Around four years ago, my college had held a photography competition, where we were required to submit our photos by compiling them over a soundtrack that they had suggested. Since I was quite desperate to get it done, I decided to do some experiments on my own. Eventually, I ended up creating my first ever video compilation in Picasa.
I was simply blown when I saw the impact that could be created by putting some images next to each other in a particular order. The slideshow that I created in Picasa made me realise that I had the power to think visually. I still remember that I had called up my brother that night and told him that I was going to become a filmmaker. Courtesy, Picasa.
I was a civil engineering student in my first year of college when I discovered this love for visual storytelling. It took complete hold of me. I spent the next three years of my engineering life educating myself with the fundamentals of filmmaking. And since then, there’s been no looking back. I just kept experimenting and have been testing my boundaries by creating things that are quite unlike me. My work is often labeled as “pretentious” because mostly it doesn’t cater to the large audiences (unlike mainstream media). But I believe that it’s perfectly okay to be “pretentious” as long as you are creating something.
Creating – it’s one of the most beautiful feelings one can experience. That is why a chef is lost in his work when he is cooking, even for himself. The universe fades away for that little while, because the process transcends physical boundaries.
It’s rather penitent that, somehow, over the years, our appreciation for creation has faded out. In terms of visual storytelling, the focus has shifted to less fulfilling things like “virality”. The social media has brainwashed our generation into believing that we need to tweet harder and Facebook faster to make our content go viral. And due to this obsession with view count, we are creating things that we would not have otherwise created. The storyteller within us is being made to compromise and give in to futile demands.
‘Filmmaker,’ ‘Youtuber,’ and an ‘Entrepreneur’ are three different terms for three different things. And things will be a lot easier for you if you know which of the three you want to be. For the latter two, one may have to depend on external factors such as online revenue and virality. But if you’re in it to become a filmmaker, you should have no concerns with all this. Like director Devashish Makhija says, you should probably separate your income source from your creative ventures. It’s just that the lines between the three titles have been blurred and it is making people focus on trivial things.
I have my own defense mechanism to fight the monster that internet is. Since we’ve become overly cautious with our image on social media, we tend to take our virtual self too seriously. The same keeps happening with me. I am also an addict of the internet and to fight against it, I try to fail publicly. I share all my experimental videos online, especially the bad ones. I am not making any effort to make that content viral. It’s just that I’m creating an online archive of my failures. It lowers the expectations that people have from me. And when that happens, I am able to work. It helps me experiment even more, because then I know that no one really cares about what I’m creating.
Louis C.K once said that nowadays online content is being consumed like porn. And we’ve created enough content to last a few hundred thousand years without the need for creating anything new. Now people rarely re-watch the things they like. They just want something new every single time that they browse the internet.
I am constantly making an effort to not be a part of that league. I don’t want to spoon-feed people. I don’t want them to discover my work through the autoplay feature of Facebook. I want them to make an effort. It reminds me of a conversation from Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona where Vicky asks Juan why his father wouldn’t publish his poems. And Juan tells her that it was his father’s way of getting back at the world which he hated so much. By creating beautiful works, but denying them to the public.
To be painfully honest, even if no one makes an effort to watch my work, I won’t really mind. Just being able to make the films on my own terms is so insanely satisfying. And asking for anything more would be rather greedy. So I find it quite amusing when people try to sympathise with me when they find out that I have only around 300 subscribers on Youtube. People actually feel bad for me that none of my videos have ever gone viral and most of them end up having less than 1000 views. Even my mom once joked around saying that maybe I should buy a cat and start making cat videos as people love to watch them.
But I consider this whole situation very favourable for my creative growth, because people are slowly losing confidence in me as I am nowhere close to becoming the next Bhuvan Bam. This decision allows me to experiment more and fail on my own terms. I’m constantly choosing to film in the dark and fail in the light. I really like what Mark Duplass said in that regard, “Keep making shitty short films until one of them doesn’t suck one day”.
When I initially started making shorts, I wanted to win an Oscar. Now I just want them to let me create (whatever it is that I am creating). I know that I am making nothing that can cater to large audiences, but it is a calculated risk. Or at least I would like to believe so. And if my calculations go wrong, I think I can always go back and buy a cat. Until then, I won’t plead you to like, subscribe and share my videos. For now, let me create my art in the dark.
Vaibhav’s Youtube page: BRAILLE CAM
Watch his short film, Platform Paune Dus (9 3/4), which was reviewed on Film Companion here:
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