Posts Tagged ‘vishal’

It won’t be wrong to say this was a completely a Jugaad ka Video :D  This is the story of how the video for Khidki came about, shot beautifully by Channel [V]

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The ripples have started showing on radio in Bangalore and quite a few of you have been noticing! So now its time to make it official! Raghu Dixit Productions has ventured into music for Kannada movies and the first movie ‘Psycho’ is finally done and two of the songs (the only two made public) from the soundtrack ‘Mahadeshwara’ and ‘Neene Beku’ have been creating quite a stir we hear :)

The music will be launched on the 3rd of May at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall at 7 PM by Shivraj Kumar, one of the biggest movie icons in the Kannada movie industry and also by our favourite Bollywood duo Vishal and Shekhar who are flying in exclusively for this launch!

Now the good part of all this … The event is free to attend and we would love it if *ALL* of you can attend this event! If you are in Bangalore on Saturday, you know where you should be … and also, this time round we have given you enough notice :)

Also, head to the facebook page for the event and RSVP. We are putting up our own little space on the Internet with clips of music from the movie soundtrack that you can sample. Watch of for more Psycho stuff to come ;)

Buzz18.com have put out their coverage of the album launch and it is quite well put together! So those of you that missed the launch … please do take a look at the video and let us and them know what you thought of it!

http://www.buzz18.com/videos/videos/who-does-srk-listen-to/41431 

We are also told that they will be putting out a lot more stuff from the launch and about the band on their website .. I shall keep you updated when that happens!

At the end of our launch show, like I told you earlier, Vishal and Shekhar joined us to do a funky version of ‘Mysore Se Aayi’. Our trusted friend and videographer Vinay Shukla was jumping around with his camera and managed to capture this much before his camera’s battery ran out!

 [googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3455263409714936667]

The day has finally arrived! the album is on sale! and for those of you who have waited along with us … and now can wait no longer … here it is!!

MusicYogi.com has started stocking and selling the album and everyone … HEAD THERE and get your copy! The first batch will run out soon … so get it NOW!!!

The lovely folks at OML and BabelFish decided to give copies of our album to a few bigwigs in the music industry so that they could listen and tell us what they felt about the music and other things … Not surprisingly, they had some very good things to say as you can see here …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI1in1optlM]

So we just got back from playing at the Eastwind Festival and as we were getting ready to go to the festival, Raghu started getting messages from people congratulating him about the album and how lovely they thought it looked and stuff like that!

A visibly shocked Raghu made a few calls and it turns out, the Counter Culture store at the festival decided it was time to start getting the CDs out! and had actually started selling CDs!!!!!

So its official people … the CD IS OUT!!!! The official launch is on 26th in Bombay and the CD will be available at a store near you … very soon! But the CD is out and its time you guys who got it started telling us and everyone else what you thought of it.

These are a few pictures to whet your appetite, of the album on sale and the first few fans to buy it in Delhi! We clearly outsold any other artiste on sale at the EastWind Festival … Now we’re hoping that will happen country wide!

Raghu made quite a few fans today and signed many autographs and most importantly, the wait is finally over! and this time there is no more postponement …

We now step into the next chapter!

It began as a murmur a LONG LONG time back and like a good broth, it was prepared slowly!

And now there is no turning back and no pushing it forward either (atleast that seems to be the case from here!). Its exactly one week left to the launch of the debut album and the magnitude of it is finally beginning to hit us! Its just one week for everything to go euphorically crazy!

The album as you already know is under the ‘Vishal-Shekhar Music’ label and is being distributed by HMV Saregama and should be hitting stores very close to where you are very soon! I am being bombarded with questions about the availability of the album and online sales. I promise to find out about the same and post here ASAP.

For now, please give us any innovative ideas that you can think of to market the album and get it into as many people’s hands as possible. Right from BitTorrent to Flash Mobs, let us hear your ideas and lets try to implement as many of them!

From here, I will give you one story about the album each day … so make sure you come back here often!

The comments section is waiting for you .. go there and let me hear your ideas!

It was meant to be and therefore it happened! It took three months and many postponements of the shoot date to finally reach a point where we had no choice but get it done. I think it was by end of August that we took a call on Ambar as the launch video song through MTV. Though Vishal and Shekhar were very sure Ambar should be the launch song, I was not myself too sure. Probably because I have always been biased towards Mysore Se Ayee from a very very long time.

Lets say everything that happened towards the completion of the video for Ambar now seems like a conspiracy of the universe in bringing together all the most improbable elements which made the entire process and the result very memorable.

Meanwhile, Anand Surapur (Phat Phish Records - Shot Rabbi’s video for Bulla ki Jaana), who knew me for sometime now (I was supposed to be launched through Phat Phish Records 2 years back), proposed that he would love to direct the video for Ambar and that too for free if Ambar would be the launch song!

