Padmasoorya Govind shares song SHOT underwater

SHOT underwater!

Actor Padmasoorya Govind shares his experience of shooting for an entire song underwater

Sanjith Sidhardhan

It may have been done before elsewhere, but for the first time in Mollywood, a team has actually shot an entire song sequence underwater. The five-and-a-half minute love song, from an upcoming film, Ettekaal Second, was shot inside a pool. The team filmed with imported equipment used for underwater photography and took about two days to shoot it.
Actor Padmasoorya Govind says, "More than exciting, I would describe it as challenging, because with every move you discover something new about how things work underwater." The actor says he had begun preparing for this shoot a week before it actually took place. "I had to work on increasing the number of seconds I could hold my breath underwater. I could manage a maximum of 45 seconds," he says. The bigger challenge came with the emoting. "Because it is a romantic song, you had to emote and lip the lines within the 20 seconds of take.
All this while trying to maintain your balance, which is hardly a walk in the park." T h o u g h Padmasoorya says he and his co-star, d e bu t a n t e Gemi, had practiced the dance steps on land, the going got tough while
in the water. "Gemi is extremely competitive. She might have learnt how to swim very recently, but as the shoot progressed, she did much better than me," he says. "You have to put in a lot of effort for those circular motions. There were also few steps where we had to go downward and the natural tendency is to buoy towards the surface. So one of us had to push the other when prompted," he says, adding that the director, art director and cinematorgrapher were the underwater crew.
"The director showed us some brilliant footage while on the sets and that inspired us a lot more," says the actor. The song was directed by Vinod Vijay and the production company hopes to find a place in the book of records for having shot the longest song underwater. The claim comes close on the heels of a similar venture for the Kannada film Teenage Yee Vayasse Onthara, which reportedly is the first Indian song to be shot completely underwater.
sanjith.sidhardhan@timesgroup.com

CHALLENGING FEAT: Padmasoorya; (below) a still from the song