By Shadan Syed

Two kids — their 10th-grade board exams appearing, no cameraman, one single camera, one single tripod — stand in front of the camera, almost make fools out of themselves and end up making a movie. No, this isn’t some pseudo-uplifting tale of how art is born out of poverty and how even the kids with access to 0 resources and even 0 people to help them make do with the resources have made a film that is internationally renowned with those two kids becoming world famous directors.

No. This is what I did, and I managed to churn out a movie.

A movie one of my friends even uses to make memes. I look ridiculous in it, our limited grasp over English while we made it reduces the dialogue to indecipherable and senseless babble. The visual effects in it put even the worst of the worst South Indian movies to shame in how absolutely un-aesthetic they are. But I picked up the camera and it has changed me immensely. And that is why today I find myself in a position where I can write something that will hopefully inspire you to pick up the camera yourself.

You can still look up this first film that I’ve written about, “The Heist: An X-Men Fan Film”, on YouTube and for all posterity I shall not pull it down. Simply because that is the film that ties me to my roots. All I have learnt today began with that one single film.

My journey started when I was ten years old. I used my elder brother’s hand-me-down phone with a it-cannot-be-handed-down-further camera to shoot videos around my society. I hardly knew how to handle a camera, directing was out of the syllabus, and editing? That sounded like some foreign, exotic bird that I could never hope to see in a million years. Learning all these techniques was tough. And it still is. Because learning filmmaking isn’t a limited course with set boundaries that you need to spend 2 hours a day at and you’ll be able to quantify your knowledge in it by the end of 4 years. No, it’s something that’s evolving every single day and has been so for more than a hundred years now.

In the summer of 2015, I (like most other teenagers around the world) saw X-Men: Days of Future Past, and I (like most other teenagers around the world) was absolutely wow-ed by Quicksilver’s bullet time scene. The special effects in that movie were what truly nudged me to pick up the camera and make a fully thought-out short film by myself. Of course, on retrospect fully “thought-out” is a little too much praise for a movie that my friend Rishabh (the second of the 2 kids with boards approaching) and I used to discuss every night and then shoot the next day with no script, no thought-out dialogue and a little more than a vague idea of what exactly it was we wanted this film to look like.

A couple of YouTube tutorials and a bootlegged version of Adobe After Effects later I gained my self-bestowed diploma in Visual Effects. I could teleport myself from one room to another, make fire appear out of this air from my hands, make my eyes emit lasers strong enough to destroy all those who attempted to (futilely so, if I may add) challenge me. The magic of cinema was real for me. I could see myself do things I wouldn’t have thought possible (except of course in my wildest dreams where I was wearing a colorful cheery latex costume flying off to save a damsel in distress from a burning building). But what was even more important was the realization that I could MAKE myself do these things that were otherwise un-imaginable.

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“Pick up a camera, shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. After that you are just negotiating your budget and your fee.”

That’s what James Cameron said in a TED Talk, and I can absolutely attest to that. I’m a nobody. I don’t travel in limousines and hang out with the who’s who of Bollywood. I just love movies and even more importantly, I adore making movies. That’s what has brought me to a point where another person believes that I’m capable of expressing my love of this medium to other people. And that is the greatest achievement of my life until now.

The greatest fear you can possibly face, is the fear of getting off your seat, turning off this computer screen on which you’re reading this little piece that I’ve penned down, and actually picking up the camera and making something. Once you’ve done that, no one can stop you. If someone told me a few years ago when I was making “The Heist” that one day I’d be able to email a record company and ask them to give me the rights to a piece of (quite popular) music for free, I’d probably tell that person to get lost. But I did that. The toughest part of the process was Googling the Record Company’s email address, and then asking my friend to help me compose the email that adequately described how much I loved the song and how much I wanted to use it and how absolutely unable I was to be able to provide any remuneration to use it. Voila, I have now used two pieces of copyrighted music in two of my films with ZERO glitches.

These movies have been to international film festivals. My short films have been shown in my home town of Raipur, Atlanta and even one of the greatest cities for film in this world, New York among others. I even have won awards. What I want to say is that the pain of losing out in a competition, the fear of losing out on being selected for a competition is nothing compared to what you’ll miss if you don’t stand up and make a short film, right now.

Most of the people around me, and in fact I too, most times have a gazillion complaints about the current state of Bollywood. And to be brutally honest, it’s really not in the best shape possible. I do not mean to say there are no good movies being produced, heck there ARE many GREAT movies being produced. What’s saddening is how often they just pass below the radar and we cannot find a way to watch them or even know about their existence.

Most people laud American Movies, and rightfully so. Hollywood churns out good movies year after year. But what separates Hollywood from the regional cinema around the world isn’t that they make “BETTER” movies, there’s no objective way of saying that they do. What separates us is that their independent movies receive a lot more attention and a lot more exposure to audiences domestically within the US, and of course internationally too. This starts what I believe is the second most important process in film-making after “picking up the camera”. This helps to start dialogue. That, in my opinion is what cinema should do. That is what good cinema should be able to do. Promoting communication between people.

I sincerely hope, that if anyone today is even a little inspired by this article, or the millions out there who have already set out on their film-making journey, not just students and teenagers like myself, but professionals in the industry who I have an undying respect for — I sincerely hope that they help bring Indian Cinema to the forefront of the global dialogue on film. And that Indian movies get the respect that they rightfully deserve.

That is what I aim to do with my movies. Hopefully, someday I shall be able to make a film and be absolutely proud of it, and take pride in the fact that long ago I made a movie about mutants with seemingly ancient technology, and it propelled me to a journey that I will never regret, and a journey that will eventually make me who I am.