Anderson School student strikes balance between filmmaking, business

Madhavi Marigold Muppala spends her days switching between business classes at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and meetings about the intricacies of making characters move realistically in animated films.

Muppala entered Anderson in 2013, hoping to improve her understanding of business and ultimately help her coworkers focus solely on storytelling.

“I hope that I can help the film industry move toward a (place where) we are able to deliver better stories to the audiences,” Muppala said.

She entered the film industry in 2005 and has worked on four major movies, including “How To Train Your Dragon 2”, “Monsters vs. Aliens” and “Kung Fu Panda 2”.

She said she thinks her background in technical and digital animation, as well as the knowledge she gains at Anderson, will help her come up with an effective system to allow filmmakers to manage their businesses and create stories that will please audiences.

Muppala said her passion for animation was sparked when she started working on her master’s thesis at the Ohio State University in the early 2000s. She said her adviser and the topic for her thesis – personality and posture – taught her about character development and ways filmmakers can capture a character’s personality through body language and posture.

One of the reasons she is pursuing the MBA program is because she thinks the film industry could benefit from a more structured business format within each studio and between different filmmakers.

She said she enrolled at Anderson because she hopes to improve her organization, development and business handling skills so she can help production teams work better together.

She said she thinks visual effects, technology and change in patterns of distribution with the digital age are prompting big studios to adapt newer models of business. She added that she thinks the effects of these changes in distribution also affect the way filmmakers approach the stories they tell, and she wants to help studios move away from formula-based storytelling.

Raahul Srinivasan, a graduate student at the Anderson School of Management and Muppala’s friend, said he thinks her approach to filmmaking will benefit the modern film industry.

“She wants to take the MBA and all the things that we learn about strategy and business management and apply it,” he said.

Muppala started working at DreamWorks at the end of 2005 as a technical director, starting her work on “Bee Movie”. Muppala said she thinks this creative environment motivated her to take classes over the next few years at UCLA Extension and the Animation Guild of Los Angeles to learn more about animation, screenwriting and screenplay.

In 2011, Muppala directed, wrote and produced a short film at USC called “A Touch of Magic”. Celu Ramasamy, a colleague at DreamWorks who worked on the project with her, said Muppala opted to shoot the movie on 16-millimeter film rather than digitally because she wanted to learn the intricacies of filmmaking.

“(Muppala) had to manage the details of production and at the same time ensure that the creative side of the film came together,” he said. “(It) was very demanding, but she was able to do it.”

Muppala has worked with DreamWorks on a new program called Apollo, which involves new ways of production, lighting and using motion blur in a scene. She received a technical achievement award from the DreamWorks technology department in 2014 for her work with the technique.

So far, Muppala said her favorite class at Anderson has been about strategy and operations. She said she thinks strategy teaches students how to accomplish action-oriented items to help businesses achieve long-term goals.

She added that she thinks this could be applied to production management and the way teams are organized.