Shreyas Raghavan - is a teenager who had just completed high school with a life long passion to be a filmmaker. At the age of 15, Shreyas had already started making short films and currently makes creative reviews and content through his own Youtube Channel. He is based in Chennai, but currently lives in Oman.
Shreyas was able to Write, Shoot and Edit all of his Short films and video content. When he had just turned 18 - he had only one lingering doubt, whether pursuing filmmaking and going to film school was the right choice for him as he had to understand how making large scale films work. He took this course as a part of the early learner program to see if Filmmaking was his true calling. Here's his take on our Filmmaking Learning Experience -
I have always wanted to be a filmmaker: there is something magical about a bunch of people in a dark room emoting collectively in response to a beautiful story projected on a screen. Director Karthik Subbaraj’s filmmaking course on LevelUp Learning takes you right inside the movie theatre and gives you the opportunity to be a student of the master director.
As a film school student who is already well-versed with the basic concepts of filmmaking, I still found this course useful and interesting. There are countless tutorials teaching you how to become a filmmaker on YouTube. But what really set this course apart for me was how personal it felt. This isn’t just a playlist of videos - it gives you a chance to take a peek inside the director’s mind and draw important lessons on filmmaking through his personal experiences.
I really like how the course is structured.
You are exposed to everything, from ideation, research, and screenwriting to planning, production and post-production. There are some great case studies from Director Karthik Subbaraj’s own films along the way that drive home important concepts and workflows.
I also found the “lesson overviews” at the end of each episode helpful in recollecting and remembering important points from the video.
But beyond these specific topics, what I appreciated the most about this course is its emphasis on the meaning of the craft. There is an entire episode dedicated to the “responsibility of filmmaking”. Another episode covers “life as a filmmaker”. In the second episode of the course, titled “Beginnings”, Director Karthik Subbaraj narrates how he entered the film industry - it gave me the confidence and clarity as to how to navigate the business.
This course isn’t an advanced, super-specific, detailed course on one aspect of filmmaking. What it is, though, is a brilliant introduction to the filmmaking process that has set me up perfectly to study further and create my own films.
