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!