Anshulika Dubey, co-founder and COO of Wishberry, shares her insights into the world of crowdfunding, and speaks to filmmakers Bhaskar Hazarika, Kalp Sanghvi and Upamanyu Bhattacharyya (directors, Wade) on how they crowdfunded their films.
Anshulika Dubey is the Co-founder and COO at Wishberry.in, India’s leading crowdfunding platform for creative projects. Her professional journey began right out of Miranda House, Delhi University, as an Analyst in McKinsey & Co. She discovered the concept of crowdfunding while on a project at McKinsey and she decided to pioneer this concept in India in 2012 by launching India’s first crowdfunding platform for creative artists. Wishberry has since helped over 500 creative projects raise over Rs. 17 crores, helping many artists realize their dream.
Bhaskar Hazarika was born in 1975 in Dergaon, Assam. He graduated in history from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and completed his masters in film and drama at the University of Reading, England. He has since worked extensively in Indian film and television. Hazarika co-wrote the screenplay for Players (2012) and co-directed the documentary Live From Peepli (2010). Bhaskar is also the director of Kothanodi (2015) and Aamis (2019). He has also produced and directed documentaries for the Film and Television Institute of India, the United Nations Development Programme and the Government of India.
Kalp Sanghvi, a graduate from NID Ahmedabad, is an animation filmmaker and illustrator. He co-directed and wrote the highly acclaimed animated short Wade with Upamanyu Bhattacharyya. His main pursuit is telling indigenous stories with local flavour, building on the incredible range of yet untold Indian stories. In 2015, he co-founded Ghost Animation, Kolkata. The studio has since been taking the medium of animation to the masses at home and beyond. He has worked on various animation and illustration projects for clients including Penguin, Amazon, Sony Entertainment India, Animal planet and Medecins Sans Frontieres. He has also worked on title sequences for feature films, including acclaimed director Mani Ratnam’s film OK Kanmani and 102 Not Out by Umesh Shukla, featuring Amitabh Bachchan & Rishi Kapoor. His artworks have also been published in Penguin and Scholastic publications. He is currently developing his first animated series Rajbari: The Ancestral House, a fantasy family drama set in Kolkata. He is also working on an animated short film about tiger conservation in collaboration with the Wildlife Trust of India called Remains.
Upamanyu Bhattacharyya, animator, filmmaker, comic artist and illustrator, is a graduate from NID Ahmedabad. He co-directed the highly acclaimed short film Wade with Kalp Sanghvi. As a founding partner of Ghost Animation, Kolkata, he has also worked on a wide range of animation and illustration projects for clients including Google, Amazon, Doctors Without Borders, and Penguin. Upamanyu also has substantial experience in working with live action filmmakers. He worked on the title sequence for acclaimed director Mani Ratnam’s film OK Kanmani and storyboarded Ratnam’s next film, Kaatru Veliyidai. He also worked with Academy Award winning composer A.R. Rahman to create storyboards for his VR project, Le Musk. He is a published comic artist, with his graphic short stories appearing in anthologies by Harper Collins and Scholastic. He has also taught numerous courses as a visiting faculty at NID, and at other film schools in India.
Currently, Upamanyu is finishing his next solo animated short film, Ten, a dark comedy about the mass exodus from Bangladesh in 1971. He is also developing his first animated feature film, City of Threads, set in Ahmedabad in the 1960’s.
