MUMBAI: While the production and post production facilities in India are excellent, the broadcast designing arena is a fairly untapped one here. Most Indian broadcasters, when it comes to designing a look for their channel, look to the west – especially LA and Singapore based agencies like Belief, TAG and Novocom.
In India, however, Metamorphosis, headed by Gitanjali Sehgal, is the sole agency of its kind, which provides complete broadcast designing solutions to it’s clients. Some of the channels that it has done work for are Rajat Sharma’s newly launched news channel – India TV, Discovery Channel and Aaj Tak. Metamorphosis has a team of 40 odd professionals in Mumbai and another 50 in Delhi handling the creatives and the production work.
Speaking to indiantelevision.com, Sehgal, who has had experience in the marketing arena and also with the production house UTV, said, “I think, these days technology rules people and not the other way round. We formed Metamorphosis with Century (earlier called Third Eye) in 2002. The concept of broadcast designing is very nascent in India and is fairly untapped. We are the only Indian agency that is specialising in giving the broadcasters what they want in terms of design and look.”
The concept of broadcast designing may have hit Indian broadcasters when Dr Prannoy Roy’s NDTV hired Los Angles based agency TAG to design its look when the channel was going to be launched. While, most broadcasters have their own in-house designing team who take care of their needs in terms of the design of the channel, some others have started looking at international agencies to do the same for them.
Belief has done some work for Sony and is also responsible for the look of the new channel from the Times Group kitty – Zoom. TAG on the other hand, has names like NDTV and UTV’s Hungama (which will launch on 26 September) to it’s credit and Novocom was the expert hand responsible for Zee Music’s new look.
Speaking on the way Metamorphosis handled India TV in giving it the face it has today, Sehgal says, “When we started off with India TV, the brief given to us by Rajat was that he wants very responsible and factual journalism minus sensationalising news. Rajat’s benchmark in terms of a news channel was the BBC – in terms of content and design. The design sense of BBC is absolutely great. So our aim was to create meaningful branding for India TV.”
What Metamorphosis did was played on the tagline of the channel – ‘Badle Bharat Ki Tasveer’ (Changing face of India) – and created a promo based on old against the new. A promo for a channel is usually people oriented (as in the case of NDTV) or is place oriented or may be heavy on layers and designing, which conveys a message. The background of the logo of India TV changes colour with the day part. For example: In the morning telecast the background colour of the logo is orange, then changes to cyan in the afternoon and evening and then finally to dark blue in the night. The promo of the channel starts from showcasing landmarks in Kolkata, then moves on to Bangalore, the Southern cities and their architectural beauties, Agra and Mumbai’s Marine Drive. So the idea being that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. That is well depicted in the promo. Also a lot of detail was looked into while designing the globe on the logo of the channel.
“This is the first time that anybody in India has taken a step towards giving due importance and valuation to broadcast design because it is very important to brand your channel. Apart from content, that is what differentiates one from the other,” says Sehgal.
Sehgal is at present trying to sell the concept of broadcast designing to various broadcasters. While some are receptive to the idea, some others are not. “This is mainly because many are not aware of us and the concept. Some channels have their own production team, which puts together the packaging and are not really open to others handling the same. While some others are working with international companies. The fact of the matter is that we, in India, are providing the same services to them and also at a much cost effective rate; but broadcaster still have to wake up to that fact,” stresses Sehgal.
Metamorphosis also did packaging for a show on Aaj Tak called Jurm, which won a gold at the Promax Awards this year. Maybe it’s time that Indian broadcaster do look out what we have here in India than running blindly to the West.