"I am in admiration of your writing. You have many gifts, but do not overlook your writing. You have a rare ability to combine conversational, autobiographical and anecdotal content with a well thought-out overall plan. Your writing is fluid, not laboured. It has a voice. Some writers work a lifetime and never find a voice."
That is respected American film critic and screenwriter Roger Ebert's take - a man Forbes magazine once said is ‘the most powerful pundit in America' - on Krishna Bala Shenoi, a Grade 12 student at the Millennium School, Dubai.
What prompted this burst of appreciation were the articles Shenoi sent him for publication on Ebert's website. "I came to know about Krishna Shenoi when someone sent me a link to his Inception trailer as done by Hitchcock," says Ebert.
"Later, I found Shenoi's video explaining the ‘giant special effects' he used in one of his short films. I googled him, and was immediately impressed by the quality of his writing, his energy, his humour, his insights. His age is irrelevant. He has the right stuff. I'm happy to offer him some exposure on my site. His potential is enormous."
The upshot was that Ebert invited him to be one of his ‘Far-flung Correspondents' who write on films for his blog on the Chicago Sun-Times website.
What the blog is all about
Ebert describes the Foreign Correspondents' blog as "a feature of Roger Ebert's Journal in which film commentators from all over the world will contribute their video reviews, observations, musings, philosophies and pronouncements.
In the wings are fine critics from Canada, Egypt, India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Uruguay. These voices are not often heard on internet sites serving US movie lovers. They've added immeasurably to the quality of the discussions on my blog."
Who is this boy who has professionals so enthused? Picture a rather tall boy with a shock of hair falling over his forehead and a shy grin. A typical school kid, only with a talent for movie making that can rival established filmmakers.
How does it feel being featured on Roger Ebert's page? "That's great, as I've been reading his reviews for about four years now," Shenoi responds enthusiastically. "I used to keep sending him stuff every now and then, but he'd not responded. But he happened to notice something I'd done recently - a trailer for the Christopher Nolan film Inception."
What Shenoi did was reconstruct the original trailer of the film in the style of Alfred Hitchcock's films in the Fifties. "He liked that, then he saw my blog and read some of my posts. He wrote to me that he liked my style, and invited me to become one of his foreign correspondents on his blog, thepopcornreel.com!
"I am the youngest among the foreign correspondents. I've been commenting on his blog for some time now, but this is the first time my articles have been put up there."
So far, Shenoi has written two articles for Ebert's blog. The first one was on the movie Superman, titled ‘It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the superhero genre!' "He later quoted my article in his ‘Great Movies' review of Superman," says Shenoi. "He told me that my article ‘got him thinking' about including Superman in his ‘Great Movies' list!"
For his next article, ‘Dear Mr Robert Zemeckis Sir', Shenoi wrote in the form of a letter from a ten year old asking him why his recent films have all employed motion capture - the digital technology used so famously in Avatar, instead of doing it the old way like his Forrest Gump or Back to the Future.
Shenoi then offers his views on some of Zemeckis' recent works: "I feel his recent films don't have much emotional appeal. The technology is overshadowing the storytelling. The Polar Express rang hollow to me, as did Beowulf and A Christmas Carol."
Moving images
Shenoi doesn't remember how his interest in films was ignited. As a child, he would look "at stuff around me through an imaginary camera lens and imagine a movie being shot. I think it was Steven Spielberg and animation movies", he says.
His earliest memory is of his parents buying him a Lego movie-making set. That started him off. Later, Shenoi was inspired to start making his own movies after watching the special features section of some DVDs which showed the making of the movie.
It all started with his mother's handycam. "I didn't have a video camera of my own and still don't. I used to play around with my mother's cam, a Sony handycam."
His first film starred a green Lego dinosaur. It was called Murplex! "I don't know what it means, that was just the name I'd given the dinosaur," he smiles. "It starred my two cousins, Girish and Sushil. They've acted in four of my movies.
Murplex was inspired by ET- two boys discover this dinosaur… I was not interested in the story actually, I was more interested in the special effects! There is not much to those movies, when I look back, but at that point I had to make them! I showed them mostly to my family and relatives."
Shenoi's parents were encouraging, "But now they are more concerned about [my] academics!" he says.
"The first film of mine that people noticed was something I am not too proud of," confesses Shenoi.
"I downloaded three video clips from YouTube, edited and spliced them together, added some music, and showed it at our school assembly on India's Republic Day about three years back. It was a very nice video, but it wasn't mine."
Striking a chord with the audience
However, it caught the eye of the school authorities who soon asked him to make videos for school functions and events. "The first video I was satisfied with was the On the Road video on road safety that I made for the STS Road Safety contest," he says. He won the contest, and Shenoi walked away with a laptop "that I now use to work on my movies".
The plaudits he received encouraged him to be more ambitious. His next film, Down Memory Lane was a 16-minute film that he made for the farewell party for 12th graders of the Millennium School last year.
"It was again very well received, and many an outgoing student broke down at the images of a student going around the school on the last day of school, filling in memories to take away with him," he says.
Down Memory Lane strikes a chord with its audience because it is something all of us have experienced. After spending the best years of our life at school, the final separation embodied in the last day at school has been very tellingly captured by Shenoi.
Sentimental, yes; maudlin, no. The narration and treatment is surprisingly mature, and the film bristles with clever ideas to convey the haunting images.
Most of his ideas come to him on the spur of the moment. He uses a spring with amazing effect to convey the pangs of separation; it was devised at the last minute in the physics laboratory when he saw some children playing with it.
He shot half the movie first, and then began ‘scripting' it. "Normally I don't script my films, which is not a good thing, I know," he confesses. "I shoot it, and then try to work out a story around it. Most of it happens during the editing, that's where the movie comes together for me."
Shenoi prefers to tell the ‘actors' what to do just before shooting the scene because he believes that allows them to give ‘real' reactions.
After Down Memory Lane Shenoi made two small films "for myself, not for my school or for competitions". He also did a film on the subject ‘The best of your school in three minutes' for Creative Festival, an annual event hosted by Dubai Modern High School, and billed as ‘the UAE's largest and most popular literary and cultural festival', with 13 schools participating. Shenoi's film won the second prize. This despite the fact that the competition specified a software that Shenoi was not familiar with.
"That was one time when I really knew what I was doing!" he exults triumphantly.
He's not really sure if he will keep making films, but wants to "keep writing articles, drawing and designing... something creative". The reason being, "I feel it's a difficult field to break into, I feel more comfortable with my writing and painting."
Shenoi pays attention to all aspects of filmmaking, and the one that he finds most frustrating is music; he hasn't been able to compose the score that he would like to accompany his frames yet. "I can make music in my head," he says, "but I can't play any instrument, so I can't compose them."
Films are a marriage of all arts, he says. "Writing, photography, acting, music, you take every art form and put them together to make a movie. It certainly is a form of artistic expression. Personally, I feel they are a form of escapism. When you watch a movie, you take off your shoes and step into someone else's. Whether it's good or bad, you learn a lot from the movies. You take something away, even from bad movies."
Ebert once advised him in an e-mail: "A word of advice. Do not limit yourself to movies only. I love movies, as I don't need to tell you. But continue to allow your attention to expand." Clearly, this filmmaker has found his voice.
Krishna Shenoi's films can be viewed at: http://krishnashenoi.weebly.com
