SearchingSirocco

The only reason I watched this film was because of Emma Watson. She didn't disappoint me. How can anyone be so perfect? Though I hated the kiss in the end because the man who should kiss Emma Watson has to be a perfect guy even if it for acting purposes, except that everything was good.  The story is simple, something which we have we have read and seen before. The good thing is that the Director and Writer have remained mostly true to the original story. The only thing that bothered me while watching the film were too long musical songs. There is a song on Gaston, the antagonist, where his best friend his praising him to lift his spirits and it kind of gets too long after a while. It was entertaining in the beginning but drags after a while. I loved the character of Gaston, played by Luke Evans marvelously, and provides the very much required comic relief in the otherwise heavily romantic film. Girls will love this film because the film survives on the ancient story of r

I am not a secular person. Secular means "not connected with religious or spiritual matters". I am religious though I was not earlier and I am spiritual, which also I was not earlier. I respect all religions and I enjoy going to different religious buildings and feel the presence of different culture at these places. I have Muslim friends and I have Sikh friends too. I have SC, ST friends and I have Pandit, Thakur friends too. Some behave nicely and some don't. That is just human. I don't care about that because that is the ratio of normal human beings and not religious people. Some people will be good to you and some will be not. Deal with it. I never called myself Hindu except for nowadays because earlier I never felt any need to, now I do. Not because Modi is raising Hindutva funda and Yogi Adityanath is Chief minister, it is because for the first time I am feeling that what I believe in really matters and there are people out there who finally care about it.

Till now those who know me or follow me knows that I want to be a billionaire. I have no real plans to state it truthfully but I know that I am on the right track and I know that it is going to happen. Right now what I need is a product and since I cannot create anything or buy anything right now, I think my product is me. I have to sell myself. I don't have mastery over anything but I am good at so many things at the same time. I have to pick what I am better at. I feel that it is the focus that is required most now and a little bit of planning on how I am going to go about it. I know that I have to sell something to this world for which there will be monetary transaction and I know that unknowingly I have developed habits of good speaking by trying to improve myself over the years. I was not good at speaking to people for a very long time but now it has become an easy thing for me. I easily influence people of my intellect and it has come as a by-product of me trying to prove my

My bhabhi likes this film a lot and really really forced me to watch this film. I had it on my system and I was planning to watch it for a long time. I missed watching it in the theater and being a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch I wanted to watch it on the big screen. The film again suffers from the same problem that many other films suffer from - characterization. The film focuses too much on the lead character that other characters have literally no role in the film whatsoever. They have forgettable lines and no other character except that of Doctor strange has been developed wisely. The villain Kaecillius seems caricaturish and you don't feel thrills watching him enter or fight. He looks like he can be easily defeated. Frankly, he looks like one of the henchmen of the main villain but not the main villain. Doctor Strange defeats him in his first fight with him when even Doctor's powers have not been fully developed while Kaecillius does not just have more powers,

I picked this book randomly. I love the name of the book. The story of the author Grant Cardone is very interesting. He was a drug addict till he was 25 and then came his defining moment when he decided to change his life for good and what a comeback he has made. The best book about becoming a rich can come from a person who has done it all by himself. Grant Cardone is one such dude. I follow him on twitter now and I have read all the books written by him by. I wanted to review this book for a long time and finally, i have decided to review and post my opinions about it. The book has opened my minds to the powers of social media. I don't do much of twitter, facebook or Instagram and I never found the need for it. He showed me that one has to move with the speed of the world to become rich in the contemporary world. I have read a lot of books on becoming rich as my prime aim has changed recently to becoming rich from filmmaking. I can do filmmaking only when I can become rich

I love Anushka Sharma but it may not be for the same reasons as you may love her. She is beautiful, yes. She is a good actress, yes. But there is something more in her which I love and admire which no other actress today have and I want to point those things out. I don't know why and don't ask me the reason because I have no idea why, but instead of writing a complete article on her I have decided to make points of the things that I admire about her so that people who aspire to success can read it and understand that apart from being beautiful, what you may need to survive in a competitive industry like film world. 1. She does not lose her mind easily, anymore. I have seen her video where she gets angry when talked about Virat Kohli but she has lately taken such an interesting and mature approach towards the whole topic that it amazes me. She gives a poker face and remain indifferent to the question and sometimes she jokingly changes the topic to something else. 2. S

I saw the trailer of "Justice League" yesterday and the wonder that why DC comics movies don't work better than Marvel became perfectly clear to me. "DC comics movies are too dark and there is no fun." I love Marvel comics characters and I am not in any way biased. I haven't read any comics from either brand. Just like any other Indian middle class kid, I grew on overdoses of Raj comics, Manoj comics and Diamond comics which had characters like Nagraj, Dhruv, Doga, Hawaldar Bahadur, Bankelal, Chacha Chaudhary, Pinki, Billu and many more, every one of them inspired and copied from foreign comic characters but were nonetheless interesting. I never had access to superman comics though I watched superman on TV every Sunday and I loved it. That is my memory of Superman, Batman and Spiderman. When the first movie of Ironman came I had no idea who he was, neither did I know anything about Deadpool. I have lived in a completely different world. Now I follow

