Myriad hues of Madras
Videos and shorts by the YouTube channel ‘Made in Madras’ highlighting various aspects of the city, are going viral
By : priyanka sundar
Update: 2015-09-12 02:48 GMT
There have been many artists and entrepreneurs who’ve started an initiative to put the spotlight on Chennai — its culture, people, or the city life. However, a YouTube channel called ‘Made in Madras’ plans to highlight everything that is the best of Chennai. Popular areas in the city like Central Railway Station and Koyambedu bus stand, to artists who hail from Chennai, have been portrayed in a unique manner. This is a pet project of Evanescence Studios, and Saravanakumar Salem is the mentor behind this project. The core members of the team are Ignatius Vivek David, Ganesh Muthu, Vijay and Rahman.
The director of their recent video about the first Graffiti Crew in Chennai, Ignatius says that their channel was an attempt at making something that is dedicated specifically to Madras. “The channel is our way to celebrate the place and the people. As of now, we have worked on multiple projects. The ‘Miniature series’ was about showing different areas in the city in a unique perspective. For example, Chennai Central is one of the areas that is usually bustling with people at all times. We didn’t want to create the usual shorts or time-lapse videos. Hence, we decided to do a bird’s-eye-view time lapse. And I must say, Chennai looks beautiful from this vantage point,” he explains.
Not just the city, they also document people from various walks of life. They started with young drummer Siddharth Nagarajan, who holds various records including that of creating a new sound of percussion.
We do not want to document people who are already popular for their work. We would want to focus on the unsung heroes. For example, there is this place called Bombay Lassi, it's like a hole-in-a-wall but the owners of this place came from Rajasthan about 50 years ago. The shop is now managed by the second generation of the family. It is also claimed that they introduced the people in Chennai to samosas. They set up the shop and the city looked after them. We want to document such stories,” says Ignatius.
This group’s recent video is about the first graffiti crew in Chennai called ‘T3K’. The video documents different walls decorated with graffiti, and the crew at work. Akhil, one of the crewmembers, explains that his aim was to get people to understand graffiti for what it is. He also wants to open a graf shop (graffiti shop). “Many understand graffiti to be something about taking a political stand, but it is about the graffiti artist establishing his name in the territory. I want people to accept this as an art form like they have taken to painting on canvas,” he says.