Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Modak KS. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Modak, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

One of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on would be my documentary ‘Galiyon Ka Sheher’ or ‘The City of Lanes’. The project started as a part of an undergraduate course designed to be an onfield research project to travel to different parts of India and study either an art form or cultural phenomenon, with one aspect of it being a documentary. My classmates and I went to the holy city of Varanasi, India. We made a nine-minute film that explored the socio-economic dichotomy between two ghats (or waterfront areas), one of which was a celebration of life and the other an open cremation ground and, in some sense, a celebration of death. The film followed a few characters and delved into their occupations on the ghat and the caste politics and privileges that came with it. The documentary captured the insidious underside of these places in a relatively raw manner. The film won us multiple student awards and grants and allowed us to expand on the documentary and delve deeper into the lives of our subjects and now friends.

When we returned a few years later, we stumbled upon something larger. We found out that the ancient streets we had filmed would soon be razed to the ground due to a government temple expansion project. Thousands of its residents, along with our friends, were going to lose their homes and their livelihoods. For context, Varanasi is an ancient city with most streets and houses packed together in extremely close proximity. Most of these houses are hundreds of years old, and their residents have inhabited them for about the same time. So when we found out that the government was trying to drive its residents out on either false grounds or underpay them for their land, it felt like we had to capture it and bring it to light. The mood was tense, and everyone around us had only one thing on their minds, so we shifted our focus and tried to tell the story of Varanasi through the eyes of its residents.

It was a heavy project for me; I felt I needed to stay true to what I was hearing, and editing it was a precarious process because I was so attached to what I had seen that I wanted to include every detail. The situation felt much more significant than me, and it was highly personal because the people in that documentary were my friends then. After a while, I finished editing the documentary, and it was received extremely well in the Indian and International festival circuit. We played at the Dharamshala International Film Festival and won the award for the best short documentary in multiple festivals. We were invited to interactive screenings, and I saw numerous perspectives the film opened for people.

Most of the spaces we filmed don’t exist anymore; we caught it at such a liminal time that it now also serves as an archival film. The central idea that I tried to stay true to was to capture the free-flowing essence of the space that once was.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Well, I’m Modak, a Dodge College/ Chapman MFA cinematography student from Bangalore, India. Growing up, I was avidly interested in wildlife photography because I could access many national parks close to home. But at the time, I just looked at it as a hobby. I discovered the motion picture only when I moved out of my hometown and went to college. I went to university to study Economics, but I stumbled on a film set during my first year there and was instantly fascinated. When a marketing major who, like me, had very little knowledge about filmmaking asked me to shoot a thesis film for her, I immediately said yes. Over the span of a couple of months, we shot and edited the film while constantly learning and troubleshooting our beginner problems along the way. Our film won the award for the best short that year, which gave me the confidence to pursue filmmaking. I ended up double majoring in economics and film, and at the end of my undergraduate course, I sure knew that the fairly binary world of economics was not what I wanted my thoughts to be consumed by for the rest of my life.

During the COVID years, I moved back home and started working as a freelance cinematographer, director, editor, motion graphics artist, and anything I could get my hands on. I shot television spots, corporate videos and even music videos. However, I was still a narrative and documentary filmmaker at the heart of it. So, I used to spend a few months gathering the funds I needed to go out and make films with my friends. I shot two features, gaffed one, and was B-Cam DP on a feature documentary before I got to film school. What these experiences taught me was how to be a chameleon. I learnt how to switch roles very quickly and support my collaborators whether they needed me to enable, build or capture their vision. Im obsessed with lighting, and apart from being a cinematographer, I also love to gaff. I love that every scenario is different and requires a creative solution.

As a person, I love learning new things, and I approach it with a researcher’s mentality. No two projects are the same for me, and with every new one I get, I try to develop a new visual philosophy that fits the story and the director’s personality. So, whether the story needs long takes and wide shots or rapid camera movements and noir-esque lighting, I love doing it all and finding what works.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of the most important lessons I had to unlearn was the myth that you had to know and do everything on a project. It seems fairly obvious to me now, but given that I had come from a school where you learnt and actively practised every aspect of filmmaking, it felt like I had to at all times know what every department was doing, and this led me to come off as not trusting of my collaborators. But after I made my first low-budget feature, I learnt the importance of communicating my vision and then letting it go so that my team could involve themselves in the process and add their creativity to it. Everyone around me on set is an artist in their own right, so now I encourage people to speak up and contribute to the image in their own unique way. It makes it more personal and sparks enjoyable creative conversations for them and me.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

One incredibly close call was when I was on set for my friend’s feature titled ‘Phir Phir’. We were in the middle of a dense jungle in Rajasthan with a forest guard, and we had to hike a kilometre down to a stream to shoot a scene we had blocked previously. The day before, my friend Kartikeya, the director, and I had hiked down to the location to take a quick insert. While we were doing that, a herd of wild buffalo moved into the area, and one male buffalo who was injured and separated from the group took an aggressive stance. We quickly packed our gear and calmly hiked to where our cars were parked.

The next day, we took the whole crew down along with all our equipment and had set up for a shot when the herd started moving back into that area reasonably quickly. We dropped the equipment in the middle of the forest, and I asked the crew, especially those slower at hiking, to start moving back up towards the cars. I hoped that the herd would pass, but I was dead wrong. The same male buffalo that had been injured started aggressively walking towards our crew, so we abandoned the ship and started running back up the trail. I kept looking back to see if the buffalo had stopped chasing us, but it kept coming closer every time we stopped. We finally got to the cars but only had the keys to one of them. So half of we got in the car, and the other half climbed a tree house-like structure that was a forest guard’s lookout. When I asked the forest guard what we should do, he said, “I don’t know, just sit here and wait till it goes away”. So we did that, but the buffalo wouldn’t go away; he’d come and headbutt the tree we were on and walk away for a bit. We were losing light, and we still had a ton to shoot, plus tons of our gear was near the stream. So Kartikeya and I, after a heated decision, decided that he would go and shoot a scene in a different location, and I, along with the forest guard, would use a different route to go back near the stream and pick up our equipment. Those few hours sitting up on the tree with a wild buffalo trying to knock it down were indeed one of the most bizarre moments of my life. Ultimately, we got down and made a run for the cars when the buffalo wandered a little distance away and re-did the scene in another location.

Contact Info:

• Website: modakks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/modak.ks/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcoK4TJLX4EPSK54z4FEODQ