VENTURING INTO THE WORLD OF TVCS
While working at Impress Telefilm, Humayun Ahmed produced many kinds of television programs. He also produced television commercials of unique characteristics starring many of his drama characters. The house Humayun Ahmed rented at Gazipur to shoot 'Shabuj Sathi' was for fifteen days only but rain delayed the shooting. The house owner insisted that the shooting is complete in the stipulated time. Humayun Ahmed realized that he needs a house at Gazipur. Following this, he started building his own house Nuhash Palli, which is at present the largest shooting place in the country. The audience has seen Nuhash Palli in many of his dramas later on.
Humayun Ahmed worked with many new actors and actress. Often, he used to call upon new models and actors to Impress Telefilm's Baily Road office and talked to them. At that time, there were only two food shops at Baily Road- one is Capital Confectionary and the other is Euro-Hut. Euro-Hut was famous for chicken fry and almost all of our crew including Humayun Ahmed was fond of Euro Hut. Another producer, Ferdous Hasan, used to visit our office at that time.
Gradually people came to know that Humayun Ahmed, Ferdous Hasan, Abul Hayat, Toukir Ahmed and many others were producing their dramas from Impress Telefilm. As a result, many other contemporary producers grew interest in working with us. Saidul Anam Tutul, one day, came to us to produce a TVC of Henolux cream where model Tania (people know her as a famous actress now) were supposed to star. From technical aspects, producing TVC was a tough job for us at that time. However, Saidul Anam Tutul did a great job with the camera person Salahuddin Lablu. They shot the TVC in Cox's Bazar. Usually, a half an hour drama took four to five hours to edit but this particular TVC of fifteen seconds took nearly two weeks. Then one day, the owner of Henolux cream visited our office to have a look at what we have made. Coincidentally, model Tania and Abdun Noor Tushar was also present there at that time. In the meantime, following a conversation the owner of Henolux came to know that magazine program 'Shuveccha', which used to be anchored by Abdun Noor Tushar, was being aired from Impress. He then expressed his interest of sponsoring 'Shuveccha'.
After Henolux, offers for TVCs started pouring in, especially of books and guide books from Bangla Bazar. Initially, Abdul Latif Reza of Prince Advertising came. In case of books, we had to place the books in colorful plastic sheets so that we could get a colorful background. Khandakar Ismail voiced over the TVC's at that time. At one point, many producers started coming to Impress Telefilm office with a view to producing their own programs. Many came with attractive offers but Impress had always been selective. One day, Manann Hira, director and dramatist, came with a proposal of a children's program. Fazle Ahmed, an employee at WASA was the writer and producer and Nazrul Kuraishi was the director. Although the program was for the children, many popular actors like Afsana Mimi and Masud Ali Khan appeared there.
BTV and ATN could not manage a lot of time for children's programs since there was a small audience for this type of program. As a result, ATN wanted that the programs be sold cheap, but Impress was unwilling to compromise with their program standard. At that time in ZTV in India, normally a package program was designed with five sequences chronologically in indoor and outdoor settings. Indoors usually meant the living room and outdoor meant the outer garden section of the house. The producers hired those houses for shooting purpose. To minimize the cost, they shot most of the scenes in broad day light. Again, they used the house for more than one shooting at a time. At one hand, it minimized the cost and on the other hand, facilitated the producers to make the best use of crews involved in producing. It also helped producers to make best use to technical equipments. They did all these in order to adapt their production cost in relation with television channels demand.
Television transmission at that time was based on pay-channel and television owners used to pay small amounts of money to such programs. Producers often went from editing units to editing units of Bombay in order to minimize the post production cost. For instance, the first daily soap 'Tara' was made this way. The protagonist of the serial Nobonito Nishan used to cost two thousand rupees for a half day shooting and three thousand rupees for a full day shooting. Afsana Mimi and Bipasha Hayat in Bangladesh used to earn twenty thousand taka for a one hour drama at that time. Overall, in an average ZTV used to spend twenty five thousand rupee for a one-hour drama where Bangladeshi dramas used to spend between five and six lac taka for a similar kind of production. With the passage of time, the disparity between Indian television serials and Bangladeshi television serials has gone beyond imagination. Indian serials are spending millions of rupees for their serials. For instance, “Keu Ki Saas Bhi Bohu Thi” takes their crew to Switzerland for a single episode. ZTV earns more than they spend in a serial. On the other, hand Bangladeshi serials are going backward due to the lack of sponsors and proper policy.
Translated by Mohammad Zahidul Islam
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