Reaved

Ayush Soni is a Producer, Director & writer based in LA from India, he recently took a formal education in Producing for Films & TV from The New York Film Academy.

Cinema holds a special place in the life of an Indian; it is deeply seeped in our culture and a big part of our lives from when we are children. Apart from cricket, it is the one thing that truly manages to unite people from all walks of life. Coming from a traditional India family, cinema played a huge role in my life from a very young age too. I can recall many a dry summer night when my family would get together and watch, what today are, the classics of Bollywood.
I remember being awestruck at the complexity and finesse of it all, as my young mind couldn’t always distinguish between fiction and reality. When I was told it was not real, I would ponder about how they managed to pull it all off; the characters, locations, action sequences, it was all very fascinating to me.
Back then, in my small city of Udaipur, there wasn’t much to do in forms of entertainment. Add this to my natural fascination with cinema and it’s not hard to imagine how movies soon took over my life. I would often get kicked out of many a class for daydreaming and making up pretend scenes in my head. I would plan every detail from the costumes to locals and even camera angles. Other times I would zone out and get so lost in thought that I would start reciting dialogues from my favorite movies.
When I was 15 years old my father decided to get me a video camera, and my life was truly changed. Unlike other kids my age that would spend their free time playing football or cricket, all I would do is walk around trying to capture life on my video camera, the world looked different, better even, through the viewfinder of my video camera. Soon I even started roping in friends and family to help me shoot the fictional stories I had made up in my mind. I now had a way to actualize (to a certain degree) all my ideas.
Funnily enough, despite my obsession with filmmaking, I didn’t actually realize I wanted to be a filmmaker for quite some time; in Udaipur “filmmaker” is not a conventional (or widely accepted) life goal. But then one day, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, a renowned Bollywood director, came to my city to shoot his period drama “Ram- Leela”. This was the first time I had ever seen a film set up close. To this day, thinking back to when I first saw the sets gives me goosebumps. Because, as dramatic as this might sound, at that moment I finally knew that this was what I wanted to be doing with my life.