BENGALURU: Music has the ability to take you beyond reality but how do you depict the same in the form of visuals? In an attempt to show the same, Indian Music Experience (IME) has a new installation, Nadam, which is a musical animation. Mumbai-based filmmaker Indrajit Nattoji is the man behind this digital blend of music and art. Nadam has three parts and Nattoji has worked on all three of them. The first, an introductory film, sets the mood. The second is Samaya Chakra and the third one is called Filmy geet.
“Nadam means music. And I’ve tried to capture the diversity of Indian music,” says Nattoji. The second film, Samay Chakra is a looped overhead projection showcasing the different Hindustani classical raagas or musical tempers in the 24-hour time cycle. Each raaga symbolises the mood of the respective times in a day, from morning to night. The struggle Nattoji faced was translating the concept into reality.
“So, I began with doing it in the form of a song. I put it in the format of a lullaby for a young girl. When the girl wakes up late at night and gets scared hearing the sounds of insects, the mother explains that that’s also music,” says Nattoji. Since it is like a bedtime story, Nattoji felt the best way to make it appealing to young audiences or for that matter for adults too was to put it in an animated form.
“In animation, you can go into this fantasy world,” says Nattoji, adding that he wanted the format to be interactive. “We have used 5.1 surround sound so that you feel like you are inside the film,” he says. Nattoji could have had a great deal of experience in directing movies, but this was the first time he experimented with music. But the challenges weren’t too many. “Music and sound are part of filmmaking, and as a film director, I have experience in all departments,” says Nattoji, who was one of the few directors who was called for the project. “I pitched my idea and it worked. My idea was pretty much the hero , ” laughs Nattoji.