Meet the digital director!

CITY LAD Ajay Gupta is a man on a vengeance trip. Straddling his creative aspirations on his handy cam, he is a film director with a difference who is content translating his celluloid dreams through the as-ofnow-new-and-experimental digital medium, which is changing the face of independent filmmaking, the world over.
Just 25 years old and he has shown his maiden film, The W (hole) Picture...& A Few Voices, in the Digital Talkies Film Festival 2003 held last month in Delhi. As to the vengeance bit, he has named his production company as Vengeance Productions because; “I want to bring back originality in filmmaking with a vengeance. What good is a great idea if it doesn’t evoke the expression of ‘its never been done before’. After all, a copy will always remain a copy however great it might be.� Hmm. An ex-PEC student, Ajay feels digital cinema is here to stay and a god send for those itching to make a film, “It’s made filmmaking easier, affordable and more experimental.
The handling ease allows one to treat a subject more intimately and narrate the story differently. You don’t even need to buy a handy cam; you can hire it and make a good film in Rs 5 lakhs. The quality is the same, if not better and just think of the risks you can take and the experiments you can do because of the budget. To think of it, one can actually make 20 digital films in the Rs 50 crores budget of Devdas,� he narrates excitedly.
Considering that he doesn’t believe in either formal training or in assisting anybody, Ajay is firm on his originality stand. “The best way to learn how to make a film is by actually making a film. The endeavour should be to chalk out one’s own genre and style. No one can teach you the director’s vision.� About his 28- minute film, The W (hole) Picture... & A Few Voices which is a one night story into the life of a corporate escort, Ajay says, “I wrote the script with the intention of making it on celluloid but didn’t find takers because of its bold subject so I decided to go ahead and make it on my own and shot the film in one day and one night.�
Already on to his next project, a coming of age teen comedy titled Kambakht Love & A Poor Dude, which he plans to digitally shoot in Chandigarh, Ajay is also writing a script for Mahesh Bhatt. Take it from us, this one’s ‘digitally’ arrived for sure!