Our Objective:
Delivery:
Outcome:
-H.P. Lovecraft
ATTITUDE BUILDING | Phase 1- Need Identification & Opportunity Spotting | |||
Topic | Rationale | Methodology | ||
1. | Understanding Human Psychology | Before understanding ‘why people buy’, an entrepreneur MUST understand ‘why people behave the way they do’ | Talk by a good film-maker & a sufficiently successful entrepreneur | |
Followed by sessions on ‘Human Psychology’ | ||||
2. | Understanding India in the global context | a. To understand the reality of our country b. To create entrepreneurs who think of ‘SCALE’ from the beginning c. To realize where India stands in the world order |
An economist’s perspective | |
3. | Entrepreneurial Marketing | An entrepreneur has to be a ‘Marketeer’ at the core | The students should be able to relate these concepts to human psychology | |
4. | Thinking like an Innovator | An entrepreneur has to constantly innovate | A combination of in-class, field assignments | |
SKILL BUILDING | 5. | The Mechanics of Business | An entrepreneur should be able to: a. Create and interpret financial statements b. Understand finance as a means to control operations c. Manage people for high performance |
The students should be able to relate these concepts to human psychology |
6. | Researching People | An entrepreneur must be always close to the user | ||
7. | Presentation skills | For a new-age entrepreneur, these skills are like the ‘3 Rs’ of old times. Basics must be known | Through class-room sessions and internships with various agencies | |
8. | Website creation | |||
9. | Digital marketing | |||
10. | App development | |||
Reading a Newspaper |
Phase 2- Concept Generation | |||||
Topic | Rationale | Methodology | |||
Skill Building | 1. | Sector Analysis | An entrepreneur must understand the contextual Business ecosystem | In-class guidance & meeting industry professionals. This would help them build strong concepts | |
2. | Prototyping & Testing | An entrepreneur must understand the importance of iteration to create a near-perfect Product-Market fit | |||
3. | Advanced Marketing | Growth strategies | |||
4. | Managing operations | An entrepreneur has to be an optimiser | Theoretical concepts backed by practical experience of how the theory pans out in an enterprise (small & medium scale). | ||
Relevant one-off activities to be planned | |||||
Assignment of domain-specific mentors |
Branding is the heart of all advertising. It is built on brand values. No film is ever complete without the brand being the center of its structure.A brand is not an inanimate object. It is a living, breathing, evolving entity in an extremely complex and dynamic set up. Its relevance in society will be determined by its evolution, but never at the cost of its core values and principles.
Creating a successful brand requires that a business understands its customer base and aligns its business image with the customers� needs and wants. Customers gravitate towards brands that they trust and find authentic. Brands are faced with the challenge of diminishing attention spans and ever increasing media clutter. In such a complex environment, branding without a larger purpose stands every chance of becoming irrelevant.
"In order to create the very essence of the brand through the magically creative process of the Ad Film, here are the key elements of Ad Film Making that must become part of the students DNA, just as they are known to the Masters! These elements are also going to be the stepping stones of the learning pathway in the course we offer."
The GRAMMAR of Ad film making is the same as the structure of storytelling. We have to tell the story in 30 seconds. Thinking of a story is only the beginning of the project. How you translate it into the visual medium and how you hold the attention of your consumer with great excitement is the heart of the grammar of ad film making, and all the disciplines that go into it- writing, visualizing, story boarding, shooting, editing and music and finishing it to a very high level of excellence.
It requires thorough understanding of its consumers' expectations and the promise that you make to them that the brand delivers. Mostly the brand delivers much more than just a physical satisfaction. Associating with a brand sometimes gives you a lot of power and prestige, depending on the kind of values that you build into the brand.
Production can either deliver or kill a project. A Director is only as good as his production team. The first thing that the production team realizes is that there is no such thing as "It can't be done". It has to not only be done but it has to be done within a budget and a time frame with the highest level of aesthetics and details to make the project worthwhile.
Thinking out of the box is where you change the perception of your consumer by telling a story from a completely different point of view.
This exercise is all about making everyday things look different, exciting, and engaging. When you create, you don't have to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story. A good story is lying under your nose waiting to be told, you just have to discover it.
Script writing is about taking a great idea in a story and honing it to its essential skeleton. And understanding the sound, the picture, visualization, the flow of music, the way casting and characters unfold, and the impact of all these disciplines on the final delivery.
