Who doesn’t want to work in the movies? Gee, that’s a tough question. Okay, it is a ridiculous question because almost everyone who is asked would tell you that of course they would like to work in the movies. The ones who say they wouldn’t like to, are obviously having trouble telling the truth. So, why aren’t all seven billion people on the planet working in the film industry?
There are plenty of logical answers to that but we’re only going to address one of them – the one about hard work, passion and persistence. And we are going to use the Indian Cinematographer Sathish Shankutty as an exemplar of those fine qualities. Sathish came all the way to Los Angeles from India to get into the motion picture business and now he is a well-established, in-demand director of photography on feature-length motion pictures, TV movies, TV series and award-winning short films.
His resumé is incredibly full of productions he has contributed to but they are numerous to list them all here. Talking about several of them, however, won’t get us yelled at by the editor of this publication. We were and are impressed by all of Sathish’s work but the ones that we’ve seen recently are Juba The Iraqi Sniper: The Untold Story (Short film), Paranormal Monster’s Society (TV Series) and Desert Sai: The story of a Killing (short film). The one thing all these projects had in common was Sathish’s lush cinematography. It appears that he can shoot anywhere, under any climate or lighting conditions and still come out looking like a champ. The movie also comes out the same way because Sathish is so confident in his talent and choice of lighting for each and every scene that he makes it look easy.
In Juba The Iraqi Sniper: The Untold Story, he follows soldiers and the sniper through rugged, dusty, extremely hot desert battlegrounds. His camera moves so fluidly that even though it is capturing a great deal of movement and is moving with the action – it feels as though it is an integral part of the scene and it never calls attention to itself. His work on Desert Sai: The story of a Killing gives us a similar feeling – that the camera isn’t really there. We feel that we are there in its place going unnoticed by the actors and all the action around us. Paranormal Monster’s Society must have been a lot of fun for Sathish to work on because of all the interesting characters and story line. His camera work is flawless in that show too. Sathish is currently shooting a documentary titled Escape From Freedom.
