A Fresh Breeze
Lack of enthusiasm among junta evident
An overview
The opening ceremony of Umang ’08 was held on January 19, in the Auditorium. The much- awaited film festival, was a welcome break in the hot and tedious academic schedule.
As the compere pointed out at the opening ceremony, Umang is no longer just about films. It helps integrate print and visual media into the culture of IITK. This is also emphasized by the renaming of the Students Film Society to Films and Media Council. In this aspect, this year’s Umang has been more successful than ever before. This was, of course, evident in the number and range of new competitions added to the festival.
Major Attractions
This time round, apart from normal events like film-making (and ad-making) and Movie-based Treasure Hunt, Umang had competitions based on other media elements as well.
An extremely novel set of events was organized this year for the first time ever, by Vox Populi. Prominent among these was Expose, an investigative journalism contest.
An animation competition Animaz had three events to offer which involved the utilisation of software like Flash, Photoshop and 3ds Max.
Umang had a Photography competition as well. Under the banner of Prathibimb, three novel Photography contests were held. In Ek Hi Rastha, teams were supposed to follow a certain pre-defined path on campus and take photos on the way and finally, submit ten of them. The best compilation wins. In Chitrakatha, participants had to depict a whole story using a maximum of fifteen photographs with captions. Judging criteria was based on composition of the photographs and overall impact of the collection. In Capture the Caption, ten unique captions were given, and participants had to take suitable snaps fitting each of the captions. There were interesting captions like Taare Zameen Par, Made for each other, Pursuit of Happiness, etc.
Other novelties introduced this time were simultaneous screening of movies in three separate locations namely the Main Auditorium, Outreach and Open Air Theatre in Audi grounds. Before the festival, an online polling was held with a long list of movies, seeking opinion from the junta regarding screening, this resulted in a lot of popular movies being screened.
Given these, it is extremely sad that the participation in Umang (except the audience for the movies) was extremely limited, with only one single entry being received in most events.
Opening Ceremony
Another result of the same was that the so-called opening ceremony of Umang ’08, held on January 19, in the Auditorium, and supposed to kick-start Umang with a bang, (though many didn’t understand why an occasion half-way into the event is called the Opening ceremony) , was quite low-key. However, some surprised members of the junta mentioned, when asked to comment on the same, that no one attends an film festival’s opening ceremony if you have to wait for an hour with nothing to do just to see someone light a lamp and see ‘a new concept under development’.
The chief guests at the event were Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi, writer, director and actor of Chanakya (TV series 1990) ( acclaimed to be the best ever Indian TV series by the critics) and director of the monumental film Pinjar and Mr. Atul Tiwari, writer of Mission Kashmir, Bose - The Forgotten Hero, apart from the other guests in campus for the other events of Umang (namely Ms. Jabeen Merchant, famous film editor, Sunil Shanbagh, eminent Documentary Maker, and Mr. Avinash Deshpande, renowned freelance filmmaker) and the DOSA. The Deputy Director was unable to attend the event due to time constraints, and its late start.
The compere seemed pretty confused. One of the most interesting moments of the evening was when he showed the deficit of info passed on to him by requesting ‘Mr. Jabeen Merchant’ to come up onto the stage. Ms. Jabeen, however, just laughed and shrugged it off. However, later in the evening, he was complimented by Mr. Tiwari on his voice.
All in all, Umang was a fresh breeze, bringing with it the joy of creation, and also pure and simple fun.
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