I-Extend

I-flex has organized a contest. That goes like this 'Biscope-Discover the director in you!'. Participant has to submit a short movie of 3-10 minutes duration. If won, the movie will be screened during induction in i-flex. I have made small home made 'movies' about my friends. Other colleagues were also enthu' about this. So we sent our registration.

The movie theme - as proposed by Jitendra Bhansali, is to show activities for the benefit of community by i-flex. The topic itself is good. During my induction, there was nothing that covered this dimension of i-flex.

I titled it 'i-Extend'. I-flex has this tendency to prefix 'i' like 'i-assist', 'i-share'. 'Extend' is the way i-flex is extending its hand to society.

I started collection 'material' for movie, only to find out that its not easy to get media clips etc from corporate communications group of i-flex. The responsible guy was on leave and that virtually shut the CCG doors for us. I relied on iflex intranet and googled some other stuff.

Without having video clips, one thing was sure. Our 'movie' will not be the movie in true sense. With only pictures and text, I had to create a 'movie'. I used Windows movie maker ( I had no options as I know and have worked on windows movie maker only ). I tried as many effects as I can, to provide some kind of motion (infusing life) to still images. For background music, I dragged my favorite slow song of the one movie [I edited this post later and removed name of movie to prevent any copyright trouble ;) ] into movie maker and chopped it apart. I selected the starting piece of song and used one more piece as filler. I kept on repeating 2nd piece for entire length of movie.

My most enthusiastic teammate - Mandar - himself needed enthu. He was ill and hence on leave. I missed him. But, Sachin, thanks to him, roped in. The movie was about 90% ready when I showed it to Sachin. Sachin liked it [that's what he told me :)]. He suggested me one brilliant idea. He told me to add introduction before the movie so that audience will have idea of what they are going to see. [I guess, while watching the movie, for the first half, he could not figure out what the heck was being shown ;)]. Introduction, that means background voice, like Mr. Bachchan in Lagaan. Now, question came, who will read it ? Immediately I thought of Prashant Rao. I knew that his voice is best fit for this. He has this 'strong' voice. [That's what I think ;)] We 3, sat together, got script ready and he recorded it many times before finalizing. Oh, boy.. hard work !! ;)

Finally, my colleagues started seeing the movie and I guess, they liked it. [At least, that's what they said. C'mon, no matter how bad your movie is, no one is going to say it 'bad' on face. I guess this is what they call 'professionalism' ;)]. Some of them like Talib and Jitendra came up with very good suggestions.

Well, the 'movie' is not a movie, but what I can say is, it is somewhere between an advertisement and a powerpoint presentation.

Let's wait for the result of contest...

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Update:
Bad news is, i-Extend was not a winner. Good news is it received some appreciation from jury (that's what I was told ;). The other movie - Life@i-flex, in which I contributed, won the 2nd prize. The team received cash prize and I was given a nice cute photo frame, having team picture, signed by all team members. It is here.. lying on my desk.... nice moments to cherish.
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Skiing - Sub-zero learning

(Jan 22, 2005 )

We went for skiing on Paoli peaks, Indiana on this day. It was about 65 miles from where we used to stay, Louisville, KY. We were about 10 people in 2 cars. We reached there around 1:30! It was cold day and it was snowing on the way. We bought one-day pass for $45 and took skiing gear on rent for $25. It was my first experience. We knew that it is going to be difficult for the first timers, but we were ready to take the gamble, as it was exciting.

The ski-shoes were too heavy and it was quite uncomfortable to even walk on it. We had winter gear, which we thought were enough to protect us from cold, but we were proved wrong!

I started and fell within first 5 Ft. It was windy and I almost lost sensation on my face. I thought of giving up when I fell thrice. But I decided to stay on. I removed my ski and walked holding them in hand. I headed for plain area. There I started skiing. It was successful move. Now I was covering more Ft before felling down. Some of us fell 30-40 times but it was fun.

One of my friends fell. While he was lying on snow, one small kid came to rescue him and told him "Skiing ....Oh boy, that's tough!"

It was so chilly that my palms were almost frozen. The winter gear was not enough. All of us were finding difficult even to speak. But, one thing to note down here is, 'no matter how cold it is , no matter how severe is the pain, but everybody was laughing out their hearts when they fell. Little School kids were skiing swiftly by us when we were lying flat on the snow.

One thing, which we all learnt pretty late, was to remove one of the skis before trying to get up from the snow. Initially, we were trying to get up with both skis on and were falling again in that attempt.
While I am writing this, my back is still paining. Well, that was an unforgettable experience.

Note: The photos are available at http://photos.yahoo.com/bhatt_vimal (Album: Skiing)