A well-cut teaser and trailer is only half the job done. For a film to become a talking point, there has to be something more. Director-producer Gunnam Gangaraju’s Amrutham Chandamama Lo – 2013, A Space Odyssey is an entertaining account of the adventures of bumbling friends Amrutham and Anji who end up on the moon. The trailer got people talking about the science comedy fiction, not a commonly explored genre in Telugu cinema. The team launched a mobile game app and a Telugu comic book with a story adapted from the famous Amrutham tele serial. Movie buffs were also invited to send in their photographs in space suits.
Clearly, promoting a film is not only about huge marketing budgets and promotional tours. Strategies are devised according to the film’s budget, actors involved and the theme. “Small players neither have big stars nor huge budgets. One has to be innovative. We began with an Amrutham movie page and devised a game for google player, unity player and android,” says Gangaraju.
He says the team took a chance by unveiling the theatrical trailer on Facebook rather than Youtube. “The response was phenomenal — 50,000 likes and nearly 20,000 shares,” he adds. That is no small achievement for a small film. Trailers of films with big stars garner a million hits in no time, but small films make their presence felt in the online space slowly.
Gangaraju feels the internet is an equaliser. He drew on TV serial Amrutham’s popularity. “ Amrutham is popular on Youtube even today. Whackedout media and Release Day helped us with strategies for promotions. We rolled out a mobile game app and then I requested the teams that did our graphics to bring out a 16-page comic book. Most children today may not be familiar with the serial,” he adds. The comic book helped bridge that gap.
ANR lives on
Nagarjuna expresses his thoughts on Manam through these lines he penned along with director Vikram Kumar:
Manam is a sign that things have changed,
And our sorrows and joys have been exchanged.
Night and day, morning and evening,
A movement of souls united in feeling,
Manam, cosmic balance rearranged.
If a small film needs to think out of the box, the largely accepted view is that star value does the talking for a big film. But the Manam team is taking a different route, one that blends good thinking with sensibility. The teasers and the trailers are largely hinged on Akkineni Nageswara Rao with a tagline ‘ANR lives on’. The songs were also available online weeks ahead of the film’s release.
“We didn’t want to advertise heavily on television and print media because everyone was talking only about elections. But we had to get the buzz going. So we used the social media,” says Nagarjuna. The theatrical trailer left many movie lovers moist eyed seeing veteran Akkineni Nageswara Rao. The tagline befits the mood of the Manam team as well. Nagarjuna says it was written keeping in mind that ANR is a legend beyond Manam . The original tagline ‘ANR lives on in Manam ’ was tweaked.
Chaitanya, who had so far shied away from social media, joined twitter. “I felt this film is the right time for him to enter social media and take his grandfather’s legacy forward,” says Nagarjuna.
Instead of a star-studded audio launch, the team unveiled one song at a time online followed by the entire album. An ‘audio celebration’ event unfolded on television screens post election results. “The songs are soulful and need to grow on listeners. Releasing the album barely two or three weeks before the film didn’t seem like a good move,” says Nag. “We wanted people to get to hear the songs, see the videos, making of the songs and the settings. I know I’ve aggressively promoted my previous films like Bhai as well, but Manam is a film I’m truly proud of. The close-up shot of my father seen in the trailer was the last shot in his career,” he says.
