MUMBAI: It's no wonder that streaming giants across the globe are trying to strengthen their business in India as the country has amongst the highest consumption of online video in the world. Streaming giant Netflix had hosted a first-of-a-kind workshop on post-production in Mumbai last October and recently it held a virtual Q&A session for the editing community in India with Emmy Award-winning editor Stuart Bass on 30 April. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings promised Rs 3000 crore for content in India in 2019-20. Hence, the streaming giant is not overlooking the training requirement of the local creative community as well.
Bass, who has worked for iconic shows like The Wonder Years, Arrested Development, The Office, and Pushing Daisies along with his long-time assistant editor Preston Rapp, shared his insights with over 100 participants from India and South East Asia. Primarily editors were part of the session along with assistant editors, post-production supervisors, writers, showrunners and/or directors.
The conversation focused on best practices in editing for complex episodic storytelling, how it differs from editing feature films, editing for different genres and the latest editing technologies. Even with the number of original content flooding the ecosystem, the country has limited experience in editing for series which requires a different approach from a creative, logistical, and management perspective. Hence, skills in editing for series will become increasingly relevant as India produces content at scale.
“We’re seeing a flourishing of stories from India across multiple genres and for every mood and member of the family. As more episodic series are made in India, there is a desire for best practices in long format storytelling. We were thrilled to see the response to the session led by an editor as prolific and experienced as Stuart Bass. We are grateful to the Indian creative community who, despite this difficult time, joined us and made this an incredibly insightful session that ranged from in-depth creative discussions to the technical aspects of editing for series,” Netflix post-production director Vijay Venkataramanan said who also moderated the session.
The streaming service has significantly upped its investment in Indian stories and storytellers. Netflix has announced over 50 productions in India. Its recent releases include Guilty, She, Jamtara- Sabka Number Aayega, Yeh Ballet has gained enough word of mouth. Even Chris Hemsworth-starrer Extraction was released on Netflix with dubs in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu indicating its ambition to engage viewers across the country.
“We've seen a big growth in viewing in India, and have had great success on our local originals there as well. Most recently was She and Guilty and a few others that have really been driving a lot of engagement in local content on our India service, and they also are big fans of our global original content like Lacasa de Papel was a huge hit in India for us, as well as most of our other originals that we have out of the US. So we're growing the business of licensed original international domestic across the board content and content taste,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in an earnings call after q1.
