Cinema scope in Mumbai

What is common between Vishal Bhardwaj, Prahlad Kakkarâu00c2u0080u00c2u0088and Sorabh Pant? This weekend, they will gather at Whistling Woods International's Goregaon campus to share their expertise and skill sets with an audience, eager to learn about varied aspects of cinema. They are part of the fifth edition of an event titled, Celebrate Cinema that offers a platform for film buffs to interact with industry professionals through workshops, screening sessions, contests and celebrity panel discussions.

Meghna Ghai Puri, president, Whistling Woods International

A to Z of cinema
The two-day event will feature over 32 sessions including workshops on screenwriting, humour writing, acting, dance, martial arts, voiceover, advertising, RJ skills, hair and makeup, prosthetics, styling, textiles and propping. While Kakkar will conduct a session on ad filmmaking, Pant, along with Anuvab Pal and Biswapati Sarkar, will share his knowledge of humour writing. Meanwhile, guests can learn the ropes of acting from well-known theatre and television actress, Lubna Salim. The line-up also includes a panel discussion titled, From Literature To Films, which will discuss screen adaptations in Bollywood. The panel boasts of Bhardwaj, author Amish Tripathi, screenplay writer Pubali Chaudhari (of Kai Po Che fame) and director and screenwriter Sriram Raghavan.

The VR game
The workshops will also tackle technological aspects of filmmaking like stop-motion and VFX along with a demo on Dolby sound. An interesting inclusion is a session on storytelling through new-age medium of Virtual Reality (VR) to be conducted by filmmaker Karan Bhutani. "Virtual Reality includes a gamut of formats, including live action, gaming and animation. I will stick to the basic concept and also, talk about how to develop fiction content using VR," says Bhutani, who started as an assistant to Tigmanshu Dhulia and later, co-founded The Rumors Project, a company that's been creating client-based VR content for over a year. They've developed their own technology and shooting equipment to enable VR filmmaking. "We will provide VR headsets to the guests and screen content by LA-based filmmakers along with a few films that we've shot," he informs.

Making music
Can an event on cinema be complete without music? The music department, spearheaded by Grammy Award-nominated violinist Dr Sangeeta Shankar, will present workshops on North and South Indian rhythms and Indian classical music. "The workshops will explore the fundamentals of instruments like tabla, mridangam and ghatam, and how these are used in films. In the classical music workshops, violinists Ragini Shankar and Nandini Shankar will highlight how the Indian Classical forms the base of most songs in Bollywood by performing a Classical raga and then, a film song on it," informs Shankar.

From: September 30 to October 1, 10 am to 7 pm
At: Whistling Woods International Campus, Filmcity, Goregaon (E). RSVP www.whistlingwoods.net
Entry: 100