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| Camera Log book |
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Sri: Tell me about Dholavira I heard it was really good but that it was also extremely difficult to shoot there.
Senthil:
True. Dholavira is an excavation of the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan culture, dating back to over 4500 years ago. ...It feels good to visit a place of archaeological importance. Scouting for locations was fun. We were actually looking for dry, open lands for the chariot race scene. We went to Gujarat while looking for the same, and some passers-by told us that there were white lands around 200 km away. We were thrilled to find salt lands in Dholavira. While shooting, we needed a light weight vehicle to follow the horses. So we bought a Maruti van, ripped open the top part, and used it to mount the camera along with jimmy jib to shoot the race. It was really very hot as we shot in summer, but it turned out to be one of the most satisfying experience in the film too.
Sri: I think another difficult scene was towards the climax, that scene where the protagonist kills 100 people.
Senthil:
Right! We had to carefully plan for that scene. Rajamouli conceived the hundred warriors episode. We had to make the hero kill a hundred warriors, but it had to look convincing too. It would be believable if the hero fought with 4-5 people at a time. It struck to us that we could use a narrow passage to restrict the number of fighters. Thus came the conception of a bridge, a cliff, and the
bhairava kOna. Shooting this part was another great experience because we were using blue mat for a number of days again in an exterior set, dealing with constantly changing light, and so on...
Sri: It looked like an inspiration of Jackie Chan's recent film
The Myth to me...
Senthil:
Honestly, I have not watched that movie...
Sri: What I feel is the most difficult scene in the movie is the cave scene, where you had to show darkness, but also had to show the set (so that the art department doesn't feel injustice) and also have to show the expressions of the artistes in the dark, the fire,
etc. How did you do that?
Senthil:
True, and the fire effect was difficult. When shooting for
Arundhati, we had a fire effect scene for which I did a lot of experimenting. It was a tough time, but I finally achieved it then. We used the same effect for this one too. We used pompoms of different color in front of the lights and then diffused them to get the needed effect.
Sri: I heard that Nandi (Rajamouli) started going around with the tape to measure the length and shot dimensions and used to note them in the note pad.
Senthil:
Indeed! When erecting the set, we had a lot of measuring to do, and it was time-consuming yet inaccurate. As a lot of CGI work was involved in the film, and since we should give dimension details to the CGI department accurate to less than one half an inch to ensure good output from the CGI, Rajamouli finally got a laser tape from the USA to measure distances accurately while saving a lot of time too!