Story boarding is how you break a film down into its many points of view. The lensing, the camera movement, the angles that the director is looking at to tell his story, the style of its narration, and the dynamics of its execution are all held together in the bible of the storyboard. The storyboard then puts every person on the set on the same page at the same time so that they know what their contribution is and don�t have to be told to fetch and carry. The storyboard ensures that the whole unit is focused on one and only one point of view and functions like a well-oiled machine instead of a rabble of confused individuals.
The director is the leader of the army and is the one who picks the story he wants to tell and then uses his entire craft and grammar of filmmaking to be able to deliver that story as close to his internal vision, despite the lack of faith or direction from the rest of his crew. It is his driving vision that brings everyone in sync together to complete the film in what was its original intention and not some accident with no direction.
Every product is a brand and every brand must be seen as an entity and not as an object thus developing human characteristics which create the value that we all live by. Characteristics like truth, compassion, honesty, integrity, courage, etc. are integral, so that eventually the product is identified as a valuable contributing part of our society and not just as a consumable.
This is true for whether it is an object, an idea, an actual person, or a political party.
A very recent part of the most important aspects of the look and feel of your film. It not only delivers a superficial gloss, but is capable of delivering a huge part of the story subliminally.
Budgeting of a film is what makes the whole proposition viable. If you are under budget you will lose money, over budget you lose the job. You must budget the way your director visualizes your story telling with style, panache, finish and detail, traits that sets your films aside from the others.
In Advertising it was believed that a pretty face launched a thousand sales, it is no longer true. A vacant pretty face which is empty of emotions and expressions with no body language cannot generate the excitement that you should be feeling. Such an Ad film will only be an exercise in futility.
From writing to sell, everything you say should encourage action. Good copywriting demonstrates value. Writing is independent of a director, because the copywriter becomes the visualizer and the storyteller all rolled into one. But he needs a director to translate the idea and the visuals into the language of cinema.
Costumes play a major role in making it possible for viewers of the film to make assumptions about the virtue of characters according to their�cultural relevance. It comes under the styling of the film. But you require experts who then use their own visual story or enhance the original story by clothing their characters with the fabric of credibility whether it is romance, beauty, poverty, pain, suffering, etc. to enhance characterization.
Lighting is the art of painting with lights and it comes in the discipline of the direction of photography. The reasons for which lights are necessary in film making is that film does not respond in the same ways as our eyes do. It presents a heightened interpretation of reality. In other words, films that touch our hearts tend to offer a world that is �More Real than Real�. The director and the production designer work together to make a story become vibrant and come alive to touch, feel, and smell without having any of them as a part of its repertoire but it touches a part of your mind which invokes all these senses even when they are not there. �
The Art Director works closely with the production designer and makes sure that detailing of the vision of the director, the DOP, and the production designer translates the idea or a reference into reality without having to actually to do it in its absolute form. His tools are cloth, paper, wood, and paint and he can create from palaces to villages so that you as an audience never realize that they are make believe.�
Film sound is storytelling with sound on its own. It either fills your world or it leaves an aching silence which are a statement by themselves. A weaver of sound who is actually a magician in his own right, in the footsteps of the great Mangesh Desai, was unsurpassed. Good sound design, editing, and music can make even an average film phenomenal. It is an integral part of Ad film making from start to finish and its importance should never be overlooked.
The editing of your film, regardless of how well or badly you have shot it is the craft of the creativity of the professional who sits and creates magic or the 'shit you have shot' into a coherent elegant, introspective - or blood curdling - visual story. He goes even beyond the Director sometimes because when the director has failed in his job, then it is left to the editor to save the film and to take the story telling from good to magical.
Post Production at its simplest is matching of the edited story, with the dialogue or the voice over and the music and the various levels at which things are playing. Today post production has gone way beyond that because you also have artificial intelligence.
Post Production in the digital world has become a very important part of the extension of the director�s vision, the camera man�s genius and the editor�s magic because it then takes the film into the realm of the impossible. Because of the digital image and computer generated genius nothing today is impossible. Though it can be time consuming and very expensive. So when the Post Production technician (who is everything rolled into one) sits and plays music with his artificial intelligence (computer), then that courtship can be earth-shattering.
Post Production enhances imagery especially if your story telling is not complete while it�s shooting, or a lot of it is left to post to actually make it coherent because it�s not possible during live shooting. So that has to be anticipated and be budgeted for.
The Ad Film Making process is a part of the Marketing Mix.�A pre-production creative meeting is therefore very crucial to Positioning, and how the film is going to function within the rest of the media, because the entire campaign and the philosophy of the brand will move in the same direction and we cannot have the parts of the media mix moving in totally different directions, regardless of the creative logic. The brief becomes very important in demonstrating and bringing alive the promise of the brand which is being touched on by all the other media.