Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

Engineering remakes

MASTERS OF REMAKES Dileep, Harisankar, Deepak, Shivan, Siddharth, Chaithin and Arun

Engineering students these days are a beleaguered lot with their intense workload, not to mention a weak job market thanks to global recession. Yet Dileep, Harisankar, Deepak, Shivan, Siddharth, Chaithin and Arun – seven final-year students of electrical engineering at College of Engineering Thiruvananthapuram (CET), who call themselves ‘The Latest Pirates,’ have reason to cheer as they talk about their latest re-mastered video, ‘In Engineering College.’ The video, shot with a digital camera, has become a rage among netizens in town and has garnered over a thousand views and top ratings on YouTube.

The seven, though, are not new to filmmaking, having earlier released ‘Pinneyum Palavattam,’ a re-mastered video based on the original ‘Palavattam’ song by Vineeth Sreenivasan from the album ‘Coffee@MG Road,’ which they premiered at Dhwani ‘09 – the inter-collegiate cultural festival of CET, to much success.

“It’s the original Palavattam song that brought us together, and we’d forever be thankful to Vineeth Srinivasan and his team,” says Dileep, the director a.k.a. Jack Sparrow. “The video was poetic retribution for the seven of us, having failed miserably in our romantic escapades,” he adds with a grin. “It wasn’t all smooth sailing at first. Our haphazard shooting schedules did cause friction. But we capitalised on the free hours at college and burned midnight oil during holidays to get things done,” quips Harisankar. The other videos of The Latest Pirates are also adaptations of original songs. “Our motto is to bring smiles to peoples’ faces. And we felt that re-shooting a music video was the best way to do that,” elaborates Dileep. “We have deep respect for those behind the original works. Had it not been for their genius and inspiration, we’d simply have groped thin air,” he adds.

The song ‘Unnam Marannu’ from the film To Harihar Nagar is the inspiration for ‘In Engineering College.’ “After dabbling once in the art of re-mastering existing songs, we thought we’d try our hand at it again,” says Shivan, the lead actor. And once again it was tough work, chorus the team.

Harisankar and Dileep saw the music video of the song over 200 times and jotted down their ideas, second by second to make a rudimentary screenplay of sorts. Once the script was done, the team took over a month to complete the work, covering almost all parts of the city from Museum to Thampanoor. Siddharth, another actor, whose antics in the video had the audience in splits, explains: “The lion’s share of our shoot was done during the Onam holidays. So we didn’t lose many class hours.” Adds Chaithin, the ‘dance master’: “All the more time to get the dance steps right!”

Hard work it may be but these guys did have loads of fun too. “The lies we made up on-the-fly to shoot during odd-hours of the day actually added to our creativity,” laughs Deepak while Arun, who joined the team for this video, says that he had a laugh playing the role of a strict teacher, when he himself was a cowering student in real life. The stunt scenes also turned out to be quite hilarious.

“Siddharth, who doubled up as the stunt master, is a perfectionist. We’d have up to 10 re-takes for each stunt scene, many of which involved the participants ending up in real brawls!” recalls Hari as his friends burst into laughter remembering the camaraderie on set.

So what’s next? “We’ve three videos in the pipeline. The scripting and background work for all three are complete,” says Dileep. ‘The 6 days’ has Shivan playing a football freak living his dream, while ‘Sagar Alias Jacky Reloaded: Return of the Machines’ has the director (Dileep) himself playing the protagonist with editor Hari wielding the megaphone. ‘Project CS 2.3 – The Quest for Q33’ is the first original work by the Pirates and will jointly be directed by Dileep and Hari.

In between, they have also published their take on the ‘Neela Bucket’ video made by their seniors. And among the seven, two (Dileep and Shivan) want to continue making movies. While Dileep is set on becoming a filmmaker Shivan wants to be an actor.

You can check out The Latest Pirates video at www.thelatestpirates.jimdo.com

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail