What is wrong with FTII’s acting course?

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meghpant
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What is wrong with FTII’s acting course?

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Film and Television of India one of worlds important film schools both in terms of infrastructure and educational content, the representative of India’s cinema trends supporting the worlds largest Film Industry in terms of volumes, an institute that should be a trend setter has serious problems with its Acting course, being from the first batch since its reintroduction in 2004 I have observed its functioning very closely and have the following observations to point out.


No vision No policy
The FTII acting course has No policy, NO Vision at all it’s functioning is based on short term convenience rather than long term vision.

Syllabus
Based on the sequence of events that occurred in 2005 a syllabus was put into place for just the sake of it and it is still there somewhere is never used as reference for planning .
It is not the foundation on which the course is based but just a flag hanging there, it has to be revived, revised and implemented

As and When
All classes are designed based on the availability of some teachers in Mumbai’s commercial training schools the standards of which are of no standard to represent India’s premier institute, and most of the time it is seen that they benefit more out of teaching at FTII than we Benefiting out of them.

The Theater Legacy
The training design of our institute is based on training practices of the medium of theater I generally do not differentiate between the two but at the advance level the differences become too huge to ignore. All the advance and technical exercises have to be redesigned to suit our medium.

No Team
A lot of money is being spent on so many things but none is spent on getting a team of people together who would work in tandem to make FTII acting the course the best acting course in the world

No Research
There is practically no research at the Institute, Papers, Experiment and World Class Education is what should separate FTII from the rest a permanent ACTLAB ( acting/ actors Laboratory ) should be established as a separate entity

No Assessment System
There are no guidelines or a system to assess, track and assist student’s performance during the course.
The acting course has to be designed based on modular training process, a non- semester , non – year training system. A continuous process like a hurdle race with x number of hurdles to cross in two years. With 20 students it is possible that individual growth can be tracked and individual attention given. The design of the system would be of designing 20 sub- sets in which 10 are compulsory for all and 10 are optional if the students feels he can do from 5 – 10 optional courses so that be the end of the course the minimum requirement should be 10 compulsory and 5 optional units.

All assessment of students progress should be done by a mix group of Mentors on a regular basis and they should recommend progress.

No technical infrastructure
The department of Acting has the highest fee and no technical infrastructure to support it to enable a technical training the department should have its own basic infrastructure in place so that it is not dependent on other departments.

No study
A acting course of this level should churn learned actors of the highest degree trained to study and research and the syllabus does not support such schemes based on the believe that actors do not need to study, which is false.
A literary module, Language Module and Learning Optional languages should be included in the syllabus.

Alumni
FTII has such a large Alumni base of people who are proud to be part of the legacy, Such big ground is not totally covered for Education at FTII and more of it should be utilized at Teachers, Mentors and Advisers

Advance Courses
FTII does not have Advance Courses for recent pass outs who want to learn, if at All some extra courses have to be started it should be Advance Courses for Recent Passouts who are practicing Acting. It would be wonderful for Alumni to come together and fine tune the Craft with Technique and work with newer batches for a collective learning atmosphere

Selection Procedure
The most important part of the course the selection is old fashioned, selecting India’s top 20 is not an easy task and I feel a separate fully dedicated department should cater to this process, covering all of india’s regions, educational background, age group, sex ratio etc have to be considered to make the group a mix group of people who learn off each other

Practical Application
No where in the acting course there is a module that teaches techniques to be able to use the craft that is learnt in the controlled atmosphere of the class to be applied to the violent practical atmosphere of the shoot.

Reference reading and Viewing
There has been no effort to prepare a list of reference reading and viewing as part of the syllabus. There are NO Text books listing, No movie Listing, No play Listing nothing

Success Rate
Considering the history of the course the success rate is less then 25%, which means that from the old school only 20% of the actors are practicing actors, which is good for earlier standards. Some attention needs to be paid to consciously working to introduce FTII actors through the FTII Alumni, I am not saying of opening a placement cell but to get a one roof database of Actors from the Film Institute because there are people all over the country that want to work with FTII actors but have no information about it. And to work with Alumni coordinators to push FTII talent


FTII Acting course as said by many people caters to “bollywood” as it is there that they get work, True but FTII as India’s premier institute of Cinema Training we cannot be so narrow minded. We understand Indian cinema is unique and Indian Systems of Acting Training should be incorporated into training but not before research a lot of research has to go into understanding as to how to do it. As it is over the current years we have seen that the world is getting close and many Indian Actors are being sourced from the country to work in “Hollywood”. So why are we sticking to older systems its time to look into the future and 10 years down the line I see the bridges close and Cinema Acting as we know it now to become Very Technical so we need to work for that.

We do not have to dig into the past to survive but leap into the future and thrive
meghpant
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