first time acted for a camera. It was 3 days of insane work Lijo was also doing it for the first time so he was figuring out stuff too. But whoever edited the footage did a good job of it. See the trailer and you will know.

AD films

I also got to be part of 2 unconventional Ad films. One was a 5-star Ad shot for internal purpose. This was shot in Mumbai by the OnM. The other ad was for Hutch-Rangashankara and was shot in Bangalore by the OnM.