This 33-year-old engineer has arguably one of the best lives anyone can think of – a cushy, innovative job as a Big Data analyst, a lovely wife who is a B.Tech grad herself and a cute little kid giving him the greatest of happiness apart from life in the land of opportunity, the United States of America.
“But I am getting ready to give up my job and re-locate to India to follow up on my passion of story-telling,” says this Hyderabadi. Meet Sreedhar Kothapally, who’s thinking all this and more, primarily because of the buzz that ‘Yellow’, his 8-minute short film is creating. Pocket Films has contracted with him to distribute the film on ‘Prime Talkies with Pocket Films’ on NDTV Profit-Prime and also monetise it through other distribution channels.
After his bachelors and masters in engineering in Canada, he took up his first job in America, with IBM in 2005 and then moved to HSBC, before landing a job as an R&D engineer with the graphics division of Lucas Films. “This actually firmed up my resolve to resort to story-telling using the medium of the large screen,” he says.
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But then, circumstances made him move to eBay, where he made his short film in his spare time, on the banner of Cinephile Film Arts Inc. What exactly is ‘Yellow’ about and why short films? “It’s about a man’s action, a mistake and the repercussions. It has multiple interpretations of one’s action in life and short films afford a person the opportunity to experiment, which does not happen all the time in feature films,” he says.
The cast comprises just one actor, played by Sunny Moza, a solutions architect with Juniper Networks and a radio jockey for a Hindi channel in Sanfrancisco. The blurred lines between the sequences effectively serve to connect the dots, the storyline. It was shot using a Canon 5D and iPhone 5 too for some scenes and Sreedhar is the writer-director-producer, sound engineer and editor as well.
Background score by Vijay Kurakula of ‘A Film by Aravind’ fame is as effective and gripping as the camera work by T. Vijayan, an architect at Commvault Systems.
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The usage of soft lighting and silhouettes make for interesting viewing.
As for future plans, Sreedhar has just finished writing a cop action thriller which he plans to pitch when he moves back to India next summer with his wife Pooja and daughter Anika.