Veerendra Prasad is one of eight U-M lecturers and tenure-track faculty members who have received 2020 summer fellowships at the Institute for the Humanities. The summer cohort will form an intellectual community while pursuing original research and participating in regular, cross-disciplinary fellows’ seminars.
For his project “Unscripted Films in Uncontrolled Environments,” Prasad's focus will be on working out a process for no-budget filmmaking. Prasad notes, "Shooting alone (this is timely!) with a small camera, a gimbal and tiny audio recorders attached to the actors, we’re able to try novel approaches to storytelling, working without a full script or even a pre-conceived story. The idea is to embrace a lack of control in order to unlock spontaneous creativity by starting with randomized writing prompts, collaborating under time constraints, and improvising in uncontrolled environments like crowds (this is not so timely!)."