Talent, training, luck: What it takes to get a career break in movies

Entertainment industry boom means there are more opportunities for aspiring filmmakers, actors, scriptwriters

Walt Disney, the American film and TV producer, said this about his profession: “We don’t make movies to make more money. We make money to make more movies”. It’s a glamorous profession but requires hard work, struggle and luck.

There are three ways to get into movies: Work at a studio set, make and publish your own short films on YouTube and other social media, or join a formal training course. Doing all three would be fine too.

Finnish filmmaker Hanna Vastinsalo, who has a doctorate in molecular genetics, left a career in scientific research to make movies. She combines storytelling with scientific discovery. Her latest movie, Palimpsest (2022), is about two elderly roommates who are randomly selected for a trial gene therapy that could rejuvenate their bodies and make them younger. “I only tell stories that I want to tell. Nobody knows what works in the world of films, whether commercial or arty films so you may as well want to tell the story that you want to tell. I don’t focus on my movies being technically accurate but emotionally accurate,” said Vastinsalo at a film festival in Helsinki in December. 

Abhishek Sinha, who spent 18 years as a marketing and advertising professional, made his directorial debut with Tumse Na Ho Payega, a movie that streamed on Disney+Hotstar. Sinha’s late movie break is inspiring.

Movie career

“(The young) are always good observers; they mimic and copy what they see. They are also willing to experiment with new things as much as they have freedom to do so. All these qualities make them a great choice for teaching filmmaking from a career perspective,” says Praveen Nagda, festival director of KidzCINEMA and Culture Cinema Film Festivals. 

Whether you want to be an actor, director or scriptwriter depends on one’s attitude and aptitude, says Karan Chechi, director of TechSci Research, a market research agency.

The director’s job is to make a film from start to finish. Her responsibilities involve supervising editing crews that combine footage during post production, advising performers on how to portray situations successfully, and collaborating with other members of the film crew to guarantee that every aspect of the production process is executed appropriately.

A producer develops a plan for a film project and oversees every stage until it is accomplished. “Producer is more like a parent – he is the one who makes sure everything is on time, everyone gets food on time, everyone gets home on time, apart from ensuring that everything is aligned from pre-production process to post production and maintains checklists and calendars,” says producer Cyril Abraham.

According to a spokesperson from production house Swastika films, “The minimum cost of producing a music video is Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh, feature film Rs 3-8 lakh, TV advertisement Rs 1-2 lakh and for a documentary film Rs 60,000 to Rs 2 lakhs. For a mainstream film even the sky is not the limit.”

An editor arranges a film soon after shooting starts, combining several shots into a single, continuous sequence. From hundreds of hours of footage, dozens of distinct shots must be selected and put together in a single scene. The final film's appearance is influenced by the editor's decisions.
 

For film professionals, the question is how to monetize their work. Sapney vs Everyone, a web series by The Viral Fever digital entertainment network, was backed by 1 Finance, an investing firm of Marwadi Chandarana Group. According to Keval Bhanushali, co-Founder and chief executive officer of 1 Finance, “There were various reasons for this collaboration. One, it adds to our brand value and for us it was very important not to go out there and do advertising, marketing or hard selling.”
 

India promotes film production in the country as part of its ease of business policies.  “In 2023, the government made a noteworthy statement raising the [financial] incentive for international film production from 30 per cent to 40 per cent. The nation offers a 40 percent incentive for international film production, with an additional 5 percent bonus for significant Indian content and a cap limit of more than $3.5 million. This move will boost India's efforts to draw foreign film projects with medium and large budgets to the nation,” says TechSci Research's Chechi. 

In 2023, Uttar Pradesh announced a new policy providing 50 per cent subsidy of the cost of the production if the films encompass Braj, Awadhi, Bundeli, or Bhojpuri scripts. For films made in English, Hindi, and other languages, this subsidy will be 25 per cent of the total cost. 

Graphics, visual effects, and animation are new-age careers options in cinema. “Big-ticket films having large budgets spread their production across the continents, where thousands of artists simultaneously work in multiple studios and produce seamless output. Such projects that are usually high on graphics and animation, and offer many lucrative opportunities in terms of careers,” says Nagda.

Voiceover artists are in greater demand as the entertainment industry expands. Fouzia Dastango quit her permanent job as lecturer at the State Council of Educational Research and Training to be a Dastango, an Urdu oral storytelling art form. “A good storyteller must have voice, expression, emotion, voice modulation. People should forget the person and only remember the character which is being portrayed. Also one needs to do perfect lip sync with the character in question and do minute things such as take in breath only where the character is talking,” says Fouzia, who has done voiceover in movies, radio and streaming platforms. 

A film curator is another new opening in movies. Curators organise exhibitions and screenings to introduce films to the general public. They work with theatres, museums, and archives and they assist in the preservation of films.

Institute	Course	Approx annual fees (in Rs)
Film and Television Institute of India, Pune	Diploma in acting, PGD (Post graduate diploma) in Editing; certificate course in electronic cinematography	1.50 lakh and more
Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata	Writing for Electronic & Digital Media, Direction & Producing for Electronic & Digital Media	1 lakh and more
Whistling Woods International, Mumbai	Certificate Programme in Screenwriting for Web & TV Series, P.G.D. in Media & Entertainment, B.Sc in Filmmaking with Direction	4 lakh and more
Center for Research in Art of Film and Television, Delhi	PGD in YouTube Film Making, Documentary Filmmaking, Sound Recording and Editing	75,000 and more
Asian Academy of Film and Television, Noida	MSc Cinema + PGD in Cinema, B.Sc. Cinema + Diploma in Cinema	2 lakh and above

Source: TechSci Research