“A Great Experience of Life”

The meaning of life is to have great stories to tell but not stuff to show. Apart from
academics, my life is mostly centered around content creation. Cinematography and
video editing has been an integral part of my life from a very young age. I used to film
videos with whatever devices I had around me and started capturing whatever stories I
could extract from my natural habitat. There was this one time I had an “action film”
story in mind when I was in class 5 and I just shot a random video along with my
neighbors and called it a short-film. Fast forward 7 years, my greatest experience of life
is winning a short-film competition which was arranged by WaterAid Bangladesh and
supported by UNICEF.

I always had the urge of showcasing my story-telling skills to the outside world and I
knew that content creation is a powerful way to do that. I always looked for the right
opportunity to portray my talent. Thanks to WaterAid Bangladesh for their initiative.
When the whole world was under the shadow of Covid-19, WaterAid Bangladesh posted
their national short-film competition in order to raise awareness about changing our
habits to prevent Covid-19. The judging panel consisted of the famous director of
Bangladesh, Nuhash Humayun, who also happens to be one of my inspirations and
many more. So without any further delay, I hopped into this competition.

I had to brainstorm for quite a few days about how I can make an awareness short-film
video staying at home. I wrote down pages of scripts, created my shot-list, made a
storyboard about how the shots will be filmed on a tripod since I had no one to help me
out due to national lockdown. Then comes the shoot day where I started at 11 in the
morning and continued for about 5 hours to get all the shots in frame. The editing
process took a few more days but while making this short-film, I had deep insights into
storytelling, video editing and more about content creation. 50+ shots were then finally
compiled into an appealing short-film of 2 minutes which carried the message about the
dos and don'ts during the pandemic period.

After a month of waiting and anticipation comes the day of results. Just like any
academic results, this felt nothing less than that- the fear of losing, the excitement of
winning all kept rushing through my head. The results were delayed by a few hours but
there were no updates from their end about the results. So I hit them up inquiring about
 2

the results and they replied that the results will be published soon. Moreover they added
“Congratulations in advance”. My excitement pumped up even more and finally after the
results were published, I saw my name at the very top of the list stating “Winner of
WaterAid Short-Film Competition-Ahnaf Ali”. That was like a dream come true moment
for me and it actually felt like “Life is like a dream”. But in reality, behind making this
dream a reality, there were countless hours of grinding behind content creation, learning
about filmmaking, video editing and more. The cherry on top was that the award was a
prize money of 1 lac taka. I always wanted to upgrade my skills and gears, hence I
utilized that money by adding a drone to my camera equipment. I am glad that my
passion for content creation is also a part of my great experience of life and I’m hoping
to have even greater experiences in future.