Video Podcast with CTO of TCS
After doing almost 40 audio podcasts, it was time to evolve. And video is the way to go. I shot my first video podcast today for KirubaShow.com with Mr.Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer of Tata Consultancy Services. He was named a top 100 IT leader in the world by the computerworld magazine a few weeks back and then also awarded the leader amongst the 100.
TCS is India’s largest IT company with 83,000 employees and offices in 47 countries. The podcast will be published sometime next week.
For those who didn’t know, I host a technology podcast show on PodTech called ‘The Kiruba Show’ where I interview CxOs (CEOs, CKOs, CTOs, CFOs…. mostly CEOs) of Indian IT companies. My focus is on Internet, Mobile and Entrepreneurship.
When I landed at TCS’ office, it was nice to see the video guys had already setup the equipment and were ready to roll. Quite a paraphernalia they had got. I must thank Aditya Mishra, Director of Innovation Corporate Development at TCS for connecting me with Ananth. Aditya has been active on the BarCamp circuit and is part of the BangaloreBarCamp organizing team.
I landed up a few minutes early and used the time to fine tune my questions. This was an important interview. It’s not often that I get to interview the CTO of India’s biggest IT company and I wanted to really make this count.
The interview went off rather well. The sufficient time I spent on researching for the questions really helped. Ananth was a very jovial person and quite eloquent. He was evidently very passionate about innovation. One of my friends once joked that bit IT companies and innovation was an oxymoron. Ananth helped break that myth.
The interview was only 25 minutes long but it consumed over 2.5 hours over all. We had to change the camera angles to get in variety to the shoot.
During the shoot though, there were some goofups. Forgot to switch off my mobile and it rang promptly during the interview. I had my voice recorder on to also record the audio in addition to the video and its battery juice drained out. Drat!
Once the interview was over, I had a separate shoot speaking into the camera for the introduction part.
The professional camera guys were quite clinical in their work. They painstakingly calculated the light and adjusted the angle for every shot. Here, the entire team is putting their heads together to get the lighting right for a particular shot.
Overall, it was good fun doing the shoot. Video is clearly the way I’d like to head. However, for CEOs outside the country though, I’ll have to stick to audio interviews until I can figure out how to do video over Skype.
