The International School of Film and Media (ISFM), a non-profit institution launched here today by city-based production house Annapurna Studios to train students in the 24 crafts of the film, television and advertisement trade, would also be offering a course on mobile application development.
“An app that is bought for Rs 80 by 20 people each day generates over Rs 300,000 per year in sales. There are many apps, some created in just a matter of weeks that have sold millions of copies, at between Rs 40 and Rs 200 per sale. Our objective behind offering this course is to provide such opportunities to creators, programmers and software developers,” said Kurt Inderbitzin, chief executive of ISFM.
In addition to the huge worldwide market, with the iPhone and iPad now available in India, there is a growing opportunity for apps targeted at Indian consumers, including games, education and business productivity, he said.
The subjects of the course include Objective-C, XCode and debugging, Cocoa touch view and controller classes, interface builder and application flow, fetching and storing data, disk, database, and web services. The 2 nights-a-week for four weeks course, with a fee of Rs 20,000, will begin from September 2011.
Announcing the launch of ISFM, actor and Annapurna Studios’ managing director, Akkineni Nagarjuna, said the school would be located within the 22-acre studio campus, giving access to the aspiring students to 10 sound stages, floors, permanent sets and post-production facilities. The revenues generated will be ploughed back to improve facilities of the institution.
“We are also creating a 100,000-sft dedicated classroom and teaching space within the studio, networked with the next-generation wireless technology. Phase-I of the facility will open in August 2011 and Phase-II in April 2013.”
The school will initially launch short-term and vocational courses, for which admissions open from July 1, 2011, and a degree programme, which will offered from mid-2012, he said adding that talks with a university for accreditation of the degree programme was already in the pipeline.
“We will eventually be the placement agency for production houses and television studios not only in Andhra Pradesh but across the country. We are currently looking at tying up with corporate houses and media channels to provide industry-ready artistes and technicians and include them in their workforce,” Nagarjuna said.
Inderbitzin, who headed the largest film and television institute in Asia – Mukta Art’s Whistling Woods International in Mumbai – from 2006 and 2008, said the media industry in the country required 3 million trained professional in the next 10 years, courtesy the explosion of growth in the film, TV and the advertising industry. “We plan to have a student intake of 500 for the short-term and vocational courses, and 500 for the degree programme every year, in five years from now.”
