iBrand 2010 and the Hand of God

Campus was buzzing with activity after midterms and turnout for every miniscule event was phenomenal. These events are fun for some, CV point for few, learning for a very few and waste of time for the remaining. During the same time, one of the committees launched iBrand, and the criterion for the first round was a creative product and practical feasibility was not a constraint. I did not have any such product flash in my mind, so did not even care to form a team.

Tuesday, 24th July, I was in accounting class when I suddenly got an idea about a product which would wake up so many students, sleeping in class. I checked with my friends about the deadline of iBrand and it was the same day! I had less than a day to make a concept, shoot an ad, edit it, come up with a name and a caption and then submit it. I had the concept and even the caption ready by the end of the next class. I could not stop myself from thinking about the project, with the concept seeming a definite hit.

I discussed it with a few of my friends during lunch and they seemed ok with the idea. So we had the cast and crew ready by 3PM. But there was no screenplay as we were still not sure of the various functions of the product. The only thing we knew was that our product looked like a hand and does many things for us. Ideas were flowing from everyone. So we had shot 6 scenes in all each showing various functions. The shooting was the easier part with very few retakes. Both of my friends who acted were actually pretty good at acting, and even the scene with a melodramatic sequence was done in a single shot.

Still, the tougher part remained. There was a lot of editing and mixing needed to be done and also we had to come up with a name. I had started editing with my little knowledge of windows movie maker and had a really tough time especially with splitting the audio. As we were halfway through, the name "Hand of God" had come up and so we decided to go ahead with it as we dint have anything better. The video was also done by midnight and submitted. After watching the videos of other entries, I really felt happy that we did a good job and had a gut feeling that we will go through.

The results were out in 2 days and as expected we were through. The second round was one hell of an experience. It was a live promotion project and we had video slots, poster places chosen by auction. Thanks to Kalyan, we had the most hatke and innovative posters, among all other teams, ready well before midnight. We had 3 videos made in one day and after which I had become a pro in movie maker! There were videos played, posters put up, games designed and many more conceptualized and executed, all in less than two days. As the event information is confidential, I cannot disclose any more details.

Thanks to our team Akatsuki (Dinesh, Naveen, Sneha, Kalyan and me), we had two wonderful days of action, promotion, learning and more than all, lots of fun.

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