How to be a success as a freelance production professional

SAAKSHA BHANDARY

Saaksha Bhandary (Commits Class of 2012), a production professional based in Mumbai, was most recently Associate Creative Director of the just-concluded reality TV show, I Can Do That, for Zee TV. She is possibly the youngest ever to be an ACD for such a big show.

I asked Saaksha to give us a lowdown on what it means to be a freelance production professional and elaborate on the responsibilities of an Associate Creative Director. Here is her piece:

Being an Associate Creative Director or Associate Creative Head means you, along with the Creative Director, are responsible for conceptualising and executing a show from start to finish — right from thinking of the basic idea of the show to finally working on it, putting it together, and delivering the “master” to the broadcaster.

When it comes to television shows and events, it means you are basically in charge of everything related to the show, be it thinking of the central theme or idea, the set design, the venue, the performers, the anchors, the on-stage and audience interactions, the light design, the costumes, the seating, the props, the scripts, the music, the acts, the choreography, the show flow or show progression, the edit pattern... in short nothing gets the green signal until the creative team approves it.

You are in complete charge of what the content of the show will be.  It's a lot of work and responsibility because one small mistake could have adverse effects on the show.

All this might seem quite daunting at first but the more shows you do the more efficient you become. I found that one of the most important qualities to have in order to be successful in this line of work is to be able to think on your feet. The Hindi television industry is not a big believer in “forward planning”. Everything happens, or, conversely, does not happen, at the very last minute and you need to be able to think of a solution immediately.

SAAKSHA BHANDARY WAS THE ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF I CAN DO THAT, WHICH WAS TELECAST ON ZEE TV.

If you are thinking about taking up this profession, here’s some serious advice:

• If you're planning to come to Mumbai to join this segment of the production industry, forget about having lots of time to socialise and relax! Say goodbye to most weekends.
• Don't play safe. If you want to get ahead in this field, playing safe isn't going to get you there. Take risks.
• Take this up only if job security is not your first priority. There have been stretches of time earlier on in my career when I have sat at home for months without work.
• Network, network, network! I wasn't too good at networking earlier. I would just come, do my work, and get out. But now I realise the importance of networking in this industry. It takes you a long way. 

Okay, I know I've made it look like a very difficult and scary field to work in... But I have come to love it, despite all the pressure and sleepless nights. When I finally see my show going on air it gives me a tremendous high to think that I have been part of creating something that lakhs of people in India and abroad will watch.

All I can say is, this is a very fulfilling job and I am fortunate to be among those people who can actually say “I love my job” and mean it. :)

IN APRIL-MAY 2011, SAAKSHA WAS ONE OF FOUR COMMITS STUDENTS WHO INTERNED WITH RED CHILLIES IN MUMBAI AND HELPED TO PRODUCE COKE STUDIO.

• ALSO READ: How to have a successful AVC-related internship

Anchoring news programmes, documentaries, travel shows, youth shows, lifestyle shows... and covering the Grammys in Beverly Hills

SHE HAS DONE IT ALL

On May 8, 2010, I watched Commitscion Priyali Sur (Class of 2005) in action as she anchored a documentary on CNN-IBN [TV grab below] that exposed the controversial cervical cancer vaccine trials being conducted by some well-known pharma companies in the rural areas of Andhra Pradesh. It was an investigative report of the highest standards, standards that we have come to expect of Priyali since her first year at Commits when she and her group members put together a news bulletin story on Bangalore's bar girls. This story received a lot of praise from the senior journalists who had come for the evaluation then.

Also, we all thought Priyali was a natural as an anchor. And she has proved us right. In 2008, Priyali, who had recently joined CNN-IBN in Delhi as a producer, was in Cuba to shoot a travelogue which was later aired on the channel. The show was amazing.

At the time she had sent me her insights on her show — there's lots here for television aspirants to learn from:

* On Cuba being chosen as the destination for the programme: As a producer-cum-reporter I decide the destination. But it's ultimately also about what works out and what doesn't. So for a travel show, you send out emails and are in conversation with at least 7-8 embassies. At the end, the ministry of tourism that agrees to your travel requirements is the one you finally choose. Yes, they are the ones who sponsor the entire trip. :) Quite cool, right? And the best part — you get to stay in all the prime places because you and your team are treated by the ministry as Indian diplomats.

* On the visa process: Visas were not an issue at all. The entire process was dealt with by the embassy people. We travelled on journalist visas.

