Unacademy Teachers Day

A teacher in a black Unacademy T-shirt is halfway through explaining the resting membrane potential when the screen glitches, the colour bars come up, and a caption asks her how long she has been teaching without a break. Then a word lands over the class in letters the height of the frame. Relax.

Unacademy Teachers' Day is a 95-second film cut entirely from the platform's own educators' classes, built for 5 September 2021, and directed by Atul Kattukaran for First December Films. There is no shoot in it. Every frame is a real lesson, re-edited, glitched, mirrored and captioned until the teachers who never stop become the stars of a music video about stopping. On Unacademy's channel it has 2.3 million views.

At a glance

• Brand: Unacademy
• Production house: First December Films
• Director: Atul Kattukaran
• Post Producer: Vivek Muralidharan
• Launch: 5 September 2021, Teachers' Day
• Running time: 1 min 35 sec
• Source material: Unacademy educators' recorded classes
• Reach: 2.3 million views on the Unacademy India channel by September 2026

The brief

By 2021 Unacademy was one of India's largest online learning platforms, and its product was its teachers: thousands of educators streaming classes for JEE, NEET, UPSC and a hundred other exams, many of them from a bedroom with a whiteboard and a ring light. Teachers' Day is the one day the platform can talk about them instead of through them.

The obvious film is a tribute: slow piano, a montage of grateful students, a line about changing lives. Unacademy had made versions of that before. The problem in 2021 was that a shoot of any size was hard, the educators were spread across the country, and a tribute film would have said nothing the audience did not already know. The brief was to say thank you in a way that felt like the platform, which is to say fast, funny and made out of classes.

The idea: the lesson is the footage

The film takes the educators' own recorded lectures, the ones students watch every day, and cuts them as if they were performances. The teachers do not know they are in a music video. That is the joke, and it is also the tribute: look how much energy these people put into a Tuesday afternoon class.

• A title on black. Here's to the hardest workers in the room. Our teachers. Then a burst of colour bars, like a broadcast going down.
• Straight into a biology class: a teacher at a whiteboard covered in ion channels, mid-gesture, with a caption slammed over her: Mai kaam nahi. Not working.
• A maths teacher in an orange jacket in front of an averages problem, framed by a wall of emoji.
• A cut to an educator at his desk, and the word Relax fills the screen.
• The caption asks the question the film is built on: kab se lagataar padha rahe ho. How long have you been teaching non-stop?
• A physics teacher's frame is split, doubled and mirrored so he argues with himself. Radius. Radius.
• Relax, aap pagal ho sakte hain. Relax, you could go mad. A teacher throws his hands up in agreement.
• Steps to Relax over an anatomy lesson, with the teacher boxed in coloured frames like a video game menu.
• A teacher mid-problem, sweating in a hotel room, a cartoon tear added beside his eye. A thought bubble reading Pakoda.
• Lagg lagg lagg. A teacher's connection stutters, and the film turns the lag into a beat.
• The captions resolve: This is your day to relax. Here's to the real legends of education. Thanks for making learning so much fun. Happy Teachers' Day.

Every effect is a thing that happens in an online class. The lag, the frozen frame, the colour bars, the teacher talking to a camera that does not talk back. The film takes the small indignities of teaching on a screen and turns them into a rhythm, and then hands the rhythm back to the teachers as applause.

Nothing was shot. The teachers made the film without knowing it, one class at a time, and the edit is the thank-you.

The edit is the production

This is a film with no cinematographer on the credits, and that is the point. Post producer Vivek Muralidharan and the First December Films edit team worked from hours of class recordings, hunting for the gestures, the grins and the exasperated pauses that would cut to music. Screen recordings at a dozen different resolutions had to be made to feel like one film, so the design language embraces the mess: hard-edged captions, glitch transitions, split screens and mirror effects that make a single teacher into a chorus.

The typography does the talking. Relax appears in white, then blue, then over colour bars, growing each time, while the Hindi captions are set in the same bold sans as the English so the film reads as one voice. The track underneath is a fast beat that the cuts are locked to, which is what turns a physics lecture into a drop.

Why it works as a tribute

Most Teachers' Day films tell teachers they are appreciated. This one shows the teachers what the platform sees when it watches them: the effort, the theatre, the sheer stamina of explaining a projectile problem for the fourth time that day. The affection is in the choice of footage. Nobody is mocked. Everybody is caught being brilliant at a job that mostly goes unwatched.

Unacademy's own post put it in one line: thank you for all the learnings and all the fun, and today, break toh banta hai. A break is owed.

Where it sat

• June 2021: First December Films makes Unacademy Believe for Lowe Lintas Bangalore, a scripted brand film with Atul Kattukaran directing and K. U. Mohanan shooting.
• 5 September 2021: The Teachers' Day film goes live on the Unacademy India channel and social platforms.
• 7 January 2022: First December Films publishes its cut, which is why the studio's records date the film to 2022.

What the film proves

This is the reference to reach for when a brief needs any of the following:

• a film made from existing footage, screen recordings or user content, cut to a broadcast standard
• a tribute that shows people instead of praising them
• an edit-led piece where typography, glitch and rhythm are the craft
• a fast turnaround for a calendar moment without a shoot
• a platform brand talking about its creators in their own material

See more of our work, the director's reel and credits, or send us a script and a date.

Credits

• Client: Unacademy
• Production house: First December Films
• Director: Atul Kattukaran
• Executive Producer: Ganesh Pareek
• Producer: Imran Patel
• Associate Producer: Ankit Singh
• Post Producer: Vivek Muralidharan
• Featuring: Unacademy educators, in their own classes