Ay Mama - rocking Tamil music video!

I directed this video for composer Pravin Mani, way back in April 2002, and edited it myself. Many of the faces in this video later became celebrities in the South Indian movie and television industry. The lead folk singer Manickavinayagam went on to become a reputed signer and character actor in Tamil Cinema.

A lot of nostalgia attached to it! I was just starting out then with my fledgling production company 'New Leaf Productions' - a beautiful name given by my business partner Pradeep.

Pravin's idea was to create 'Total Chaos!' and ours was to film the chaos with 'total control'. We shot it with two Canon XL1 cameras - the principal camera mounted on a crane operated by Shamdat and the second one amidst the dancing crowd in my hands...and of course the videographer you see twice in the video is me!

And the whole video was shot in a single day at AVM Studios, Chennai. Five long takes of the entire track! And all the other shooting crews working in other portions of the studio lot came to watch our shoot...some of them danced too...not just because they loved our track and work...but also because of our loud soundtrack possibly distracted their work!