Posts Tagged ‘alert’

After a very nice experience at the first location, we couldn’t wait to see what awaited us at location 2!

The whole crew and us packed up everything to go to location 2 which we were told would be a deserted railway station. Now don’t get me wrong .. but why would there be a deserted railway station in the middle of a HUGE film set in Panvel? all of us thought it was a sure shot prank (well .. atleast I did!) and that there was some prank being planned … but we went along nevertheless ..

What we saw when we reached there was quite unreal .. right there in the middle of nowhere were 4 train coaches and I mean real train coaches and a proper retro railway station which was fully customizable for a film crew depending on the shoot you want!! The train was just kept there mounted on some springs and the station was complete with the clock and a few stores on the side and everything! and the train itself was from ‘Lahore to Amritsar’!! and the station was marked as ‘Atari’, a station which is actually on the India Pakistan border!

Siva as usual was in his element and we decided it was time to start using the train and the station as a prop and enact popular train and railway station cliche’s. It started out with Siva being a politician who had just landed in a village and was doing the customary ‘Namaste’ to his entourage and moved on to a very popular scene down south in railway stations … the bunch of old men sitting by the railway tracks and drinking their coffee with a spoonful of conversation! but as you can see here … we had quite a tough time looking authentic on that one!! especially me … who can’t fake it to save my life!!

The most authentic one of the lot has to be Siva who sat in the train and decided to act like the ‘Pissed Off Old Man’ who was just throwing his attitude around! and he looked the part ;)

It was tons of fun with all of us rolling with laughter and we had some nice ideas for the shoot. Raghu was still doing some solo singing at the first location while the crew just began setting up here. So we were all set for a super shot 2.More about the shoot itself in a post to follow …

The Raghu Dixit Project is being featured on MTV all of this month on MTV Alert. This is an 8 minute clip which will play 2-3 times a day all of March on MTV … so make sure you tune in for this!!

The clip will have an exclusive interview with Raghu and also exclusive footage of the band playing and some super scenes created for the music that we make .. I shall dedicate the next few posts to describe this shoot in some detail ..

Prologue

We were told to report at the venue at 7AM for the sunrise shot by the river. It was quite a struggle, but we made it on time only to find out it would be a sunset shot instead!! but then the entire MTV crew was on location and some wonderful breakfast was ready .. so we had nothing to complain about .. we promptly ate to our hearts content, drank some super ‘kadak chai’ that was in infinite supply and went to our rooms for a snooze!

Our clothes were taken and ironed and everything was set and everyone was waiting for the first location to be set and the director to call us!

Shot 1

The scene for the first shot was magical! the setting was perfect and the entire location and the lights rocked!! I have no words to describe this .. you have to see the picture yourself .. it was basically in the middle of a Bamboo Grove with some ‘holy thread’ tied around different bamboo shoots randomly … the entire place was strewn with dry bamboo leaves and there was some smoke being artificially fed into the shot … when we first went there and saw it … I must tell you … it blew our minds!

The band had to walk through the place like we were on a journey and also Raghu had to sing a few songs there and we were on to shot 2 …