Shibani Sharma, the content development head of the Ryan International School, was a special delegate in the currently ongoing 14th Mumbai International Film Festival. On the very 1st day of the 14th Miff, Shibani Sharma had a TV workshop in the Films Division complex. In this session she first had a brief session, as a media initiative, on the importance of the taglines, highlighting the fact as to why they are essential even for the Public service Announcements (PSA).

What are your feelings as a special delegate of the 14th Miff?

I feel good nay I feel great on being a part of the ongoing 14th Miff and moreover I feel proud and humbly honored on being given the opportunity to hold a workshop on behalf of the Ryan International School. I also feel that the Mumbai International Film Festival offers a good platform to budding directors in the arena of documentary and short filmmaking, in this case our own school students too, to showcase their latent directional skills. It offers a perfect opportunity for them but I just came to know before the session that Miff is held only once in two years. I think it should be made an annual event any this is just my suggestion and since I have come to Miff for the 1st time ever I can’t comment anything more about it.

Could you enlighten us about today’s Ryan TV workshop session?

Regarding this session I would like to inform that as a content development head of Ryan International School I help the students to realize their latent talent of their directional skills in the arena of film making like short films catering to Public Service Announcements. This time they have been given the concepts of making short films on “No Smoking” of one minute duration. And in this session I also explained to them and the entire gathering that giving a tagline to such short film of public interest is especially relevant when backed by statistics. Besides I also held a sample tagline creation contest for the audio – visual medium of the Public Service Announcement especially for the benefit of the attending students from Ryan International School including the media and the delegates of the 14th Miff.

And what was the response of this workshop-oriented session?

I would say that in general the response was good enough but it could have been even much better if the media and the delegates were properly informed about this session and about its proper venue in the films division complex.

And what were the highlights of this particular workshop oriented session?

As the topic of this particular workshop oriented session was “NO SMOKING”. The statistics given to them were that research shows that children are now trying their 1st ever smoke at a much younger age than ever before. So no doubt that the students present in this workshop oriented session came up with varied taglines like “Don’t smoke – it’s not a joke”, “Don’t Smoke – Lung Stroke” and so on and so forth.

So who and which tagline was declared a winner?

The winner was of course, one of our own student and the winning tagline was selected by one of the most honored and respected delegate of the 14th Mumbai International Film Festival (Miff) namely Ms. Parvati Menon who is in fact the 1st ever woman to graduate from the Film & TV Institute of India (FTII – Pune) in the Advanced Direction Course. And the winning tagline was “Be smart – don’t start”. Besides the session had ended with a short audio – visual presentation on varied topics created and designed by the students of the Ryan International School.