Goafest 2018, day two, when the Abby award ceremony was at its culminating stage, an organisation caught everyone's attention and that was Early Man Film. The presenters were paging them repeatedly, but no representative of the company seemed to be available to collect the beautiful and prestigious metal of honour. Immediately after the award ceremony, the entire five-star hotel in Goa was a buzz about who this Early Man Film company was. The next day (Day 3), the organisers made an announcement at the press conference that the founders of Early Man Film would be there; the ad film production company bagged 17 metals which include 5 Gold, 4 Silver and 7 Bronze and the one and only Grand Prix of the 2018 Abbys.
Early Man Film was started four years ago when Ayappa resigned from his day job at Viacom18's youth and music channel, MTV and partnered up with Anand Menon. "Anand was already running a production house called Food Candles and when I joined him we decided to change the name to Early Man Film," says Ayappa, co-founder of Early Man Film.
Early Man Film receives the Grandprix award
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Ayappa and Anand believe that their needs and desires are similar to that of the early man and that is the reason behind the nomenclature. "We are happy with food and good work, and that's our philosophy," says Ayappa.
"Ayappa started his career as a Copywriter with Orchard in Bangalore and then moved to MTV where he was working with the On-Air Promotion team. A commerce graduate (B-Com) from Madras Christian College, he joined advertising to experiment and do something creative and that's where he was first exposed to the craft of filmmaking. "It was an accidental entry," is how he explains his existence in the industry today.
The Story Of Kaveri from Early Man Film on Vimeo
Early Man Film is based out of Mumbai and has about 25 employees working in the organisation. "We are a production house and we hire freelancers whenever we need, depending on the project we are working on," Ayappa explains. Early Man Film is a bootstrapped organisation and is already making profits; the founders, at this stage, are not looking for any funding either. "See, we do not believe that we need to hire 10 directors and we will become successful, so scale up for us means getting quality work and for the rest, we hire freelancers, so we don't really need capital and all; it's not a start-up that you need 25 crores to set up. We are a production house and we can sustain ourselves," the Grand Prix man adds.
From the very beginning, it was all about doing good work for the production house, "Money is secondary" says Ayappa, adding, "We always wanted to do a lot of good work and not just make money making Fair & Lovely ads. Everybody wants money and so do we, but we don't want it at the cost of creativity."
"Today there is so much competition and everybody is undercutting each other. See, it's not that clients do not have money, they have a lot of money, so our philosophy is you pay us and we give you a great product. Quality work needs money, if you have the budget we can hire better equipment, a quality editor which will altogether result in a great creative product," opines Ayappa.
'Great Khali breaking walls', that famous Ambuja Cement film was made by Early Man Film and had received a lot of recognition, but nothing compared to their recent film, "Let The Kaveri Flow". The three-minute film has received huge appreciation and ad man Prasoon Joshi also praised the piece calling it "great work". "What worked for us while doing the Kaveri Film is that we had a lot of freedom; the client came to us directly and asked us to make a film and they gave us full freedom. It was a very moving subject, so the entire team, most of who worked without any money, gave it our best because you don't always get an opportunity to do this kind of work," says Ayappa.
He adds, "Also, just to make a great film was not all that we wanted to do; we wanted to ensure that the film brings in change. So after the film, Karnataka called for one of the two Railway projects they had planned as it involved a lot of deforestation, so you contribute to a social cause. And it was also a great script, so I don't deserve all the credit..."
This client-production direct relationship is something Ayappa cherishes, yet he has no plans of making pitches directly to the client or turn into a creative agency and not remain just a production house. "We have thought about it and realised that you cannot go and bite the hand that feeds you. And, there are some things which they are better at, like handling the clients. It will be foolish of us to go and behave like an agency; whenever an agency starts its production house we directors get upset; similarly, I assume whenever the directors act like an agency they also get upset. I also believe that one should do what he/she is good at instead of putting fingers in different pies," says Ayappa
Ayappa is happy at the recognition Early Man Film received at the Abbys, "Video craft, as a category, is very competitive because all the production houses entered, fairly unlike the advertising categories where 80 per cent of the agencies did not enter. So the win in the craft category is a little sweeter because there is genuine competition as opposed to the advertising categories where only two people landed up on the field," he says.
Early Man Film is also getting into the documentary space and will spread its wings over other forms of creative communication, is what Ayappa assures. He also aspires to make a feature film one day, "Who doesn't," he quips, but he is in no hurry and is very happy making ad films. He believes ad films have bigger opportunities to experiment as the budget is good for a small piece of content.
Ayappa feels the competition is increasing and the budgets are getting slashed. He is of the opinion that people are slowly failing to see the importance of production money because it's cheaply available. "Execution is one aspect and idea is a far bigger part. So the market reality is you only get this much budget and in that budget, you have to do quality work and that is the biggest challenge for us," he says.
"It is getting harder and harder to find quality work; I mean today we are getting too serious about products and how much it's getting viewed. People do not care, they want to be entertained and only then you can grip them. So, the freshness is another challenge, today you switch on the TV and you get 10 similar ads and a lot of people are happy doing that, something which is worrying," he concludes.