Think BIG, Think FAST, Think AHEAD : Happy Birthday FulMarxx

Young Turks

It’s been 12 months, 360 days and beyond. Of us continuing to believe.
Believe in us. Believe in FulMarxx and everything else that seemed almost impossible initially.

Most start-ups begin with a few people kicking around ideas. Some grow into Google. Most fail. And the critical period is usually the first year where success rides on smart decisions and even the smallest mistake can mean failure. And today we complete our 1^st year.

The past one-year has been the most exciting phase of our lives. A tremendous learning period. Of course it was not easy. It never was meant to be. Not for a bunch of postgraduate students trying to run a full fledged company from a classroom set-up. Then there were not so kind words. But its all have been taken in good faith. For every brickbat received, we’ve received ten bouquets.

FulMarxx right from its inception has travelled a journey plagued with snags, only to battle them and emerge a victor each time. We have recently started our second office in Kolkata. We are coming up with three new verticals in next 3 months. These will be joint ventures with TASOL GLOBAL, our web technology partner.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Gautam Jain and Prof. Rajesh Asrani for having guided us at every step. Professor Atul Tandon (Director, MICA) for taking as keen an interest as he has and who’s silent support has carried us through. KGK Pillai( Registrar MICA) who’s dispensed some invaluable advice. Prof. A.F.Mathew  who’s love and passion for cinema has made us the individuals we are today. My classmates of PGPCME who’ve let their support unconditionally.  And of course MICA for the sheer fact that we are privileged to be here and can say it with pride.

Nothing spectacular has ever been achieved alone. The same also applies to FulMarxx as well. Everyone of you all, who’ve stood by us; Ankur Kumar Singh, Pooja Ganeriwala, A.Jain, Shakti Mohanty, Abhishek Kadam, Jay Gotecha, Anand Parikh, Neeraj Sharma and Vipin Kandwal. The strong pillars of FulMarxx as I call them. The extended team of FulMarxx at Kolkata comprising of Aditi Roy and Neil S Mitra who have made enormous efforts to see it a success.

I strongly believe there is no better occasion than this to welcome the new members of the FulMarxx family. Sandeep Malhotra and Lakshmee Narayanee who inspite of their rigorous academic schedule are passionately striving hard to bring out an inspirational case study on FulMarxx. Also Aman Ranchan, Sonal Shekhawat, Reha Rewal, Amit Srivastava and Shreyams Betur the young enthusiastic team who will make our dream of  FulMarxx DOT TV a reality.

I take this opportunity to thank each one of you’ll for having been with us and take the liberty to believe that support will extend to all our forthcoming endeavors.

Warm Regards,
Shiladitya Bora
Founder CEO, FulMarxx Integrated Filmed Entertainment Company 

 

You owe it 2 your dreams.

Dreaming is a dangerous thing…more so when done with your eyeballs showing. It alters the norms, makes you think beyond logic (often uses a different kind of logic), overlook the sane voices and sides with the one that tugs at your heartstrings.  Ours isn’t a very different story.

Born out of a 4pm class banter, FulMarxx journey wasn’t all hunky dory. Shiladitya knew it wont be easy…the very concept of short films seemed unfeasible to many ..”too futuristic, not suitable  for Indian viewing sensibilities”… Some said.

The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations…the fear is not of the dark, but of the unseen. But dreams are crazy things; they cling onto you as if they are the only way forward; the only right path… and FulMarxx was never born to conform anyway…was it? 
7 months of toiling day-n-night, running from a sponsor to the other and putting all the acts together… on 26^th of April 2008 FulMarxx was a reality… bigger and grander than what the founders had ever imagined. Over two days, 43 entries out of a total submission of 189 shorts were screened and the quality of the films screened spoke volumes of the fest’s success. FulMarxx Shorts Fest is now India’s biggest short film festival, with a resounding international participation… and that, in the very first year of its inception…with renowned Bollywood personalities like Tanuja Chandra, Onir and Makrand Deshpande on the jury…media splashed the papers with FulMarxx bytes. When pan India visibility was unthinkable, participation from 18 countries is what it ended with!!

It was a bold start (at least we thought it was!) and a brilliant one too. India is a country in transition…for every handful of masala flicks we had a ” Iqbal”, a “Bhejafry”,” Aamir” and a “Tare zameen par”… all path breaking films in their own right. Even though the Bollywood potboilers continue to rule the roost the kafka-esque thriller NO SMOKING became hot topic for coffee time conversations.

