If you look up ‘The Girlfriend factor’ on YouTube and go to the first video on the list, you will find it described as 'the first online mega series cinema which will be out on the web in episode pattern.'
Indeed, the five-episode film is arguably a first-of-its-kind effort given that it is being put together by a group of school and college students. Each episode, around five minutes long, the series is bound together by a common theme that runs through the stand-alone nuggets. The summer time project was the brainchild of Arjun Satheesh and Fahim Safar, both of whom passed out of St Thomas Residential School,Mukkolakkal, this year.
“We wanted to do a fun piece on the ways - both positive and negative - inwhich, a girlfriend influences a boy’s life,” says Fahim. “For example in the second episode, a cricket match is going on. While our hero is waiting to make a catch, he imagines his girlfriend praising him when he makes the catch and the next moment, he imagines the opposite - she berating him for missing it.”
And does the hero make the catch? “Of course, he does not,” says Fahim. The moral of the story - ‘thinking about your girlfriend is inversely proportional to success’. The promotional video for the first episode, which was uploaded on YouTube on June 24, has already had over 700 views. The group is very active on the social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook, as well.“We have a Facebook page where we keep our followers updated on the releases of the videos,” says Fahim. Calling themselves ‘Zero Gravity Entertainment’, the team comprises 13 members, all below 21 years of age.
Their youngest member (and one of their main cast) is 15-year-old Gouri Krishna of Lecole Chempaka School. Other members include students of city-based institutions like Loyola School, Mar Ivanios College, St Thomas College and CA Academy and also Oxford College, Bangalore.
So what was the cost of production for the project? “We wanted to do a zero-budget film but of course that was not practical,” says Fahim, who is getting ready to join the National University of Advanced Legal Studies in Kochi. “But we have managed to wrap it up within `5000.”
Stating that they were not looking for commercial gains through this venture, he says, “This short film series will be released on the Internet.The first episode will come out on July 5. Once it hits a 1000-view mark, other episodes will follow.”