The Beginning
In 2012, by the time Ayush Dinker completed his graduation, the internet had started to expand in India. While the west had already made a significant impact on YouTube as a platform, India was still taking its initial steps. Channels like TVF had already forayed into the Indian YouTube space, which made Ayush realize the potential & power of YouTube.
After graduation, Ayush was a bit haywire about his content & films. Having no experience in the field of films, he decided and started working under various Indian startups as a part of their marketing & creative teams, contributing substantially to making videos & creating content for them. After gathering enough understanding of brand building and expanding horizons, he finally got a clear picture of the exact content he wanted and started uploading videos on his YouTube channel Ethereal in 2015.
Films & Human Emotion
According to Ayush, Ethereal is a creator of travel films, not travel vlogs. Talking about Ethereal, Ayush told TimesNext that films at Ethereal are personal narratives from a character that goes out to explore a topic or concept related to a larger question about the human condition. The idea is to bring out a personal perspective on the topic. The films at Ethereal are usually about a primary human emotion, and the whole narrative revolves around that concept.
Ayush remarked,
“I struggled to sleep on time and get up early, as a habit. When I saw the mornings in Varanasi during a trip, it fascinated me enough to go back to create a film (Subah Banaras – Sunrise in Varanasi) around sunrise in the city and how sunrise and humans a related. Similarly, I remember that at some point in my life, I realized love is the solution to all the problems in this world, and opinions are not facts. So I went to Kashmir to see if I can explore something related to it and came back with My Kashmir Love Story.”
Realizing the difference between ‘could’ & ‘should’
He told TimesNext that an excellent, engaging story could usually take around five days of shoot with research for the film ranging from 1 week to 1 month.
Ayush was born in Aligarh but later shifted to Kanpur because of his father’s job transfer. He spent his childhood in 5 different schools all across UP, after which he went ahead to complete his mechanical engineering from Birla Institue of Technology, Ranchi. It was not long before he moved from engineering to filmmaking, turning himself into a self-learned filmmaker.
For him, traveling has changed & molded him into a better version of himself. He feels that it had made him patient and realize what matters. It gave him a perspective to understand the difference between the things that ‘could’ be done and the things that ‘should’ be done.
TimesNext asked Ayush about that one place he’d like to go back to again, to which he said, “I feel every place has its own magic, and it is your first encounter with a place that this magic dawns upon you and makes you fall in love with that moment. It will not be the same when you go there the next time. You may need a different perspective to explore the same place next time, in order to fall in love with it again. I think Varanasi is one place where I want to keep going back to just sit beside the river and watch the sunrise.”
Ayush on his next destination, advice & more
Ayush plans to start a series on the exciting and unusual phenomena taking place around the world. He will also be visiting far west in Rajsthan to some of the remote villages where the entire population spends their life only singing.
Ayush advises all the aspiring travel vloggers & filmmakers to never confuse fame with success, which, according to him, are two different things altogether.
“When you are starting out, and you start producing some work, you are going to get appreciation from the people around you as well as your audience. If you start believing that things are easy to come by and you are deserving, let me tell you one thing, you are lying to yourself. In order to create value for yourself, you have got to pay your dues,”
declares Ayush.