* On the team and teamwork: There were three of us: my camera person, the camera assistant, and yours truly. Trust me, the smaller the team, the better. Oh, talking about having a good relationship with your crew... you've just got to work on that because at the end of it all, your visuals are all COURTESY THE CAMERAMAN. So if you get along with your cameraman you're lucky; if you don't, make sure YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

* On the stay/shoot in Cuba: For a 30-minute show you ideally get seven days to shoot, but we had less time because we had a deadline to meet and the edit alone would take a week. So we shot in Cuba for only five days while the travel to and fro came to four days, with a halt in Paris :) I know what you must be thinking! Well, you've also got to live it up a bit when you're working, right?

But the five days in Cuba meant waking up at 4:30 am, getting your make-up on (a killer when you have to do it all by yourself, especially the hair-fixing bit; I'm sure the girls will agree with me on that!) and then starting the shoot/travel at 5:30 am... and shooting, then shooting, and shooting... and shooting till 11-12 at night.

* On the people she met: People... hmmmm!!! They speak only Spanish, except for my guide who spoke good English and who was our saviour. So the only communication between me and the Cubans was "si si si"...which means "yes yes yes" to everything. Yes, that could also have got me in trouble... but what the heck, I was an Indian diplomat there (ha ha ha!).

* On the highlight of the trip: It has to be the finale to the travel show: skydiving! It's the best thing I've ever done… free-falling from a plane at 10,000 ft… it really wasn't scary but phew! the views I got!

* On her work method on trips like this one: Take along a shooting script: you've got to tie up a certain set of activities that you'll do there even before you get there because it's the activities that make a travel show interesting and pacy. Once you get there things may not go as planned, so be prepared to go with the flow and always remember "YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE FUN". That applies even while you're working: if you're happy it shows on camera.

After you get back, the first thing is to finalise the script and then edit… edit… and edit... till you see your show on air. After all that hard work, it's a great feeling :)

After watching Trial And Error that night, I asked Priyali to share some details on the making of the documentary. Here's her response:

THE IDEA: The story idea came from the fact that my sister was insisting that I get this new vaccine that she had heard about because it is supposed to prevent cervical cancer. I told her no one should take a shot just like that without any research and a simple Google search threw up the controversy surrounding the vaccine — that was the starting point.

THE WORK: In terms of production there was a lot to do, but in terms of research you handle it on your own.

THE SHOOT: Two days of shoot in Khammam and Warangal; a few interviews in Delhi (approx. 2 weeks).

THE RESPONSE: At work, everyone liked it a lot and there was lots of viewer feedback on IBNlive too. :) Also, some people who saw and liked the show found me on Facebook and made appreciative comments.

THE FUTURE: I will be doing more of these documentaries but only when I can be spared from my regular work. I have to do them simultaneously with taking care of Living It Up and ynot... so let's see when I can do this next.

PRIYALI WITH KOYEL MITRA (CLASS OF 2011) IN MAY 2010. KOYEL WAS AN INTERN WITH CNN-IBN AND SHE WORKED WITH PRIYALI ON A STORY ABOUT EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTIVE PILLS.

*
"YOUNG JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR"
On March 17, 2011, Priyali Sur was presented the NT (News Television) "Young Journalist of the Year" award in New Delhi. The News Television Awards, instituted by Indiantelevision.com, are selected by a jury comprising journalists from the country's television news channels. So the awards are a measure of the value Priyali's peers and seniors put on her work.

And take a look at the list of winners: Rajdeep Sardesai, Udayan Mukherjee, Bhupendra Chaubey, Rajiv Masand, Karan Thapar. Priyali is in august company, indeed.

Well done, Priyali! Congratulations to you from the Commits family!

PRIYALI FEATURED ON PAGE 1 OF THE COLLEGE NEWSPAPER.

*
"SAMPA'S DIARY"

On the weekend after the NT Awards presentation ceremony, Priyali Sur's latest documentary was being aired by CNN-IBN. "Sampa's Diary" is all about a woman's fight to get her husband, being held hostage by Somali pirates, back to India safe and sound. Watch the documentary here.

*
COVERING THE GRAMMY AWARDS
Priyali Sur's most recent international assignment took her to Beverly Hills in Los Angeles in February 2012 to cover the 54th Grammy Awards. She also reported on the sudden death of superstar singer Whitney Houston on the eve of the Grammys (TV grab below).

You can watch Priyali's report here: "Whitney Houston no more". She also got some of the stars to answer questions about visiting India — you can watch that report here: "Grammy stars would love to come to India".

