The Chitrakaars, have virtually replaced PPTs with their catchy animated short films
Niranjan Sharma
Hyderabad: Moving past the slide presentations, a group of four entrepreneurs, who call themselves The Chitrakaars, have virtually replaced PPTs with their catchy animated short films. Providing a mix bag of offers like animated videos, documentaries, etc, the techies-turned-entrepreneurs are making big bucks by catering to overseas IT players and Indian biggies and startups.
“The IT firms generally use PPT to provide presentations for internal assessments and also to their clients, which are not very interesting. We tend to make it more informative by making self explanatory videos of software products, based on a storyline, which are used for presentations for internal assessments. And as we are from a technical background, we understood better how to present that product through our video,” says Anil Bhargav, the co-founder of The Chitrakaars. The company clocked a revenue of Rs 50 lakh last year as 70 per cent of their revenues came from overseas markets.
Being in the business of film making, their lives too resemble a Bollywood story line. Four childhood friends, coming from a humble background, possessing a passion for story telling follow their hearts to carve a niche in the entertainment industry.
Starting from a modest Rs 25,000 for wedding assignments, currently they charge Rs 3.5 lakh to Rs 4 lakh for filming weddings and have also made promotional video for rap star Honey Singh’s performance and firms like Justdial, Dr Reddy’s and CtrlS.
Anil, an alumni of IIIT Hyderabad, was always interested in story telling. So despite getting placed at an IT company with a hefty package, he resigned within a year in 2014 and started wedding photography along with his three friends.
Though, full of passion, they needed to learn the nuances of photography and film making. So they relied on online tutorials and met a noted photographer from Hyderabad. He was impressed by their work and appointed them as assistants, where they learnt the intricacies of the profession. And word-of-mouth publicity brought more opportunities.
“Whatever we earned from weddings, we used that to buy equipment,” says Anil, adding, “For our first assignment, we charged nothing and as we got our second client, we charged him Rs 25,000 which we used to buy a DSLR camera and further raised our charges and bought equipment.” Soon, they set up a studio in a garage in Jubilee Hills, a posh locality in Hyderabad.
( Source : dc )
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