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Marathon man
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Sharat Chandra Parsa looks at the short film as a training ground for full-length features
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Scenes form 'The Thinker' Photo: D. Gopalakrishnan
SHARAT CHANDRA PARSA looks at the short film like "a 100 metre sprint. It is preparation for a marathon - the full-length feature film." Sharat, who graduated from the Sheridan College, Canada, was always interested in creative arts.
"I was painting since I was three. I used to draw mythological stuff and somewhere along the way I realised, it was a form of storyboarding. That was my entry into the visual medium." Sharat's romance with the moving picture happened when he was cast in "Shyam Benegal's Susman as Shabana Azmi's son. It was a whole new whole world for me." And there was no looking back.
Sharat joined the National Institute of Design and studied animation and as an exchange student at Sheridan, studied every aspect of filmmaking.
Sharat considers "animation a way to enter film and a good tool I picked up." The young director sees both sides of the storyboard dilemma - "too much planning does not leave space for the rule of the unknown and on the other hand, you cannot expect a miracle every second."
Sharat's student film at Sheridan, The Thinker, which won a nomination to the Student Oscars as well as an entry into Cannes, is a brilliant marriage of concept and technique. Inspired by Rodin's The Thinker, the film combines three mediums of animation - cell, Claymation and computer generated special effects to follow the path of a thought.
Poignant fare
His Malli, which won the Best Original Concept at the India and South East Asian Film Festival is a poignant look at the crushed aspirations of the girl child. As of now, Sharat is working on a travelogue for MAA TV ("for bread and butter") and there is My First Love, a 10-minute feature with an international producer.
"I have shot a 40-minute thriller called Blur which is in post-production." Though Sharat has won awards for his editing, he is pleased to hand over the editing reigns to his friend and schoolmate ("we went to St John's Church School") Shravan Katikaneni. "The principles of editing are tuned to direction," he explains. "Every director has to be an editor."
Sharat does not look at advertising as callow, shallow and the rest of it. "I have seen some very cool ads and at the end of the day, an ad is also telling a story and that too in shorter time. It requires a special skill to be able to tell a story practically in précis!"
"The medium does not matter, I just want to be able to tell stories." And coming back to Sharat's marathon run, his ultimate dream is "make romantic comedies - the Woody Allen kind of movie. I have nothing against mainstream cinema and would love to make a sensible movie that does not go against my sense of aesthetics." It is get set and go for the dynamic filmmaker and we are waiting at the finish line!
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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