Balwadi

TIIMMC first came to be associated with the Foundation purely by coincidence! When I sent out the email asking for volunteers for making the Movie on the occassion of World Environment Day, Om forwarded the email to one of his ex-teammates who he knew to be interested in Environmentalism. That teammate turned out to be Sushma, subsequently the lead actress in 'A Matter of Choice' of course. Apart from Environmentalistic tendencies, she is also associated with the Foundation, and thus started the association!

The Foundation is very active in the cause of Child Education, and one of their frequent haunts is the hamlet of Islampura, right in the middle of Bangalore, a few kilometres from our office. Every year, the Foundation runs a fund raiser campaign, in order to be able to support the education of some of the poorer of the children from the slums of Islampura. Contributions are invited from people in the company. They were about to kick-off the event for this year, when TIIMMC & the Foundation first conversed. We thought it would be pretty cool if the MMC could help make a short advertisement video to go along with the Foundation announcement.

Dale was the main driving force behind the video. From the beginning it was (& was supposed to be) a very low key, unplanned affair. We had a chat one evening, and Dale took the camera to Islampura the next day, and captured a few shots of the kids speaking into the camera. I dumped the footage on Premier, cut & spliced them together & built a framework. A few reviews with the team, some captions added, background music copy-pasted from here & there... and it was done!

This year's funds Exceeded Expectations as the Foundation guys tell us! (Maybe even an 'Outstanding' in Harry Potter terminology!) Recession not-withstanding, they raised more money than ever before! Some of it even came from abroad - the video was hosted on the company's international news page & employees around the world saw it. A short sub-two-minutes video, costing one day of shoot, 2-3 days of editing time - causing a big impact on at least a few people's lives - this was indeed one of the most successful ventures of the Movie Making Club.

The Foundation did not want to publish the video as is because of some Legal concerns. So, in this version, I have replaced the logo of the Foundation with the TIIMMC one at the beginning, I have also removed the mentions of the Foundation from the Poster near the end of the video. Apart from that, this is almost as it was originally!

Back in the News!

If you want to view the video first, before reading the post, so that you can nod along & agree with me all the way, well, here’s the link!

http://www.filmcamp.tv/FilmCamp.TV/Workshops_Films/Entries/2008/7/18_Suckered.html

The video is B-A-D! And here are the reasons why.
1. They spelled my name wrong in the credits!
2. They chose a pathetic name for the movie. What kind of a word is ‘Suckered’?
3. Even if one accepts ‘Suckered’ as a word and figures out what it means who gives a ‘suspense-movie’ a reveal-all name?
4. They skipped some shots which could have turned the video around. Essentially the editing is screwed up!

‘They’, of course, refers to the guys in Film Camp (www.filmcamp.tv). But let me start at the beginning.

It was summertime one year back. My wife was then in the UK. Vibhor wasn’t married yet. We had a lot of free time in the weekend & decided to spend one day trying out the Film Camp which we had been getting email invitations about. Dale was also free & game to join in.

We reached Lalbagh right on time, early Sunday morning, and duly paid the Rs.1000 as fees. (Money down the drain… but I am jumping the gun here. Back to the story then.) The group was quickly split into small teams of 4, one of the Film-campers (the instructors) were to accompany each team, and help them develop a short story, teach them how to shoot, essentially guide the team through the whole process.

Our guide (forgot his name) explained to us what a ‘Treatment’ for a movie was. We came up with a storyline, and went into developing the Storyboard. (I think we skipped ‘Screenplay’ completely, not sure.) The list of shots were decided & we started the shooting. At this point our instructor reeled off a few technical terms like ‘180 degree line’ & ‘Rule of thirds’. He then proceeded to explain each term, wrongly as we later found out. Once in a while, Sanjay Nambiar, probably the only person in the outfit who really knows about filmmaking, walked by taking pictures to publicise the camp. Of course he didn’t have much time to spare instructing us!

Shooting got over by twilight. We were promised that we could do the editing also on Final Cut (Macbook Pro!) In reality, we just had enough time to pick the shots & transfer the footage before we were shoo-ed off, with a promise that our instructor will complete the editing and post the movie on their website a week later.

The movie was indeed posted – in a completely garbled state, with key shots missing – three months and one abusive mail from Sanjay Nambiar later!

The fellow, Sanjay Nambiar, has a big attitude problem. To a simple query over email in the lines “We had participated in the Film Camp in Bangalore on 20th of April. We were told that the completed movies would be put up on the website in 2 weeks time. (Snaps from that day's camp were put on the Film Camp homepage also for a short while!) Any updates on these? It has been almost 7 weeks since!” Sanjay’s reply read: “Wait! All good things come to those who wait. And watch that tone when you write to me. I just taught you how to make a film, not idli-vada! Know anybody else who can do that for Rs.1000? The photos on the homepage are a courtesy. You can thank me for them. If you complain, you won't get shit!” [All quotes verbatim!]

It seems he has continued to extend further ‘courtesy’ to us! Shankara mentioned that he had seen an ad for some ‘Film something’ on Bangalore Times over the 4-5 July weekend with my picture in it! Given that I have not been to any other ‘Film something’, I am pretty sure it is the same picture that appeared on Film Camp website homepage. I couldn’t locate the newspapers, if you can, you may crosscheck if you care to!

I don’t remember the terms & conditions that I signed at the beginning of the camp, so I don’t know if they have a right to put my picture on the newspaper. But do take it from me, I am not advocating to anyone to join the camp! In fact, the only reason you should join the camp is if you have an extra Rs.1500 (they increased the price!) and want to spend a quite Sunday in Lalbagh, handling low end Panasonic Camcorders & switching ON a Macbook Pro. But if you want to learn anything on making movies, just look up the terms ‘Treatment’, ‘Storyboard’, ‘180 Degree Rule’ & ‘Rule of Thirds’ on Google, and you already know more than what you can possibly learn at that camp!

TIIMMC

The last movie we made - "A Matter Of Choice" - met with unprecedented publicity. The movie was of course for a good cause, so many people have been asking for copies to show to family & friends. Colleagues & relatives have shown the movie in their own offices. Even in Youtube, there has been more than a 1000 hits - a first for TIIMMC videos. And this happened in the span of 3 weeks!

The icing on the cake was when the Prime Minister of India also watched a couple of scenes from "A Matter Of Choice". People are often intrigued at hearing this. The explanation is of course pretty simple! The Marketing team was going to demonstrate a projector made by our company to the Prime Minister. He chose to use a couple of scenes from our movie for the demonstration!

Sushma claims that she cracks up at the thought of the Prime Minister watching us - it's usually we who see him on TV! Swapna joked that the Prime Minister did not see the whole movie after all! But I say that there is some sort of a poetic justice in his seeing only two scenes - when we are surfing channels, we typically change the channel after seeing him for a couple of scenes!

The movie is, of course, posted in Youtube in two parts - for all to watch. They are also embedded in the first post of this Blog.

Our Managing Director (now 'President') watched the movie when we screened it in the Auditorium on World Environment Day. He liked the movie - the whole concept - and wanted to meet the Green Leaders & Movie Making Club teams. We had a brief meeting with him today (there was cake also!) The Green Leaders had a few slides on what they did. I wanted to present for TIIMMC - but then I decided that we should not present foils.... we should do what we do best!

Well, here is what we presented.