A time to remember

RM Rao,cinematographer from the first batch of 1961,says,“It was a different world back then. I am saying world because over the last five generations everything has changed at a rapid pace. However the interactions,both academic and creative,the debates and the subsequent results of the same,were as intense and similar to the ones that students here have today. So in many ways a lot of the integral aspects of the institute have remained unchanged.”

Rao who has worked on a lot of documentaries and advertising films was instrumental in bringing technologies like slow motion filming,slit fields,video assisted camera technologies to advertising films,feels that even today FTII is an organisation that churns out the best that the business has to offer.

Rajan Shukla,director from the first batch of the FTII students’,best known for his works,Rendezvous and Mrig-Trishna seconds that thought. He says,“When we graduated out of the institute we went into the film industry,which was outright hostile towards accepting us. They did so on the grounds that established technicians who had learnt the various technologies over a period of almost 20 years felt undermined by the fact that we had learnt the same in just three years. So at least on the technical aspect they were very hostile. However,gradually as the industry began to absorb more and more of the students from the industry things changed,attitudes changed and perceptions changed.”

Known for working with the,then nascent,television industry-Doordarshan in particular,students from the first batch have have worked on television serials like Hum Log,and even been a part of teams that broadcasted the first ever televised documentary of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shashtri’s speech. Speaking about the technological differences of the yesteryears,SR Gupta,from the first editing batch,who worked on the television serial Hum Log says,“Even the editing,(read as film cutting) was literally done manually. We would cut the films,and then send them over to have them developed to the photography departments. The wet negatives were then dried with a unique combination of a heater and a fan and then and then mounted on a 16 mm projector,viewed individually with mechanical precision,and then literally cut manually and made ready for the television.”

And as far as an interesting anecdote from their college days is concerned,CS Nair,from the direction batch of 1964 says that there was a time when he along with Rao had gone to Armed Forces Medical College to shoot a documentary on the blood bank there and were locked inside during the shoot. “It was minus 23 degrees inside the bank,good enough to have our bones and blood frozen,and yet we managed to shoot the film,and not have ourselves preserved there in the process,“ laughs Nair.

“Surely an institute that has been instrumental in producing talent that has won just about everything right from the Filmfare and National Awards to the Oscars deserves to be in the leagues of other national institutes like the Indian Institute of Technology or something. But ironically that hasn’t happened till now. And even though there are a lot of (supposed) funds flowing in,we just hope that,it doesn’t lead to the commercialization of this institute,” says Vasu Bhagat of the 1964 Scriptwriting batch.