Learning The Practicalities At Examination

Examination can be fun sometimes, as was the radio news and the television documentary projects, the M.A. Part I examinees of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Calcutta were asked to do as a part of the second half of their fifth paper (practical). The class was divided into ten groups with two groups having six students each and each of the remaining having seven students.

Each of the groups was supposed to film a ten-minute audio-visual documentary and record an eighteen-minute radio news. Each member took up tasks according to his or her liking, as per the needs of the hour. Obtaining permission for the documentary was a part of the delayed process, that was a learning experience nonetheless. Most of the groups had to hire cameramen and editors. The shootings were usually day-long affairs, and the video editing coupled with the audio recording for a group or two actually extended to the wee hours of the morning after toiling hard with the dope sheet, video clips and microphone all through the previous day. That was learning the tools of the trade and the rules of the road trough practical hands-on experience.

The topics of the documentaries ranged from hand-pulled rickshaws to arsenic pollution, montessori schools to Nandan. The scripting was an important part of the radio and the television projects, as was recording the finished products in CDs and cassettes. The process was expensive and time-consuming, with the creative and the organising abilities of the students put to test. As the fortnight-long process reached fruition, the students burst into ecstatic outpourings of the magical creations. It was a matter of realising the inspirational theory of artistic creations through the process of scoring marks.