If music and dance could be the language of the world, we would all be happy people in love. A group of young dancers and musicians have come together to weave a love story around dance.
The trilingual, recorded in Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu titled Neene , Neeye , and Neeve respectively has a common music video starring dancers Shreya Deshpande and Niranjan Harish from Bengaluru and has been shot across the city.
The romantic and melodious number follows a young couple practising on stage and their love take wing, through a contemporary dance piece. The unlikely contrasting music its set to, and the unusual locales -- an apartment terrace, a sports field... give it a freshness and set it apart from average film fare.
There are some recognisable shades of the iconic 80s film Dirty Dancing, though.
Written and directed by Bengaluru-based photographer/cinematographer Gomtesh Upadhye, the music video has recently been released on YouTube and is picking up fast with a total of over one lakh views across the three languages. An engineer who worked in the IT industry for some years, Gomtesh started off with photography, working as an assistant on wedding and landscape photography.
He then went on to do the second unit photography for Pawan Kumar’s Kannada film Lucia and turned assistant director for Pawan’s next film U-Turn .
“The original was in Tamil and composed by film music composer Phani Kalyan based in Hyderabad. I’d worked on a Malayalam music video before and we knew each other. He had dance on his mind, and I wanted a love theme,” explains Gomtesh. “We felt that this was the right time to make a standalone music video because a lot of people are on YouTube on their phones always and want quick content that goes beyond TV and cinema. And this is true even of smaller cities, not just the metros,” he observes.
The dance has been choreographed by Vishwakiran Nambi, and along with the lead dancers Niranjan and Shreya, they have all been or are with the popular city-based contemporary Indian dance group Nritarutya. The film was shot around Whitefield and Sarjapur Road, because Gomtesh wanted “a Bengaluru feel and look” for the song.
The team rehearsed for five months because Gomtesh had conceived the dance as one continuous flow.
“Everything had to be in-sync and required exact timing; there were no cuts and close ups most of the time. We shot on a hand-held DSLR Nikon and the video looks good because we’ve largely used natural light,” says Gometesh, for whom this was a passion project -- he wanted to work on something where he had complete creative liberty. Akshay Rao teamed up with Gomtesh as director of photography.
“Once we started off, we realised we would need a large budget. So I decided to crowdfund it, and on the crowdfunding platform ZingoHub we managed to raise Rs. 1.80 lakh within three days!” he says.
It’s amazing how the duo Phani and Gomtesh have managed to pull off a coming together of popular film musicians and lyricists across languages for this project.
Phani has studied at Chennai’s K.M. Music Conservatory set up by the A.R. Rahman Foundation, and has composed for two Tamil films as well. Yasin Nizar, a popular film playback singer who’s sung across all south Indian languages has sung the male lead across the three videos. The Kannada female lead has been sung by popular Kannada playback singer Sparsha R.K., the Tamil by film playback singer Sharanya Srinivas, and the Telugu by Tollywood playback singer Sameera Bharadwaj.
Lyrics in Tamil are by Arivu, Kannada by Kiran Kaverapa, and Telugu by Sreejo.
