Summary
A former student of Jadavpur University recalls making short films and launching Kolkata Film Collective
Cinematography to editing to post-production work, a bunch of young film enthusiasts made three short films
As far as I can remember, I have always wanted to make films. However, I had no idea how films are made. In the autumn of 2016, I finally mustered the courage to take the plunge with the help of my friends at Jadavpur University.
I was aware that it takes a lot of effort and commitment to even make the shortest of films articulate and evocative. A random conversation with friends gave birth to an idea and the basic objective behind the Kolkata Film Collective (KFC) was conceived. None of us had any formal training or the technical skills required to make films. We just had an old borrowed DSLR camera with a kit lens. Our objective was to get an experience of making a film to understand what it takes.
24 hours and a dreadful film! Later, we realised that filmmaking is an extremely arduous task where seamless coherence between creativity and technical ability is needed to translate what is on paper to screen. We were extremely proud of the final product because of our hard work but, at the same time, creatively it was a massive disappointment. The final product was not even close to what we had imagined.
Even though our experiment wasn’t successful, we learned a lot from it. Before that day, we had only been concerned about the ideation, story and script, things we needed to start the production. We didn’t pay attention to other aspects of filming such as production design, lighting, and logistics. It was an extremely valuable experience for us in terms of understanding our limited collective imagination regarding the process of filmmaking.
Seven months later, we got together again to make another attempt at creating a short film within a day. This time we were more prepared, skilled and even had a bigger crew with new equipment like a sound recorder. We also decided to showcase our film to people.
We took a different approach this time like expanding several sequences and choosing locations. It was a chaotic experience. We formally launched a platform called Kolkata Film Collective and finally uploaded our film. We got some valuable feedback for our effort from our families and peers, but once again we failed to achieve what we had imagined.
A year later, we met up again to make our third project. We arranged for better equipment, even managed to get a set to shoot our film and had a proper screenplay. Despite all these advantages, we failed to match our expectations again. We fell short on several key aspects of direction, cinematography and editing. Our short film got selected at CineYouth, Chicago International Film Festival’s yearly film festival that showcases short films made by filmmakers 22 years old and younger from around the world, and The Kaohsiung Film Festival, Taiwan.
From this experience, we learned a valuable lesson in filmmaking, which is to improve individual skillset. To make a film, various art forms like writing, cinematography, editing, music, acting, sound design, and production design need to come together seamlessly to establish a greater collective art form.
The third production of KFC was our last project as a collective. Most of us are in different parts of the country pursuing our careers but storytelling through films has been a constant passion for all of us.
The entire experience of KFC taught me the actual difficulties of making films, zero-budget films to be precise. Even without the added pressure of commerce, it is quite a strenuous process. It helped me realise that the enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
Last updated on 14 Dec 2021
