Mumbai - Day Four
I am starting to feel the pace now - long days with our evenings filled with fantastic food have been fabulous fun but tiring. So today was supposed to be a light day of visiting Prime Focus in the morning, then I was to head up to the newest and probably largest training facility here, Whistling Woods.
As with everything here, things do not come to plan. The cars are late. One driver has little fuel left and does not know the way, so even though we leave 3/4 of an hour before the other car, they beat us by 3/4 of an hour to Film City.
This is a very large part of the countryside, it feels almost like a game reserve, with armed guards at the gate, walls all around, and over 20 sound stages making the 1000+ Bollywood films a year. I arrive at the Whistling Woods compound - very impressive it looks too. I am given a tour; a large, well appointed auditorium with digital projection and dolby surround sound; a smaller, but equally well appointed auditorium, rehearsal space, two tv studios, animation teaching spaces with lightboxes, tv and audio training rooms with all the kit you would expect to see - all in all very impressive.
Whistling Woods is only 18 months old and was built with private investment. They have a large plot and plan to expand (a large building with 3 studio spaces and more animation and vfx rooms are planned, along with R&D space and residential areas). They limit the class space to twelve students in 8 different disciplines, though all students are recquired to understand all of the creative and technical process. And the depth of learning seems very good - for example in the first term the budding animators are all working in pencil and watercolour - life drawing classes are essential. All students get placements work experience during their holidays, with around 25% of them coming from outside India, from Australia, Germany, US, Lebanon. It costs around £4 -6,000 per year, with bursaries and scholarships available.
Mr Ravi Gupta, the director, and myself chat about how we can work together. The Skillset Screen Academies and the soon to come Media Academies would be the first choice in any partnership. We share a lot of the same issues - educating more people about the career choices available to them in media; instilling a professionalism into the sector; ensuring that continual professional development keeps the workforce skilled are just some of the areas we discuss.
As I head back into town I ponder what the links could look like between our industries, between London and Mumbai, between the UK and India. There is an opportunity for two-way exchange in talent (One area that Whistling Woods are keen to explore is an training agency like Soho Editors to work in partnership to offer short, industry focused training courses, and I am beginning to see a source of competent, engineering specialist for the audio visual industry. Management keeps being an issue in India as much as in the UK. But I think one key area is in that of research and strategy - there is no common voice here, as far as I can tell no easy way to see the numbers on the industry and therefore an un-coordinated approach to helping it grow.
Much of the population of India believe in fate, in sychronicity of events. Andrew Sunnocks sits next to a DJ from the UK on the plane, John “OO” Flemming. He is playing a series of events here in India, including one in Mumbai. Tonight he puts our party on the guest list for the gig he is doing at Poison. A few of us head down to a lovely little club, which soon fills with the guests to what must be the hottest ticket in town. As we drink our VIP drinks, we meet a really nice guy, Shailendra Singh, who turns out to be the Managing Director of one of the largest companies in India. He invites us to the launch of their new animation film, Hanuman Returns, tomorrow night, a launch which throws another perspective on this sub-continent. But that, dear readers, is for another day.
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