Art & Entertainment

Cutting It Short

Can shorts break the revenue jinx to stay their alter-course?

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Cutting It Short
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Short films—and short, as in really, really short films—are in. One-minute, three-minute, six-minute flicks you catch alm­ost exclusively online. And some get more viewers than a censor-certified, two-hour-or-longer feature. The short films come in as many genres—thrillers, romance, comedy, horror, adventure, drama—and not just startups or indies, even the bigger, older production houses are into it.

“The average time a user spends on these films is growing,” says Sameer Mody of Pocket Films, which has six lakh subscribers on its channels. Just last year, the int­ernet went gaga over Ahalya, a short film by Sujoy Ghosh of Kahaani fame. Two weeks ago, Imitiaz Ali put out a short—a first by his Window Seat Productions—to maximum chatter on the social wires.

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Bunny

Anuj Gosalia, co-founder of Terribly Tiny Talkies, has created micro-fiction for the internet for close to two years now. “If your content is good, it travels,” says the 29-year-old. And why not? Hunger for content has only grown so far and anyone with a DSLR camera and a MacBook can shoot, edit and put a vignette out on the fly.

With demand and supply poised favourably, Pocket Films and others like them thrive on crowd-sourced content. Budding filmmakers post their videos online and the process takes off. “It’s an adventurous platform for young filmmakers to showcase their filmmaking skills and connect with the top brass of filmmakers,” says Anurag Khanna of Six Sigma. Indeed, young filmmakers are in demand. “For our first short film, we had a 25-year-old director, Venky A.V.,” says Percept Pictures CEO Danyush ‘Danny’ Mamik.

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Love Shots

Smart startups like these apart, big banners like Yash Raj Films are in the business too. But they know the audience for this is different, not quite those who swooned over DDLJ. “When they ripped off the Game of Thrones teaser on Sasural Simar Ka, the audience let them know about it,” says Ashish Patil, who heads YRF subsidiary Y Films. “On the internet, you spot bullshit a mile away”.

So how do they make money? Well, that’s tough. Advertising on YouTube—the main source of revenue—gets you “Rs 1 lakh say for around 10 lakh views, which is peanuts,” rues Ashish. Everybody is still figuring out a viable business model. So far, the stars who figured in these films—say, Radhika Apte, Nimrat Kaur or Irfan Khan—have worked pro bono or for a modest fee.

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One Day Mataram

Despite low production costs, though, the firms have to keep looking for sponsors. Anuj says they roped in a tea brand for Cheers, “as the narrative was around chai”. Now, with Netflix, they could see a rise in subscriptions. Everyone agrees, though, that it’s not the place to make money. Not by a long shot. Not yet.

To young, ambitious actors and directors, the short is a calling card to Bollywood and such like, but who knows if that ‘appeal’ would last? And the stars are there for reasons other than money—say, a chance to push the acting envelope. “Richa Chadda plays a cop in a clip where she molests a guy. She would never get to do something like this otherwise and was kicked about it,” says Ashish.

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Stricter, more sanskari censor-snip norms, though, could redraw these flexible boundaries of the short-film genre. If and when moral policing turns its sights on the shorts, what would it do to the possibilities of portraying the edgy, the messy, the offbeat—the bread and butter, metaphorically, of the short-filmy imagination?

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