Storytelling always came naturally to Sandeep Balan. The 33-year-old Digital Marketing Head at United Breweries, was into comics and graphic novels from a young age, before graduating to short stories. “As a Malayali, I had a passion for films as well, and since my father was in a transferable job, vacations in Kerala were when we used to catch up on movies. I also had a habit of cooking up stories to tell my sister, who is five years younger than me,” says Balan, who was also an active blogger until a few years ago.
These little trysts with storytelling came in handy when the Ultra Shorts YouTube channel wanted to release a feel-good short in connection with the Kingfisher Ultra Indian Derby, and Balan decided to step up to the challenge himself.
“We had previously worked with TVF on Pitchers, so I had received some exposure to a web series, but this was my first attempt at a screenplay,” explains Balan, who went on to create the short film Half Ticket, starring Naveen Kasturia, which was posted on the Ultra Shorts channel ‘Cheers!’ On YouTube in January, and centered around the theme of blind dating.
Taking heart from the positive reception Half Ticket received, Balan went on to write Born Free, the tale of a disheartened IT employee who secretly nurtured his talent as a beatboxer, which also did well with the online audience. This prompted him to write Rise, starring Vikrant Massey, which sees a young IT professional laid off from his job the day he had finally saved up and bought the motorcycle of his dreams. The fourth and final episode of Rise, Balan’s longest writing effort yet, was released on YouTube recently.
“I realised that relatable content always resonates on YouTube,” says Balan. “Half Ticket was about blind dates, which creates a lot of relatability with the Tinder generation, and I was reading about IT layoffs and hearing about it from friends and even the comments on Born Free, which led to me writing Rise.”
Talking about the similarity between his last two projects, which both feature disillusioned protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs with fixed hours, Balan says that his audience was what inspired him. “Sumeet Vyas’ character in Born Free was a talented beatboxer, but many people do not know what their own talents are, and for them, their job becomes a way of achieving their material goals, and they don’t know what alternative career they can fall back on that speaks to them. In fact, Vikrant’s character in Rise voices a similar thought in a scene. There have been long comments that people write that show that a lot of people ask themselves this question.”
Balan says that for him the transition from story to screenplay was not a difficult one, particularly with regards to the effort required to set up a scene. “In a screenplay, the focus is on the now, and on the dialogue voiced by the character, and you don’t have to write lines upon lines setting up the scene, as you would do in a story, which is the only major difference I faced”
Now that he is comfortable with the format, what is next in the pipeline? “Well, the projects have been getting longer. Half Ticket was about 25 minutes and Rise in total is around two hours long. Now I think the time is right for Half Ticket 2.”
