A fitting tribute to Kerala’s biggest team sport
KOCHI: What comes to one’s mind when you hear the phrase ‘the world’s largest team sport’? Well, if over a hundred men armed with oars swerving to the frenzied beats of chenda melam don’t give you the feel of Kerala’s famed boat race, then this 3-minute film titled ‘Spirit of Kerala’ will definitely make you care about this age-old sport.
Alappuzha’s own Arun Joseph and his aspiring filmmaker friends were on a mission to take on the mighty boat race, shoot and record it, and as he put it ‘to make this video a fitting tribute to these oarsmen and their spirit’. With the video, they’ve achieved this and even more when it got entered into the My RØDE Reel Film Competition 2019. The international competition, conducted by audio equipment maker RØDE, has big entries coming in from the world over. Interestingly, with the film moving up to the fifth spot on the most voted charts of the competition, the takeaway here is that Arun and his crew have become the first Indians to make it to the top ten. Considering that they’re in the ring with a whopping 1,680 other entries coming from some top names, this is no ordinary achievement.
Moving to the specifics, the video comes with some amazing imagery of the boat race, which Arun and his cinematographer Arjunan canned by poising their lenses on the snake boats over many takes. “We would follow them with our cameras over many intervals. We shot the snake boats on and off the races. At many times we even shot them during trial sessions,” said Arun. Shots from the races at Champakulam, Punnamada, and Mutherimada in Kumarakom were added to the mix to make the film a bit more
wholesome.
But the biggest forte of the video is its sound. Arun’s sound engineers Prashanth Muruganantam and Aswin Ram would use a standard RØDE VideoMic to capture the thunderous chants of the oarsmen, the gush of the waters beneath the snake boat, and everything beyond it. “Mixing the sound has been the most tiring exercise of the lot,” says Arun. “Work on the sound of the film helped it capture its raw appeal. Men who were on those boats even called me up to tell me how original the video had felt. Men who were on those boats even called me up to tell me how original the video had felt,” added Arun.
He appeals to the audience to vote for his film, which is still open. To watch the film and vote, log on to My RØDE Reel online.