Sex, Cinema and Lies - A Short Film  Reunion is a story of Two filmmaker friends who meet over one night for a casual chat which later turns into an egomaniacal fight. Big fan of film Deewar, coincidentally their names are Vijay and Ravi too. Ravi is a successful film director down south and Vijay is still trying his own luck. As the night progress, one event leads to another and more people are called to join in the Ego Parade This was basically a 125-page screenplay, for which I didn't have a budget to shoot so I decided to shoot the first 25 pages of the film just for the heck of it. I have started this film so many times and it never gets made, to remove the curse from it, I and my friend Raashul decided to shoot this one night.  Please share the film as much as you can and subscribe to my channel. Direction, Produced, Written, Edited, Sound Design: Shitiz Srivastava Associate Director: Raashul Tandon Operative Cameraman: Abhinav Kaushik Co-Producer: Nishadh Chand

The problem with one fine morning getting up and finding out that you are not in the good state of mind. The feeling that nothing works right for you. The feeling that whatever and however you try it will end up as nothing scares you the most. Today morning i got the same feeling. There are lots of things that are going wrong in my life right now. Actually, they are not wrong, they are just round the corner and i am afraid that i am not making the right kind of effort to reach there. But what should i do? Sometimes i feel that i am reading too many books on inspiration and thinking so much so that i am relying on them to change my life. Nothing will happen unless i take the right step. I know that. My job is to work hard. I am working hard but that hard work is scattered so much that i am unable to pick the pieces of it that has fallen over. There is so much negativity all around. Everyone is failing. I don't have any successful person around me. I don't know any director wh

I was a big supporter of Kejriwal once and I am not alone. There are many like me. They all supported him once and now they don't. What happened? Well, politics happened. When a man for himself decides that he is great, his downfall begins. Kejriwal is new in politics and he is still trying to figure the thing out. His mistake was that he took politics as a mathematical game where if he played by the rules he will win. Play the victim card, show oneself as savior and the bigger organization as a villain. Unfortunately, politics is not a mathematical formula. The rules of the game in politics changes with the progression of the last step. You cannot play this game with the comfortable mind. You have to be awake all the time and you have to think in terms of what people really want instead of what you think they want. You may think that a poor person would not desire for anything other than food and if you give him food he will vote for you. The truth is human mind does not

Baahubali was a blockbuster in every sense. I didn't like it because as a screenplay writer I found too many faults, which I thought if avoided it could have become a legend of a film. But the film was entertaining and lead its own culture. A lot of people around me loved it. That is the curse of learning filmmaking that I have to carry my entire life, I see filmmaking from many points of view, not just entertaining. I do VFX for my films too and I know how difficult of work that is. Baahubali-2 does not reveal much in its later trailer, except the visual effects and close beauty shots of actors. But then that is the whole point of this film. I just wish that the story this time will be better to create its own standing. That is just my point of view and i know people loved the story otherwise how will u explain the "Katappa killed Baahubali" Craze. People were involved in the story, that is why it became such a cult. I trust Rajamouli as he is a brilliant director

So I finally made it. But I only shot 25 pages of the script. I tried to make this film for last six years and every time I tried to make it, it never got made. So an idea struck me recently that why not just shoot the first 25 pages of the script and take it from there. I talked to my friends and the production started but then again, it couldn't get made and as usual it let me disappointed. I started feeling like this film is a curse and will never get made. But Raashul, one of my closest friends in Mumbai and also one of the actors int he film kept pushing me to shoot it, with me acting along with his side. I didn't want to act in it or two reasons, First I am not a terrific actor and secondly, I wanted to concentrate on the direction in this film. But again, just like it happened with my first feature film, Amphigori, I had to act. Another problem arose, I couldn't squeeze my time for rehearsing the dialogues and since Raashul has rehearsed the dialogues so many ti

28 Filmmakers Reveal How They Financed Their Movies I have been struggling to make my film for last three years now. I have made two films before. My third film has taken a long time. This is the right kind of motivation that i was looking for. Great documentary. 

Link to the website:  30 Free E-books will help you master Filmmaking I love this website - "No Film School" and I keep visiting it because it has tremendous resources for a Filmmaker to update himself every day related to everything about cinema.  Here are fabulous links to few E-books which you can easily download by following the links on the website. Learn as much as you can before making your first film. I am game for it because after one month I am going to make my own low budget feature film.   

