Honoured to create my first commissioned movies
Over the last month, the two movies I worked on were entirely my own initiative. But right after the release of my first film, Ajāmila, something unexpected happened - a spiritual teacher and Guru from our community reached out and asked whether I could create a set of movies for his annual pilgrimage retreat. This retreat is attended by hundreds of people from around the world. What an honour — and my very first commission! I said “YES!” immediately, full of excitement and confidence, even though I had barely a few weeks of experience at that stage.
Over the next four weeks, I immersed myself in two major chapters of the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam. These chapters are not light reading - they contain long, profound philosophical dialogues between emperors, empresses, kings, queens, sages, and even animals. In many ways, it felt like working on a large-scale production. To my knowledge, no one has ever created a video presentation of these particular pastimes, nor have they ever been staged in a dramatic form. And yet, these chapters are among the most important in the entire Bhāgavatam — deeply emotional, highly confidential, and full of sentiments that often get overlooked. For most readers of the Bhāgavatam, with its 18,000 verses, these two chapters might appear to be simple conversations, something you could skim past in search of more action-packed stories. But once I began my work, I couldn’t believe how enriched I was becoming personally.
The workload was immense. Alongside these commissioned movies, I was also developing my second independent film, Ambarīṣa Mahārāja. My weekends became marathon sessions — 10 to 15 hours of work each day. There were definitely moments of frustration, especially when the AI tools struggled to generate realistic characters, settings, or body language. Every mistake costs not only time but also credits, which means money. Still, the work had to continue. Whenever I finished a significant section of a chapter, I sent it over to the Guru for feedback. I won’t hide that I was often anxious about the corrections that might come back. Corrections usually meant recreating entire clips — characters, dialogues, movements, and editing—from scratch. That easily consumed several hours.
This is where tolerance and humility come into play. Accepting critical feedback is not easy, but it is essential. To keep myself on track, I created a detailed Google Spreadsheet to log every correction and follow-up. That little bit of structure saved me. I realized that organization is not optional in filmmaking — it is survival.
Now, after four weeks of intense work, I’ve managed to complete three full movies of about 15 minutes each! THREE! Wow, I say.
An additional short movie of eight minutes is remaining (making it four movies in total!) and is scheduled for completion today, which should wrap everything up. If all goes well, by the end of tomorrow, I will have polished, finalised, and handed over the videos, ready for public screening at the retreat.
One important note: I will not be uploading these commissioned movies to my channel until June 2026. Next year, that is. This is because they will first be screened by the spiritual teacher for his audience later this year and early next year. Once those screenings are complete, I’ll be able to release them on YouTube for a wider audience. Until then, they remain safely tucked away — a labour of love and discipline that I look forward to sharing with you in the future.