Shaan Rahman’s dream has been movies, but the majority of the offers that came to him were of music albums. It was while working in such a music album —Udayasooryan — directed by his close friend Vineeth Sreenivasan, that he met Gregory Jacob for the first time. It happened nine years ago. Shaan, who was a singer and actor in Udayasooryan, years later, has composed the music of Jacobinte Swargarajyam, the film based on the life of Gregory and his family.
“The shoot of Udayasooryan was in Dubai. It was during the production of that album I came across Greg (Gregory) who was also there on the sets as he was a friend of our crew members,” say Shaan about Gregory, who had acted in one shot of the album.
And they became good friends. “Greg became one of our close friends in Dubai.
The next year, his family met with a financial crisis as shown in the film,” he recollects.
Two years ago, Vineeth told Shaan about his plans to make a film on Greg. “When I heard that, I too felt their inspiring story needs to be made into a film. More than that, only a few people, including me and Vineeth, were aware of those incidents. So I supported Vineeth’s decision,” says Shaan, who has set tunes for five songs in the film.
The initial plan was to include just two songs in the film. “But when the script got locked, Vineeth found space to accommodate more songs, which would help the narration. The English track used in the beginning of the film was added during post production,” he says.
“It was Vineeth who suggested me to avoid a normal background score and try out an English track to give a different feel to that sequence,” says the composer, who has four films in his kitty — Jude Anthany Joseph’s Oru Muthassi Gadha, Midhun Manuel Thomas-directed Sunny Wayn film, editor Mahesh Narayan’s debut directorial venture and Basil Joseph’s Godha. Shaan has composed 10 tracks for Godha. “But, only four are complete songs. The rest are one-minute-long small songs which would replace BGM to convey certain ideas,” he sums up.
