In the early 1990s, whenever an ad film production house wanted to shoot a campaign with those bouncy hair-in-the-air shots, they would trek to Billoo Sandhu’s ad film production house in Worli to borrow the only trampoline there was in Mumbai. The Rs25,000 prop, left over from an ad campaign for ITC Ltd’s Gold Flake cigarettes, had been carted all the way from South Africa.
But that was then. Today, prop houses catering to the advertising industry in India offer everything from forks and spoons that sit prettily on a dining table, old picture frames, Picasso prints, retro radio sets, psychedelic lava lamps and beautiful antique furniture that could have been dragged right out of a cosy home in a Parsi colony to perfectly ripe mangoes that can be shot in the middle of December. No giant chandeliers or period props of epic serial Mahabharat, stuffed animals or shiny saas-bahu costumes here.
Keeping pace with the Rs16,000 crore advertising industry in India, prop houses have come a long way in the past two decades. They have moved out of dusty trunks in nondescript godowns to become successful businesses that cater to every prop requirement an ad production house might have.
Three establishments hold sway over the Rs1.2 crore prop industry in Mumbai which, experts say, has been growing at a modest 10% year-on-year. This includes “everyone, even the street shops at Chor Bazaar”.
But the three big players—Propability, It Ads–a prop shop and Propaganda Co.—have a lot going for them, considering they are prop shops catering to the ad film industry, 90% of which is based in Mumbai. And demand is thriving—production houses would rather pay a small fee to rent props than buy them and arrange for their storage. Props can be rented for as little as 10% of their cost price, starting as low as Rs15 for a cup and saucer.
“Film production houses have it really easy today,” says K.V. Sridhar, national creative director, Leo Burnett IndiaPvt. Ltd, who remembers a time when agencies had to shoot ad films eight months in advance due to the unavailability of props.
“If you had to shoot an ad for a mango drink, you had no option but to shoot it eight months in advance,” he says. The ads had to be released just before the mango season “but who is going to give you ripe mangoes in the middle of December?”
Or for that matter, a tandem cycle. “We had to fabricate one for a Taj Mahal Tea ad,” Sridhar says. This was years before the legendary Wah Taj! campaign featuring tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain.
Those were the only two options—buy it or fabricate it. The recent ad for Coca-Cola Co.’s pulpy orange juice brand, Minute Maid, used fibreglass oranges that had been bought from a place called Prop Shop in New York, 15 years ago.