Hindi
Percept to produce live action animation film ‘Jumbo’
MUMBAI: Percept Picture Company (PPC), producer of the successful animation film Hanuman, is making a new live-action cum animation feature film Jumbo.
The concept is developed by Walt Disney and Percept has acquired its exploitative rights, says PPC CEO Preet Bedi.
The project will involve live action cum animation and is slated to go on floors in March 2008. “Jumbo is a story about a baby elephant. Disney has taken the concept to various countries and we have acquired its exploitative rights. We are looking to release it sometime in 2010,” Bedi said.
PPC, meanwhile, has finalised a release date for Hanuman Returns, the sequel to Hanuman. “We are releasing it on 27 December. The film is ready and we are currently putting into place the marketing activity for the same,” said Bedi, while showcasing a preview of the film at Nasscom Animation and Gaming 2007.
“The budget of the sequel is about Rs 220-230 million and the marketing spends are about 15-20 times of what we spent on the original. Hanuman has become a brand and we are leveraging its popularity on multiple platforms of which merchandising forms a significant proportion,” he said.
For Hanuman Returns, Percept Picture Company has tied up with Pantaloons for branded apparel and stationery, Jump Games for mobile and Microsoft XBox 360 for console gaming.
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.