Anand is a director who doesnt like to have a concrete storyboard to begin with. It can be quite frustrating to clients wanting know what the video is gonna be all about or how its gonna look. But, with Anand, the answer is never straight and you would be better off not asking him!

Till the video was finally done with, I didnt have a clue what it was all about! All I knew was that Anand is flying down some hep ‘motion control camera’ and that the whole video will be a single shot video. The song’s wave form was first mapped into co-ordinates which then was converted into a data that was fed into the motion control camera and the camera would then move according to the crests and troughs of the wave form of the song!!! aaarrrgggghh! Thats the concept???!!!! I wondered…and doubted the whole technical jargon thingy!

But the more frustrating point was that I made 4 trips to mumbai each time staying for nearly a week to 15 days everytime and each time the video shoot was postponed because ‘the camera never arrived’!!! Meanwhile there was this deal with MTV to submit the video before the first week of October. They would then bombard the video enough number times so that no one would wonder who the hell Raghu Dixit is when he opens for the Lycra MTV Style Awards 2007.

But, it was only by 18th of October, much beyond the deadline date, that I went back to Mumbai after being assured that the camera had indeed arrived. But damn, i forgot to ask if the cameraman had arrived too! It was only after I landed that I was told that the motion control camera had reached but there was no camera person to operate it! The technician who was supposed to arrive was stuck in shoot for Kamal Hassan’s movie in Chennai!

By now we had reached a point where we had no more time to lose. Anand ditched the motion control camera and instead decided to work with a handheld movie camera but still wanting to execute his idea of a single shot video! The camera person would hold the camera and sit on a Grip Trolley manually pulled and operated by four hunky men for about 200 metres and the entire song would be enacted as the camera and the trolley moved through those 200 metres! I was still doubtful about the whole process and i carried those doubts with me to the shoot location.

Location? It was a government run Animal Hospital!!!! But I was simply thrilled when i went to the location. The hospital was full of huge green trees and the buildings were beautiful old british-era structures. The trolley-camera would start at the beginning of a narrow tar-surfaced lane, continue to first a dog-house, then a piggery, a horse stable and then lead on to a broken, run down 1832 built Microbiology-Pathology laboratory where the main part of the video would be shot!!! How perfect that my first video gets shot in a Microbiology lab. The coincidence was hard to believe and the conspiracy of the universe was beginning to unfold! (for people who don’t know, I used to be a Microbiologist before I became a musician!). The big plan was to practice the whole run of 200 metres for two days and shoot on the third day.

Now was the tough part. Anand wants 7 good looking women for the video! We really couldnt afford the professional models. So the ever dependable Samira, Neysa and Bobby turn their mobiles on and start calling up friends and after many ghost-to-ghost hook-ups they finally managed to get 4 ladies including my good friend Anushka Manchanda (ex-viva girl). A good friend of mine, Deeba Shiekh came down to the location to meet me, and Samira immediately goes ‘would u be interested to act in the video for free?’ and Deeba didnt say no! The same evening my gorgeous wife Mayuri calls up from Bangalore and tells me that she is landing up next morning to watch the shoot. I was thrilled and urged her to bring along some pretty clothes…little did Mayuri realise she was getting conned into modelling in her husband’s video!!! So finally we managed 7 women…very good looking at that. Delna (Bobby’s Fiance), Anushka Manchanda, Mayuri (my wife), Poulomi (Samira found her on facebook I think), Tracy (Youhan’s gf), Deeba and finally Rohini (RJ on Fever FM).

The video would start with me singing the first two lines and then camera would first capture Delna (Bobby’s fiance), who would be on the balcony of a house and then catch Anushka walking dreamily into the camera as it flowed down. Meanwhile I would run to the next point and start walking with my back to the camera and slowly turning to it as it came down on me….the camera would swoop again up to capture some of the beautiful trees for about 6-10 seconds and come down before which I run to another point such that this time I am in front of the camera and walking towards it singing the song…like that we keep alternating between me, the women and the nature till the end of the video! Just that everything has to be perfect! The trolley has to be pulled to move at the perfect pace to reach the precise positions marked and the artistes too have to be at the precise point at the precise moment in the song! We practiced the whole motion for about 15 times.

Anand was shocked to learn that I would wear a lungi and kurta. He was disturbed that I was not wearing a casual T-shirt and jeans and chappals! But I insisted that I stay in my Lungi ;) which kind of traded off well with me obliging to Anand’s demand that I shoot for the video without any makeup!

