We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rohan Ramabhadran a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Rohan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today The first dollar you earn in a new endeavor is always special. We’d love to hear about how you got your first client that wasn’t a friend or family.

It took a while for me to learn the importance of networking. As a child that used to sound like such an old person “job” kinda thing. I never wanted to grow up and be the out of date old man.
Took me a few years to understand that networking was the grown man’s word for making friends and connections.
My first client was a result of networking. A friend of a friend, I met at a bar. A lot of times people meet you for the first time, hear what you do and suggest things to collaborate on. This time it was a serious thing.
When the job was confirmed, I was delighted. But more so, I was excited to get to work.
Beyond the work, I was happy to be able to get a little paycheck to help reinvest into my business.
It felt like a great way to dip my toes into the industry. I was extremely grateful for the experience.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Growing up, when people talked to me about connections and networking, I used to think of it as such a grown up thing. Those seemed like business words to me. I never really liked the thought of becoming a business person. If someone had told me networking was just what adults call making friends, I would’ve been a lot more receptive to it.
I got into working through friendship. A friend of a friend made music, we met him on a night out and he said “let’s make a music video”.
Taking the idea of friendship, something I value extremely highly on set is the happiness of people around me. I like working with people who love laughing and don’t take life too seriously. I think the importance of an attitude of happiness and wanting to bring joy to others always reflects well on clients. Happy people work harder for the vision.
That attitude gives you ability to gel and harmonise with the people around you.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Funding equipment in film is extremely hard for any beginner. And being a filmmaker, or at least a decent one, is impossible without good equipment.
I spent a year working part time while in college as well as doing a couple internships during that time, to raise the money I needed to start building a camera rig. I saved up some money, invested some in risky stocks (extremely naive and silly idea), got lucky and made profits.
At the end of all that, I had enough to start building my inventory.
Another extremely important aspect of building the equipment stock is understanding what you’re getting. I rent out some of my equipment. I’ve chosen a cheaper specialisation with my lenses for instance. I chose to get cheaper vintage lenses and learned to do the tedious maintenance of it myself.
None of that would’ve happened if I hadn’t worked a minimum wage job for a year and hadnt got those internships. I’m extremely grateful that I had to go through that to start to build myself.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

NFTs fascinate me. I think art regardless of how and where is formed, has a place in society.
An NFT to me is the difference between an exact replica of a Van Gogh, and a Van Gogh. It’s just the digital version of stamping an artist’s originality on it.
The market itself got extremely inflated due to the hype that flooded the internet. That’s the problem with everything that catches a whiff of fame now. As a result, the public perception is skewed into thinking all NFTs are, are ape images that people buy.
I think years down the line, it’s likely that NFTs will return as a regular platform for digital artists to sell original works.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: r.guha01

Image Credits

Luke Cooper – photographer for BTS photos with me holding camera.
The rest are captured stills from my cinematography work.