http://www.tehelka.com/story_main51.asp?filename=Ws291111FLASHMOB.asp
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"Shonan Kothari’s tips on how to plan your own flash mob
"Pick a Venue: CST is a beautiful structure that offers a great indoor space and high footfalls. So that was my dream location for a flash mob. It’s better to short-list a bunch of venues because you may not get permission for some.
"Make a presentation and show up unannounced: Create a solid presentation on what a flash mob is and how it will benefit the venue in terms of publicity, footfalls etc. I didn’t have contacts or appointments at the police station, railway station or park. So I just showed up during working hours and made sure they listened to me. Soon, everyone was super co-operative. Since I didn’t intend to have any commercial gains, it was easier and I received permissions from almost everyone. If you’re planning a CST mob, approach Atul Jani, Senior Divisional Commercial Manager, Central Railways.
"Sort out permissions: You need three permissions—from the venue, the BMC and the police. In the case of CST, there were a million internal departments that had to grant individual authorisations as well. We even needed a separate permission slip to get a ladder on the premises.
"Recruit your mob: In order to make my presentation attractive I lied about having 200 dancers on board. Since I lied, I had to make it happen. The best way to do it is send out an email to 20 of your closest friends and get each one to recruit 20 more.
"Swear to secrecy and find a good practice spot: It’s not easy to get 200 people to perform routine dance practices in public places and keep it a secret, but we tried our best. This involved not using any social media pre-event and splitting up the practice into batches. Priyadarshini Park at Napeansea Road provided the ground for the same.
"Rope in experts for less: If you are able to sell the idea well enough—it’s still novel in India—you can get cool choreographers and film companies to shoot the event at a subsidised cost or even for free! Ours was choreographed by Bhaumik Shah (he’s worked on a bunch of music videos and Bollywood shows) to the Rang De Basanti song because I figured you can’t go wrong with AR Rahman.
"Blend in: The whole point of a flash mob is to look like people at the venue—in our case, commuters. No loud or revealing clothes, no garish make-up.
"(You could) sell your flash mob: Although we kept it under wraps, word got out to a few brands who approached us for in-mob branding. I chose not to do it, but you could.
"Crowd control: Where we failed was to control the crowd, who formed a ring around the first five dancers thereby ruining the initially planned formation as well as some really cool entries and exits. Make sure you take measures for crowd control.
"Make it viral: You should have a multiple camera set-up at the venue to get shots from several good angles. Do a quick edit and put the video online as soon as possible."
