Multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Vimal Chandran’s perpetual muse is the picturesque Pattambi city in Palakkad. He describes poorams (temple festivals) as cultural comedian cons crammed with vibrant components that stoke his curiosity to today. His mildly chilly, sepia-tinted frames set within the rural setting characteristic what he calls a retro-futuristic spaceship, unblemished by any Hollywood affect.
His sightings of poothams (a ritualistic dance) and different ritualistic figures bleed onto his interpretations of the extra-terrestrials, as lately witnessed within the music video Vimal directed of Sushin Shyam’s ‘Ray’. It is Sushin’s first unbiased solo and has garnered over a million views on YouTube.
“Sushin made this song around 12 years ago, and I happened to hear it last year at Ajay’s (cinematographer Ajay Menon) house. Sushin was looking for ideas to visualise an English song about finding light in darkness, titled ‘Light in your eye’,” says Vimal, over a name from Palakkad.
As he got down to envisage Sushin’s imaginative and prescient, Vimal broadened the thought of what or who’s an alien, exploring completely different types of displacements prevalent within the present world.
Vimal Chandran
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‘Ray’, set within the ‘90s, begins with a family moving to a new place — one of them is a boy, who turns a few heads with his “unusual” blue-coloured hair. His only companion is an MP3 player. One day, he encounters an alien, a young boy. Even though he feared the alien at first, they eventually became friends and realise the similarities between them. The alien’s planet was on fireplace, and he, too, had a household there. The track ends with the alien discovering a brand new residence with the boy’s household.
“We took four days to shoot it and gave the visuals to Sushin. He was moved by it and decided to rework his song. We decided to do the song in Malayalam and Vinayak Sasikumar wrote the lyrics,” says Vimal. “None of us had a concrete interpretation of the core concept of the song, and the story was just a surface level structure. It was Vinayak who brought in the idea in one of the lines about how an alien sand particle becomes a pearl inside an oyster.”
Vimal Chandran throughout the taking pictures of ‘Ray’
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The alien
Vimal explores the thought of “the other” via this work and the way individuals are alienated in our midst. “When the video starts, the father is reading an article in a magazine, which has a cover about the immigrant crisis in the ‘90s. If you look at human history, everyone came from somewhere else. I wanted to show that people can coexist.”
A nonetheless from ‘Ray’
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The look and aesthetics of the alien within the music video might be traced again to 2021, when Vimal was growing a digital artwork sequence, Folk SciFi, set in Palakkad. Initially, he struggled to combine an alien into the setting, however later included native cultural influences into the character, making it simpler.
“They are mostly inspired by South Asian culture with their bright red colour. Their dress shares similarities with a kimono, a theyyam or a sadhu’s costume.” He created 20 illustrations on this sequence and used them in inventive movies and model collaborations.
“Developing the alien for the video was difficult, since it is present throughout the song. We had Ronex Xavier (makeup artiste) use prosthetics on his face during shooting. We had to transform the alien’s face to remove that human look. A VFX team from Mumbai painted each frame and changed his face. The video has 65 per cent VFX, and it took seven months.”
A nonetheless from ‘Ray’
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The early days
Vimal started portray on the age of three with watercolour as his medium. “My father had a keen interest in painting even though he was a maths teacher. He was my first guru,” says Vimal, who labored as a software program engineer in Bengaluru.
His foray into Photoshop was in school, when he was the editor of the school journal. Since he couldn’t afford to rent a software program knowledgeable to design the journal, he taught himself find out how to use the software program.
The Visit by Vimal Chandran
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Once he began working, Vimal invested his wage in a digital camera and obtained into pictures, which later developed into cinematography. He began with taking pictures small movies. In 2013, he resigned from his job and have become a full-time artist. He labored on a number of model collaborations together with a marketing campaign with Lamborghini in 2021, utilizing influences from his Folk SciFi sequence that includes ritualistic kinds equivalent to poothan, kaali and so forth.
Vimal says, “Growing up, I have lived here and experienced all of these things. After the pandemic, I attended a pooram, and the whole atmosphere felt like a sci-fi festival to me, which was a perspective I had never tried to explore. And as an artist, I had a chance to look back and reimagine these ideas.”
