Experts narrate their experiences

The communicative english department of Jyoti Nivas Degree College had worked hard for weeks to organise Akhyana 2012, an intra-collegiate fest. So when over 30 colleges turned up to take part in the fest, the girls and their teachers were all smiles as their hard work had paid off.

With interesting events like media amalgam, media spoof, documentary making, paper presentation and photography, the students had the perfect platform to showcase their talent.

“We had an online photography competition which was open to all, not just students. We would give the participants a topic and they would have to click pictures on the same,” explained Punya and Saraya, two second year communicative english students and the organisers of the fest. “Since it was on Facebook, we chose winners depending on the maximum number of likes on the pictures,” they added. The fest began with an interesting panel discussion with eminent film personalities to enhance their knowledge.

The panel consisted of actress Rupa Manjari, costume designer Lovleen Bains, Basha, film distributer and art director Pooja Ramesh. The topic was ‘Behind The Scenes — Links To The Box Office’ and these personalities showed the real picture behind a film’s making to the interested students around. While Rupa spoke on how she chooses her scripts, Basha had a lot of questions from the audience regarding post production work since he was the distributor of hit films like Dabangg and ‘Ready’. Lovleen, who has designed costumes for films like Rang De Basanti and Mangal Pandey — The Rising, spoke on the hardships faced by costume designers in the industry; and Pooja Ramesh elaborated on how she needs to take the exact picture from director’s mind to create the sets of a film.

“Each one of them spoke extremely well and overall, the panel discussion went on smoothly,” explained Shilpa, a student and the moderator of the discussion. “Rupa and Pooja are from JNC so they were extremely happy to come back to the college and even stayed for one of the events,” she added. Colleges like Mount Carmel, St John’s, CMS, Christ University and St Ann’s participated in the fest. Saumya Soman, a student of Christ University, was excited to be participating in paper presentation. “My topic is whether publicity is the key to the commercial success of a film and I have analysed the recent success of films in Bollywood and Sandalwood. I have also tried to differentiate between buzz, hype, controversy and promotion,” she said.