• Also read: "The Commits Chronicle".

What it means to be an entertainment television production professional

AFREEN RAHMAN

Commits alumna AFREEN RAHMAN (Class of 2010), who is an assistant producer with Zoom in Mumbai, gives us some interesting insights into the entertainment television industry:

What was I thinking when I took this job?!

My parents were puzzled, friends laughed, and the best part was that even I was confused. Why did I want to be part of the entertainment media industry? Because I wanted to be in Bollywood? No, if you really want to know, I wanted to be Kareena Kapoor. Well, that’s my subconscious mind talking but I was always curious to know what lies behind this glitzy world called Bollywood.

While I was an avid reader of Filmfare and Stardust, it was Ramesh Sir and Sai Sir at Commits who made me read novels (Salman Rushdie… how can I ever forget him?) and then write reviews. I would run, hide, do everything to avoid what I thought of as a tedious task… but I would still somehow submit the article.

And now I am writing yet another.

WHAT IS ENTERTAINMENT?
Entertainment is a term that has been used and abused many a time in this industry. An industry where reality shows claim to be unscripted and soaps and serials have become entirely predictable. What is entertainment then? The dictionary would say “agreeable occupation for the mind”, but a senior producer of an entertainment channel would put it as “art meets science and creativity meets news”.

Well, working for a television channel dedicated to Bollywood did give me thrills initially but, as time went by, I realised it’s not easy to create the drama, to create the hype, and to make celebrities look larger than life, especially when it came to celebs who are completely different from the perceptions people have of them. Like chalk and cheese, if I may say so. Don’t believe me? Here’s choreographer Sandip Soparrkar on Katrina Kaif: “She is a cold fish — how can she be any man’s desire?” Meanwhile ad guru Prahlad Kakkar doesn’t even want to acknowledge the presence of Akshay Kumar on the Bollywood circuit. This is the reality off camera.

WATCH ZOOM'S RED-HOT COUNTDOWN HERE. THIS IS ONE OF THE MANY SHOWS AFREEN RAHMAN PRODUCES FOR ZOOM.

DAILY DRAMA
Being designated a producer might seem all fancy-shmancy but the daily real-life drama that I am part of at work makes for more absorbing entertainment than any soap or serial.

As for deadline pressures, we often hear people cribbing about meeting deadlines; well, I have learnt deliver before deadline. That is expected of us today.

A day in the life of a professional in my industry would ideally begin at 9:30 a.m.; mine begins at 11 a.m. Why? Let me just say it’s a time-management issue. You see, I need to work closely with my scriptwriter who racks her brains to write lines in Hindi (which is not my forte). But she needs constant briefing because she tends to get carried away and writes at great length, which ultimately needs heavy editing keeping the episode duration in mind! (There have been times when, while speaking to her on the phone, I have dozed off.)  Then there’s my forever-demanding editor who feels there is never enough footage to edit a link. So even if I leave office at 1 a.m., I am on call till 4 a.m.

The next day, even as I board the train and squeeze myself into a seat I am coordinating with the voiceover artist and my post-production head, AND updating my senior because she wakes up after a good night’s sleep and wants to know if her posterior is going to be on fire or not! To top it all, if the updates don’t go out on time, 8-1-1 (my extension) does not stop ringing. Any wonder why I sometimes feel like dialling 9-1-1?

RESEARCH IS A MUST
Television shows are mostly shoot-based or edit-based. Therefore research on your subject is a must, else audience and stars alike feel cheated and you end up like a popular newspaper supplement that showers rumours and unverified gossip on its readers daily. Zoom editor-in-chief Omar Qureshi, who is a veteran film journalist and ex-editor of Stardust, has a personal rapport with most of B-Town’s A-listers, but he would still face the heat if something that was concocted appeared on the channel. He knows, however, that if his background research is foolproof, nothing can deter him from stating the truth.

Now my research is all about news… Bollywood news! It helps to be updated and be ahead of time. In Bollywood we have a mix of everything — not just gossip and glamour — so entertainment reporting is not really that different from crime reporting or political reporting, which, by the way, makes headlines every day. Here you dig deeper because surely the life of every celebrity is worth talking about!

