Hindi
Paramount starts slew of initiatives on the mobile
MUMBAI: After Paramount formed a mobile entertainment division in February, it has been seeking and implementing new ways to package the studio‘s content for mobile and wireless devices.The scope of projects includes the development of new original content, in addition to one-of-a-kind advanced applications.
VooZoo Mobile –Paramount Mobile Entertainment will launch a beta-version of VooZoo Mobile, the first Multimedia Messaging Service application on Facebook. VooZoo Mobile is a cutting edge mobile application that allows Facebook users to express themselves creatively by selecting scenes from their favorite movies and sending the “movie emoticons” to their friends‘ mobile phones.
Facebook users subscribing to the top carriers in the US will be able to share their clips from films like The Godfather, Mean Girls, Zoolander and Breakfast at Tiffany‘s for a monthly bill-to-phone subscription fee. Paramount Mobile Entertainment expects that VooZoo Mobile will revolutionise the way people communicate through their mobile phones and has leveraged Hook Mobile‘s MMS delivery system, MAX 2.0 Platform, to handle the projected volumes.
Retrosodes: Paramount Mobile Entertainment is planning on going into development on mobile applications that will translate Paramount Pictures‘ catalogue of films into a series of animated shorts entitled Retrosodes. The Retrosodes will consist of animated episodes based on films and will debut with titles including Top Gun, Saturday Night Fever and Zoolander.
Paramount Mobile Entertainment and Player X will co-produce and publish the Retrosodes to be made available for download or streaming through wireless devices.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
