Kannada filmmaker Pawan Kumar has been very active online during this lockdown phase. After launching a podcast series on April 17, which is now streaming its second season, he launched a free workshop on Kannada film production.
The podcast series, titled ‘Lockdown Tapes — Confessions by Pawan’, is candid as he looks back on his journey into films. An engineering drop-out, Kumar was active in theatre and had little knowledge of Kannada cinema.
Beginning his career as an actor, Kumar went on to direct two critically-acclaimed films, ‘Lucia’ and ‘U-Turn’, and is a director to reckon with in Kannada cinema.
Encouraging new talent, he turned producer with ‘Ondu Motteya Kathe.’
The online workshop on Kannada film production was launched on April 30 and comprises seven lessons. Speaking in Kannada and English, Kumar talks on the importance of films, classifying them into commercial, art and parallel cinema and comparing them to different kinds of food-junk, healthy food and home food respectively.
Moving onto the making of a film, he goes into its different aspects and the business mode followed. While discussing alternative modes of funding a film, he talks about his success with crowd funding for ‘Lucia’ but that same magic did not work with his next project, ‘Nicotine.’
Kumar’s lectures are easy to understand and accompanied with flow charts. This will benefit film students and is an eye opener for film buffs.
In chapter six, he has a solution for bringing in investment for good content films by involving people in the making of a film through annual subscriptions. The members as part of an online film club-Kannada Movie Patrons,’ will be entitled to watch good content Kannada films. Calling it a crazy idea, Kumar’s aim is to reach a membership of 1,20,000. He will he heading the club the first year and will curate films for production.
Kumar has shared links to his podcasts and film production course on his Facebook page and Twitter.
While the film production course is free, Kumar requests viewers to contribute towards the welfare of daily wage earners of Kannada industry as they have been unemployed since March 19 due to lockdown. Contributions of any sum can be made at Hometalkies.com
“We had initially raised Rs900,000 but distribution of funds to workers was not easy. This site connects directly the donor with the beneficiary,” said Kumar.
