Vancouver Film School is taking its curriculum to students in India
Vancouver Film School executives realized they had reached the point where it made more sense to take Hollywood North to Bollywood, rather than try to recruit more Indian students to its Vancouver campus.
So VFS has just reached an agreement to export its services to India in the form of two campuses there as public-private partnerships, one in Mumbai and one in Hyderabad, Diwakar Gandhi, the school’s director of international strategy, said Tuesday at the B.C.-India Partnership Summit in Vancouver.
“We’re looking at India in a very, very different terms,” Gandhi told the group of business, government and educational officials. “Gone are the days when we looked at India and (and thought) ‘Let’s bring 150 students to Canada and teach them.’ ”
“Now, we realize for every two students who come to Canada to learn, there are 10 who cannot for various reasons, financial being one of them. So we’re looking at doing more in the country.”
It is one example of the bilateral opportunities to do business in the digital media and entertainment sector highlighted during the meeting, sponsored by the Canada-India Business Council.
It was the second edition of the B.C.-India meeting. The 2016 meeting focused on infrastructure, and organizers picked digital media and entertainment this year because the two countries have intersecting interests in the sector, said Sukesh Kumar, a partner at the accounting firm KPMG, a sponsor of the event.
B.C. is emerging as a centre of excellence for digital and entertainment, with a growing visual effects industry and film production location.
And India is hungry to absorb more of those kinds of skills, with a market of 1.2 billion people that is increasingly interested in digital content, Kumar said.
“There’s a natural fit because B.C. has some great things to offer in terms of technology, skills, knowhow and processes,” said Kumar, the lead on KPMG’s India desk.
Tuesday’s event brought together some 160 people to highlight potential opportunities and make openings for potential partnerships, Kumar said.
“We hear a lot about a market of 1.1, 1.2 billion. That’s the stat,” Kumar said. “Here we talk about real opportunities that B.C. companies can go and take advantage of right away.”
For VFS, Gandhi said their effort to try to establish campuses in India is a long-term strategy, which they hope will become more of a two-way flow.
VFS won’t just be taking what it does in Vancouver and teaching it in Bollywood, which is a complex industry, Gandhi said.
Instead, faculty will adapt programs that build production skills but also bring some structure and creativity, Gandhi said.
In return, VFS hopes the longterm play will lead to more co-development of intellectual property — films and games that can be coproduced. Kumar said the meeting was also aimed at attracting Indian firms to B.C., like Indian entertainment giant Zee Studios, which has just established a production office in Vancouver with a goal of producing content for the global market.
“British Columbia is known to be home to content makers,” said Subhadarshi Tripathy, senior vicepresident for Zee Studios International, “and the talent out here is amazing.”