FulMaxx is an offshoot of such changing trends. It realizes that a story doesn’t have to dwell on its audience for a whole 180 minutes to be told.  In times when more and more people desist from taking out 3 and a half hours for a flick, FulMarxx comes as a breath of fresh air. In its quest to encourage shorter formats of story telling, FulMarxx also raised a few pertinent questions…what makes a story worth telling, are there any standards? What makes it good or bad? And who decides?

As we move into the second edition of FulMarxx, here is hope that the insanity continues and a few more walls be shattered, in the discovery and promotion of the New. India will see the world with new eyes, eyes we never knew we had…and a dream lives on

See ya at the movies

FulMarxx Shorts Fest VER 2.0: 25th, 26th & 27th APRIL 2009


Submission starts 1st OCTOBER 2008

Cheers
Sherwan Ahsan


FulMarxx Shorts Fest : India’s Largest Short Film Festival

Tarantino- Film making – FulMarxx/100

Most of us love watching good movies. How obvious statement is that… but the truth is that its just a form of entertainment for us, and we somehow manage to leave out the “art” aspect of it. Why we do that is a question many will choose to answer differently. I accidentally stumbled upon this question when I had lots of time and I decided to watch everything contained in the DVD which no one is really much concerned about- the special features. I distinctly remember the movie: The Basic Instinct. After watching the special features which had making of the movie, producer notes and such, I realized that what I had seen was not merely a 120 minute collection of scenes and dialogs , but it was an expression of some one that was nicely wrapped up with all the necessary decorations to make it pop into life.

After that, I make it a point to watch all the special features, gathering trivia of all the movies I like, specially Tarantino, from where this piece draws its title. I have come to appreciate many of the movie critics terms like “bad editing” , “good story line”, “directorial indulgence” and such. But one documentary that really added perspective to my vision was “Spielberg on Spielberg”. Here the man himself speaks about his movies, how he has portrayed modern day terrorism and its effects in the War of the Worlds and such social issues in other movies. You really appreciate a director as an artist. Its amazing what a good director can do with an inspiration that might otherwise pass as a trivial event for some one else. Talking about directors, I also enjoyed reading Mahesh Bhatt’s diary entries of the time he spent with the renegade philosopher U.G. Krishnamurthy ( not the G. Krishnamurthy who is the more famous one. Trivia- U.G. gained much of his fame actually bashing the hypocritical discourses of G. Krishnamurthy).

I have always thought that inspiration is a useless thing if it does not transform into action. So I have been well influenced by all these movie makers and I am ready to take it to the next level. What have I done? The most I could do for a start was try and dig out some aesthetic taste within myself using a digital camera. I completely lack in education on photography, but with whatever chance I get, I try and capture some image in the best way I think possible. I have read almost all literature I found out of my google search query “digital photography”. But believe me, in this age and day, if you want to get serious about anything- from a good cuppa to a relationship, you gotta dole out the dough. So my reluctance on funding my new found passion by buying Nikon N40 or something has resulted in the stunted growth of my hobby.

Just at such a cross roads was I, when I heard from my old time friend. He considers me a friend-philosopher-guide so that makes things more interesting, which I will explain later. This friend of mine goes by the name Shiladitya Bora. He was my junior in hostel. I always found him intriguing. Sometimes I thought that he had some creativity in himself but he landed up in an engineering college due to some mishap, and this has rendered him confused and wasted. Sometimes I thought that engineering was something he was using to cover up some diabolical plan he had hatched to take over the world or something…hehe But by the end of our time there, I thought that he had been always been heading in a direction which none of us really understood, hence the various incorrect conclusions. He was set to take on his creativity and out it on visual display- sketches, paintings, still photographs, moving pictures, MOVIES…. now with the advantage of hindsight I know that these come straight out of a director’s work board! And at that time I thought that he was merely flirting with different kinds of arts… naive was not I??

So Shila comes up to me and says I have started this thing to get entries for short films… why dont you make a movie or something? Frankly for some one like just the thought of putting an amateur effort at an unknown art that we are not sure exists, for display and public approval (critical basing?) is intimidating enough to scare me off. But I have started thinking up of ideas and will try and do something. I am sure Shila will help me out and this will be interesting. Now the part about friend-philosopher-guide. I have been playing the pedantic to Shila since I know him… now I will have to learn from him… a role reversal that I am really looking forward to. He is a nice guy and I am sure he will keep the casualties to minimum… hehe

Good luck to me…

Piyush Patra, Minneapolis, US of A .
(re-posted with permission from Piyush Patra)