ARE WE SAVING LIVES?
I often hear people saying, “Be passionate about your work”, “Content is king”, “Be available round the clock”. And then I have friends saying (not asking, just saying), “Are you saving lives?” No, I don’t have any clear answers yet to such questions, but, yes, even if we are passionate about work and our content has given us TRPs (what every channel thrives on), the way I see it is that we are fighting with rivals and saving the channel’s reputation. Here is an incident that underlines my viewpoint:

I had recently produced an episode titled “Bindass Celebs of Bollywood”, a countdown show. One week after it first went on air, when the repeats were on during prime time on a Saturday, somebody somewhere tuned into Zoom and watched the episode. The following day, a Sunday, I received a call and I was asked to report to work by 10 a.m. for a meeting with the programming head, the CEO, and my senior producer. Whoa! I had a lunch plan! Which I cancelled and then crawled to work not knowing what had happened.

Programming team meetings are usually fun; we spend a lot of time sometimes discussing the quirks of some of our stars (we get many interesting details from our reporters). But that day the room had a different air. As I sat down mentally prepared to tune out, I was asked the first question: Why did I do an episode called “Bindass Celebs of Bollywood”? Well, this can’t be bad, I thought. As I sat up straight to reveal the inside story and cover myself in glory, the CEO pounced on me: How dare I use the word “Bindass”. I was taken aback. I had no idea what I had done wrong.

Until it struck me suddenly that UTV Bindass is our rival channel. Oh boy!

I won’t go into details of what followed, but I surely wanted to quit then and there. Just as this thought was crystallising in my mind, Monisha Singh, the programming head, broke the silence that was taking up precious Sunday time: “Entertainment in television is very different from movies. One has to be aware that along with creativity (read creating news) comes strategic planning. Budgets, business angle of the channel, changing tastes of the audience, relationship with the stars — it all adds up to create the channel’s offering.” I think all she could have said was “Be careful next time” instead of this long-winded elucidation. :-)

KEEPING THE TARGET AUDIENCE IN MIND
In our industry, along with the actors, different media houses have learned to co-exist. One cannot survive without the other and, hence, both try to maintain a balance in this need-based “relationship”. Even as one gathers information for the various shows, one must never forget that every minute of every show is important. Therefore, a fervent desire to tap the pulse of the channel’s target audience should be in the DNA of every individual who is part of the 24x7 media circuit. To be sensitive and be sensible while narrating a story is as important as tracking the competition closely and outdoing them in the very same race. This part of our job may not be written down in the appointment letter but that is what decides our growth in any media organisation.

Speaking of target audiences, here’s reality TV producer Priyanka Kochhar on show formats that work and show formats that don’t: “Beauty and the Geek might have been popular in America but the same show failed in India because it couldn’t cater to an audience that wants masala and gossip in reality shows. Bigg Boss, on the other hand, rakes in higher revenues than Big Brother because it stimulates the audience’s mind with some much-needed juice.”

Now you know why, when deciding the format or the flow of a production-based show, one has to be very clear whose addiction one is feeding. If the TG, or target group, is “15 to 24”, it’s not the metro youngsters that we are cashing in on. It’s those kids in Kanpur, Noida, Nagpur, and Lucknow who come into the picture. Would they prefer Shah Rukh over Shahid, or Hrithik over Ranbir…ohhh! It’s a never-ending debate. Simi Chandoke, editor-in-chief of Lifestyle and Society at Times Television Network justifies this stance: “It’s only your TG that matters; it’s better to be honest with your viewers and readers than with the celebrity you interview.”

So, as I come to the end of my day and this article, I would say that no matter how difficult it is to cope with the incessant demands made on your time, you have to realise that your life in entertainment television is very different from that of your friends in other sections of the television industry. I believe they have a life, while we, apparently, slave to make space for the living. Competition is tough, there is always someone waiting outside the door to take your chair and maybe do the same work even better. And the pay sucks at my level!

CHANGING LIVES
Then why do I still do what I do?

Because when I go off to sleep for the few hours I can manage to, I have a smile on my face, a smile which comes from knowing that the day was well-spent! Even if I am not saving lives, thousands of Bollywood lovers actually look forward to MY show. Even if I am not Kareena Kapoor, I am a celebrity in my own little world — no other job gives you that kind of status. In my own way, I am changing the lives of dreamy-eyed youngsters in this country and that is no small achievement and no small responsibility.

And, for the Parthian shot, here are a few things I have learnt from experience: If you want to enjoy what you do be different, wear a T-shirt to a formal meeting, chew gum (and people’s brains), laugh aloud and gossip in whispers, indulge in small talk, call in sick when the Oscars are on, sleep with your eyes wide open in meetings, and never ever cheat where work is concerned.