Last week i had the chance to feel like Simon Cowell. I was judging a set of student films. Phrases such as which butcher did you use to edit that; or was the camera broken; or Is there a point to this; or where is the script; wtf, wtf, wtf; oh god – please let this end; cut, please cut, pleeese – crossed my mind.? ? One of my co-judges leaned across and whispered to me, I know it is ametuer, but does it have to be so bad? And bad it was.<\/p>\n
In the four years that i have been teaching, i usually find student films to be quite good. They have a germ of an idea – and they can express that idea. What is usually lacking is technical sophistication – but since we aren’t looking for narrative sense more than visual sense- it is fairly ok for now. But this lot – was just plain bad. I have never seen such an unstructured approach to work. There was one film that had a germ of idea and was fairly well put together – the rest were a waste of everyone’s time and energy (and that includes the people who made them). And it is not so much the students’ fault – as much as those who are supposed to guide them. This is unmonitored, unguided work – and student films are not supposed to be made with no input. And it is not the fault of those who guide – they really don’t know too much about the media – either in terms of theory or in terms of practice.<\/p>\n
The fault is of the University of Mumbai for introducing courses like this – without ensuring that there is a) competent faculty to teach it; b) adequete infrastructure to support it. The body of work that i reacted to is part of the Bachelor’s in Media Studies programme offered by the University of Mumbai. One of the ‘paid’ courses. Parents pay an average of around 15k per term for a variety of these so called professional courses. This includes a bachelor’s in Management, Bio Technology, IT etal. The fact that there is a demand in the market for cattle fodder – and these courses somehow manage to fill the numbers – no way deters from the fact that the courses are not really khaas.<\/p>\n
Students are better off doing a general BA or a BSc and specialising at the time of their Masters. The courses neither have the theory to give one an academic rigour, nor have the infrastructure to give the practical orienation that is needed, nor indeed industry backing to ensure employment.Courses like Bio Chemistry are run without either faculty or lab. It is someone’s future that we are talking about. End of the day the blogging world may go up in arms against private sector instutes like [tag]IIPM[\/tag] for their claims, but what when the [tag]University of Mumbai[\/tag] puts out programmes that don’t deliver?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week i had the chance to feel like Simon Cowell. I was judging a set of student films. Phrases such as which butcher did you use to edit that; or was the camera broken; or Is there a point to this;…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[44],"tags":[755,1564],"class_list":["post-525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tv","tag-india","tag-teaching"],"yoast_head":"\n