My diploma project required producing a minimum of three films of the duration of 30 seconds to four to five minutes. My sponsor, Synapse, was then holding an account of CRY – USA and India, and also of ShareKhan. This laid the foundation of my project.
I made two advertisement spots for ShareKhan, India’s leading online stock brokerage company. Both of them were related to each other but one was for cinema and the other for television. The one for cinema was named ‘Smoking Facts.’ It showed how, in a day, we spend Rs. 80 on smoking which leads to Rs. 2 lakhs in ten years; investing the 2 lakhs in stocks, would lead to a value rise of Rs. 11 lakhs today. The TV ad showed chain smoking and the harm it causes not only to the smoker’s health but also to his loved ones’.
For CRY, I made two advertisements. One was on children deprived of their rights. In this ad, I used origami (paper cut-outs), which, when opened, turned out to be four children joining hands in a row. By using a trick and cutting it the other way round, the shapes of the children at the two ends were halved. To join them, one would have to make an effort, which was the idea behind the concept.
Carrying forward the same idea, I made one ad for girl child rights. In this ad, there were six paper cut-out girls with patterned frocks. But, one of the girls was shown to be not wearing one. The text then indicates that one of every sixth girl child is sexually abused. In the end, a hand is shown putting a yellow frock on her, which is indicated as the effort made to rehabilitate her.
Courtesy my diploma project, I was sensitised to and learnt a lot of things about social issues that were alien to me earlier.
