The filmi dozen
These daytime techies have managed to make the city proud with their filmmaking hobby by winning top honours
By : sneha k sukumar
Update: 2015-10-04 23:16 GMT
Bursting with talent, software professionals no longer believe in working behind their screens and sticking to it. A group of 12 techies from the city made namma Bengaluru proud by being chosen for top honours at Asia’s largest filmmaking challenge - the India Film Project, this year. Standing seventh from over 640 entries across the world, their entry, 2+1=2 has been the first Kannada film to make it to the top. And this has given them more than just a round of applause. “It has given us the necessary confidence and a jumpstart,” says the team that lives and breathes cinema, despite having other jobs.
The comic thriller that was made in under 50 hours revolves around an engineer’s job hunt and how he falls for a ‘scam’, in the hope of earning Rs 1 lakh a month. “It’s a hilarious take on how he ends up in a racket to ‘employ’ robbers,” says the brain behind the story and its associate director, Tejesh Arani. Big names in the industry like Shyam Benegal, Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikhil Advani and Bejoy Nambiar have all been a part of the jury before and this time, it was Ketan Mehta and Onir’s turn to make their choice out of 640 entries! More than 21,000 filmmakers from across 18 countries have been apart of this celluloid gala before. This year, “Although the theme was to have a twist at the end, our motive was to have people at the edge of their seat, ensure that they laughed for the duration of the film and were thoroughly entertained at the end of it,” says the director Nithesh Nanjundaradhya, who may be an electronics and communications engineer, but is a thorough film enthusiast at heart.
Using the weekend, the team battled through the city’s unpredictable power cuts, scouted for locations, obtained permissions, scored original music and produced the film - all in a day! “We came up with three different scripts, all of which were scrapped at the last minute and we finally zeroed in on this, based on our gut feeling,” reveals Chetan Krishna, the man behind the lens. As they nose-dive back into their jobs again, they still keep their ‘shooting’ passions alive. As one of the winners, the team gets to make a short ad film for a prestigious brand too. And with the 3,000 odd views that their film has bagged in less than a week, we’re sure that will put a smile on our faces too.