A Jerky Affair

The song gets over in less than four minutes. But then quite a lot happens in ‘Boogie’ – that’s the song title - so much that by the end of it, you’d possibly find yourself jerking up and down. ‘Nice animation’ someone commented when Vishnu Raghav who directed the video posted it on his Facebook. “But it is not animation, it is hours and hours of aching my back to work out the video, most of it shot on an iPhone, quite a lot of it stills made to look like a video,” says Vishnu, who is also an actor.

This is the second song that comes from the band Everafter, a little group of four that includes music director Roby Abraham, singer and actor Madonna Sebastian, musicians Ashwin Aryan and Joel Varghese. The first Veruthe too had been directed by Vishnu, Roby’s friend since the time they met in the sets of Dulquer Salmaan’s Theevram – Vishnu as an actor and Roby as its musician. When the time came for a second song, Vishnu suggested using ‘stop motion’. “That’s when you take about eight to 24 stills per second. The fewer the stills, it’d look jerky and cartoonish. Not many have done this before, but it is not new either. Alphonse Puthren (director) has done it.”

There’s a lot more technicality. Vishnu keeps giving out more terms – hyper lapse, stop motions in long exposure, in double exposure. “The idea was to do a variety video.” That worked. They had to work on it for months for someone would always be busy. “Donna (Madonna) would need to go Chennai for she’s been acting in Tamil films,” Vishnu says. When they did get together, they’d find locations in Kochi— inside a flat, or some closed building, in Vagamon among the cool breezes and many trees. “Sometimes we’d fit the iPhone at the end of a PVC Pipe and then use it like a jib – Swaroop Philip did 80 per cent of the cinematography. Rest was done by Shajeer Basheer.”

All the jerkiness matches the song tempo too. Roby says it can be called closest to EDM or Electronic Dance Music. “Nothing new there. Internationally, the younger generation is moving closer to the electronic experience, even bands like Coldplay coming out with electronic sound. It is just less common here,” Roby says. The music is mixed and mastered by Vivek Thomas and the lyrics are by Manu Manjith.