Create a Text Message Bubble in After Effects I really struggled for a long time to find a way to successfully put text message bubbles in my videos.I have tried it and I have succeeded but I wanted to do it more seamlessly and efficiently. Finally I found this video which is terrific and will help you a lot in creating this in after effects.

Channa Mereya - Ae Dil Hai Mushkil | Ranbir | Anushka | Pritam | Arijit | Pushkar Kandpal(Cover) I am not making fun or trying to be sarcastic but this guy has some really good voice. I accidentally hit on his video and his voice is really great.  Do check out.

Where do I start to describe this man? I don't exactly know from where so I will start from any random point.  He is one of the few clean hearted people I have ever met in my life. I first met him in 2011 when he was doing music for a director I was assisting back then. We never had a close one to one chat back then. four years later, in the second half of 2015, he messaged me out-of-blue on facebook that he was making a music video and whether I was interested in directing it. It was a free gig and he was also doing it as a favor to one of his friend. I don’t normally do free shoots anymore in Mumbai but somehow I said yes because frankly, I wanted to meet him. He has always been extra nice to me and had once helped me in the background music of one of my short films. We met and we gelled instantly. To know about his background, he is the son of Legendary singer Poornima, who started her career with R.D. Burman. His mother was a big name during 90s bollywood era and sh

I first met Kamlesh in 2010 and it is very important for me to write about him because he has been a tremendous influence in my life during my prolonged stay in Mumbai. I was struggling at the time when we met as I was new in the film industry and I was working in one film where officially I was production assistant but later I was thankfully burdened with responsibilities of an assistant director and art director too. Not that I was given those responsibilities but I took those responsibilities because I just wanted to work as much as I can on sets and understand filmmaking in a better manner. I had the best time of my life working on that film and I met some of the good people there who became my good friends later. One of them, and most important of them was Kamlesh. Kamlesh’s full name is Kamlesh Puri Goswami and he is a Marwari. He can speak four languages fluently- Marwari, Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi, and now he speaks English as well. He is good at accounting by birth

A day ago I met an IPS officer. He is a good friend of mine. He is posted in Kerala and his name is Prateesh Kumar. He was here on a short visit to Mumbai so we decided to take a stroll around seaside just to remember the old times and talk about other stuffs of life. We decided to have lunch and dinner together and he was paying the money at every shop we went as I had not a single rupee in my pocket. I told him about my financial conditions which are not very bright and I told him that when you are in film line, nothing is certain and there are always good and bad phases that awaits you. You don’t get monthly cheques and there is no certainty from where your next cheque is coming from. He asked me whether he should loan me some money and I told him that I never borrow money from anyone. He understands my ego and self-esteem as we are childhood friends and our families are close together so he stopped insisting much. But he did ask me what were the problems I was facing and I to

I needed to have a review of a Rajnikanth's film on my blog, it was a necessity. I chose Baasha because it going to released again soon, a digitally remastered version of it. Baasha was the film which gave Rajni's stardom new heights. He became sort of a Demi god after this film. It was a phenomenal blockbuster and no one had seen such euphoria before. Frankly, since i am not a south Indian person so i don't find any special in Rajni's acting. I don't even find his film good or excellent. They are entertaining but then that's that. But what impact's one thinking is the craze of people towards Rajni. Baasha was developed in Rajni's mind when he was working with Amitabh Bachchan's film 'Hum'. He took a part of the film's undeveloped storyline and developed it according to his own culture and thinking. I watched Baasha two years back on Youtube. I wanted to watch it earlier but I couldn't find any copy of it with subtitles.

I am sharing this video with you so that you can rehearse the lines if you want to be an actor. I love this whole scene when i first watched it ages back and it still haunts me. The way James Spader has performed this whole scene astounds me still. The perfect intonation, gaps, punctuation, speeds, pauses and whole performance is just scintillating. the big revelation came to me when i started auditioning for acting and I decided to create my showreel. So I downloaded this episode and wrote down the entire speech. It is way too long firstly, and secondly English is not my first language so there was difficulty in speaking this language. But destiny had some better plans for me and taught me something which I could not have learned otherwise. I started reciting the lines along with Alan Shore and when i did that i was awestruck more by the acting skills of James Spader because speaking along with him I tried to follow his pitch and pauses and it was very difficult. It seems a

Writing. It is one of the most beautiful things invented by human beings. The invention of writing has opened so many ways to store the human experiences life for infinite time. It is a process of recording your thinking and giving a life to it and putting your brains on paper. But most the writers I meet here in film industry have no idea how to write a film script or screenplay or what is the difference between the two. There are lots of words that you are going to hear from the mouth of producers who will ask you to present them with Loglines, Synopsis, Screenplay, Story, Script or may be some new fancy words and you  might get afraid as well as confused what they actually mean because the meaning of these words might take away your job from you. So let me just help you by describing a little bit what these words really mean. These are the definitions that I have made up due time and these are definitely not standards, but they will help you understand these things better.  As