New Delhi: Ashoka University has collaborated with Anupama
Chopra and Film Companion, Chopra’s entertainment portal, for a 13-week long
workshop course called Filmmaker’s Companion. With the semester long course,
Ashoka University aims to provide its undergraduate students an opportunity to learn
the art of filmmaking with a complete hands-on Bollywood experience. The course is
scheduled to start on January 25, 2020.

Filmmaker’s Companion has been curated by Ashoka University’s Media Studies
department with the help of film critic and author Anupama Chopra and her popular
portal, Film Companion. Chopra is also the Director of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film
Festival with Star in Mumbai.

According to Chopra, “There has never been a more exciting or challenging time for
storytellers. The entertainment world is changing at a rapid pace and with this in mind,
we have created the Filmmaker’s Companion, a course that brings some of the industry’s
top professionals to the education sector. We are thrilled to facilitate and curate a course
in which students get the unique opportunity to learn from the best in the field”.
Describing the course, Head of Ashoka University’s Media Studies department,
Professor Vaiju Naravane said, “This unique collaboration has produced an exciting
course which will be taught by luminaries from the Indian film industry on every
imaginable aspect of filmmaking”.

Specially designed for Ashoka University with the help of India’s finest film journalism
platform, the course will introduce young minds to different aspects of filmmaking like
direction, cinematography, sound design and production with heavyweights from the
Hindi film industry invited as guest speakers to conduct seminar/workshops on
different topics.

The course will begin with an introductory class by Suresh Chabria, former Director, the
National Film Archives, and Professor, Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). The
department will host industry experts such as screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi, popular

songwriter Amitabh Bhattacharya, cinematographer Jay Oza, among others, for three-
hour-long workshops. While Chaturvedi has written screenplays for films like October

and Piku, Bhattacharya has songs like Iktara, Emotional Atyachar and others to his
credit. More seminar-workshops on direction, production and film composition will
follow.

This is a one-of-a-kind course for the spring 2020 semester. Filmmaker’s Companion
will enable students to gain understanding of what goes into making a full-fledged
cinema production.

About Film Companion:
Film Companion is a platform for independent entertainment journalism. Our main
focus is film – Bollywood, Hollywood, global cinema as well as Indian regional cinema

i.e. Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Marathi. It does reviews, interviews,
features and recommendations around cinema. It also covers television, short films, web
series, OTT-platform content, stand-up comedy, cinema-related books and occasionally,
non-film music.