The cinematographer was Bakul, a frail and petite but tough woman. Navarathri ke din maal banaaneka hai was the line from her I will never forget! She was completely focussed throughout the shoot and despite many disagreements and arguments with Anand every now and then, she did a commendable job! Its so imporatant to be objective on a job! Sanjay and his team of strong hunky men too never did whimper even a single complaint pulling that heavy trolley up and down the road for 20 times or even more. The only problem I faced was that we did not have a PA system to play the song loud enough. What was available was an iPOD with an iTrip relaying the song onto a portable music system at a barely audible volume! I am sure u will catch me strumming and singing off the sync with the song in the video ;).

I think it was the 7th or 8th take that we managed to get that almost perfect take and i barely heard the casual murmer from Anand saying ‘pack up’! Our one shot video was done in as much time as the length of the song! But then we had waited for months and practiced for hours….and the result will be there for all to see by the first week of November once the video is aired for the first time on MTV! Hope you all will love it.

Sunday October 8, 2006

The last time I wrote in this section was on June 09, 2006. Since then, a lot of you reading this section regularly asked if I had taken off to Himalayas for a long penance, or if i had renounced this world of music, or if I had become a mechanic in a hardware godown!

It is indeed not of my real self to keep silent. But this time I did and for a long time at that. No, laziness definitely was not the reason. Somebody told me to keep quiet if something nice is about to happen – keep quiet till it actually happens. It has happened to me many times when I have spoken about things when they just ‘seemed’ to happen but did not really happen….so this time when this miracle in my life was taking shape, I kept quiet. Real quiet.

If you have read my earlierfirst blog ‘What a Fantastic Beginning’, I had told you about a certain small solo gig (my guitar, my voice, my sky) at a hip place in Bandra, Mumbai called Zenzi. I had a decent crowd that night and it was a long time since I held a crowd being alone on stage…among the crowd were many known names and among them a particular group of 4 were listening to me very intently. Vishal-Shekhar the hip music director duo of Bluffmaster, Taxi-9211, Golmaal fame and many more, along with Vijay Nair and Bobby (Only Much Louder) stayed back after the concert to have a word with me. We sat at a table outside, away from the crowd and Vishal spoke to me in his usual no-nonsense tone. We spoke for a long time…it took even longer to digest where and what I was doing there and it took till this very day, as I write these words, to realise what a miracle was taking shape!

Vishal-Shekhar along with Vijay Nair and Bobby have started a record label called ‘Counter Culture Records’ which now has sent me the final draft of the recording deal to record and publish 9 of my best songs! Suddenly, my song ‘I am in Mumbai, waiting for a miracle’ doesnt seem to have any significance to me! Ha ha!

Since that fateful concert to this day, I have been literally underground working on those 9 songs. We have almost got there to that final stage of recording. A few finishing touches here and there and soon we get into the mixing mode. I have been having a fantastic recording experience at my dear friend Ricky’s studio in Bangalore called the Raveolution Studios. With a huge generous heart, he has waited as many years as I for the completion of this album and its subsequent release. His patience and tolerance has been commendable…and so is his colleague Abhijit’s support. He has pain stakingly recorded and re-recorded till I was happy. He has also programmed drums on couple of tracks with the help of our drummer friend Siva.

I have been blessed with contributions from some of the most phenomenal talent from Bangalore city and I will promise you a great sounding album very soon. Bruce Lee Mani on lead guitars, has turned around the sound of certain songs, especially Hey Bhagwan and the Kannada songs. The contributions from my earlier bandmate Manoj George on the violin has been tremendous. I also recorded Pandit Prakash Sontakke playing Hindusthani Classical on Hawaiian Guitar for the song ‘Ambar’. But the most rocking track has turned out to be ‘Khidki’…a completely different style of song compared to most of my compositons. Anirban Chakravarthy has layered his electric guitars on this song and this song probably will be the dark horse of the album ;). Lyrics for both ‘Ambar’ and ‘Khidki’ were written by a good friend of mine from Delhi, Niraj Rajawat. 4 bassists – JosyJohn from Kottayam, Gaurav Vaz, Rzhude and Keith Peters have performed on different tracks of the album.

The album will consist of 6 tracks in Hindi and 3 tracks in Kannada. Counter Culture Records was insistent that I include the three Kannada tracks I had composed without a single hint of doubt! I really appreciate and respect that bold gesture. I have been hinted at 3 videos over a period of time which means you will be seeing a lot of my band on the TV! The support of my friend Nisha Abraham who was instrumental in connecting me to Vishal-Shekhar and of another friend Shashank Ghosh (director of Waisa Bhi Hota Hai – Part2) who put me up at his lovely house whenever I went label hunting to Mumbai, and help me get introduced to many great people of the industry, has to be mentioned here.

So…here I am staring at my recording deal next to me on my table…it cant go wrong from here. Its just a matter of time now. 2 months max. See u then…the miracle will be complete.