Award Winning Filmmaker Gurdeep Singh

Gurdeep Singh takes us behind the scenes of his cinematography career!

Gurdeep Singh clearly understands the concept of totally immersing oneself in something in order to be successful at it. He is a very talented and extremely knowledgeable cinematographer and all-around filmmaker from India and when he decided to become a filmmaker, he threw himself into it whole heartedly and never looked back. His journey into the world of cinema began when he lived in hostels while studying. The only entertainment available to him was watching movies in the local cinema, and he never missed a single film that was shown there. He found films to be something that not only intrigued him, but they mesmerized him so much with their storytelling power that he started writing stories of his own. When he shared them with his friends, they found them more interesting than the movies they had seen in the theatre. That, of course, changed everything for him. He knew then that he would be a filmmaker for his life’s work and career.

Gurdeep earned a bachelor’s degree in filmmaking at the Centre for Advanced Media Studies at Punjabi University, and went on to direct short films, music videos and commercials. He also used his own Canon digital camera and began building quite a substantial portfolio and body of work that landed him an executive producer role at Speed Records, which is the biggest Punjabi Music Record label in the world. While there, Gurdeep worked on music videos for, among others, Miss Pooja, the famous Indian singer and actress, and the singer and songwriter, Akhil, who is the American born Indian who is very active in Bollywood. Gurdeep’s interest in filmmaking led him to shift his focus from production to creating visual images so he came to the United States and completed a one-year conservatory program in cinematography at the legendary New York Film Academy. 

In an interview he did with usreporter.com, Gurdeep says that he loved the way they taught cinematography. They started the students off with 8mm film cameras and then slowly built their way up to 16 mm and then 35 mm film cameras. Working with film (as opposed to the now commonly used digital format cameras), taught him a valuable lesson in the filmmaking process. He learned to be disciplined and to plan every shot carefully because once an image is captured on film, there’s no to name a few. He feels that working with brilliant and generous creatives like them was a more valuable education than the one he had received in New York.