Varun Live

Yesterday, I had participated in a short film making competition at YCET, Kollam. Let me tell you two important lessons I learnt.

Lesson 1 in Film Making – Making a film shouldn’t be a race against time.

Lesson 2 in Film Making – You should make a film because you want to make it, not because the film has to be made.

Everything began badly with the camera with which we were to shoot being unavailable. I somehow managed to get hold of a handycam just in time. The theme for the film was ‘Melody Of Youth’ (which none of us could figure out what the organisers meant by this) which was given minutes before the competition began. Constraints were the 5 minute duration and a work time of 4 hours. We shot the movie, edited it but couldn’t dub it properly even after getting the time duration of the competition extended by a couple of hours. I have a confession to make that the film we made was a rip off of another short film made by our seniors.

We didn’t win any prize, but the lesson I learnt was very valuable. Many of our competitors had pre filmed shots as they had guessed the theme would be campus related. But we shot the whole film (5 mins 30 secs approx) then and there. We enjoyed filming it but the editing and dubbing was tedious as our tensions were running high as the time remaining was too little. This is the first competition our whole team attended and we did pretty well for our first attempt.