Organised by leading Indian Media Portal and B2B services company, Indiantelevision.com, The Sixth Indian Telly Awards – Technical, Trade and Programming Nite was held on 6 February 2007 at Mumbai‘s St Andrews Auditorium.
With excellence as its core theme, the Awards honored the best of technical talent that often works behind the scenes in the world of Indian Television with professionals and experts from more than 30 disciplines being awarded.
Amongst the awardees, Graphiti Multimedia‘s Tilak Shetty and Ace Art Director & Set Designer Omang Kumar won big in the arts category.
Other awards relevant to the Animation / VFX vertical included best channel id/ packaging which went to Disney/Jetix for Birthday Bhoot created by Vaibhav Kumaresh and voiced and produced by Disney‘s Piyush Raghani.
Tilak Shetty won the AnimationXpress.com Visual Effects Award for his VFX work on Graphiti – Nickelodeon co produced CG cum live action show J Bole Toh Jadoo. “It feels great to win an award or any recognition because it inspires you to do further good work. Especially the Telly award because it is given for technical excellence, for the talent who are working behind the screen and very rarely get recognized. In the series like J Bole toh Jadoo there are about 75 people working on the project for 10 months” commented Shetty.
Sharing the same sentiment was Omang kumar Bandula, who won the award for Best Art Direction (Drama series) for Dharti Ka Veer Yodha Prithviraj Chauhan on Star Plus and Best Art Direction Award (Game Show/Talk Show/Reality Show) for Kenstar Max Stardust Awards 2006. “It feels great, knowing hard work pays off. Receiving this award is another feather in my cap, and completing any job successfully to my satisfaction and receiving appreciation for the same is an achievement”, he said.
Commenting further, Graphiti Multimedia‘s Tilak Shetty shared his views on the increasing use of VFX in television industry, “Indeed the use of VFX is increasing; the need of the hour is that VFX need to be better conceived and it should be conceived at the script level. Typically the VFX team is brought into action after the shooting is done! VFX heightens the emotional efficacy of a scene. It need to be treated as a ‘cast member‘ and hence need to be visualized at the script level. Also the script writer needs to know the potential of VFX in the series. For instance, in Jadoo we would discuss VFX at the Scripting, pre-production level and also storyboard the same and shoot the VFX scene as per the board and the results are for all to see”
The event was attended by a host of experts and top level professionals from the Indian Television Industry. Film & TV veteran Lekh Tandon was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award and renowned lyricist and writer Javed Akhtar won the honors for his lyrics for the song Hath se Hath… on AIDS awareness.
Besides the technical experts and top level executives the technical Awards also witnessed the presence of TV actors like Gaurav Chopra, Narayani Shastri, Rupali Ganguly, Amna Shareef, Mona Singh, Karan Oberoi, Delnaz and Rajeev Paul.
The internationally acclaimed fusion band including artists such as Merlin and Vivian Pocha performed live at the event which also boasted of an excellent act by Comedian Sanjay Keni.