Multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Vimal Chandran’s perpetual muse is the picturesque Pattambi town in Palakkad. He describes poorams (temple festivals) as cultural comic cons filled with colourful elements that stoke his curiosity to this day. His mildly cold, sepia-tinted frames set in the rural setting feature what he calls a retro-futuristic spaceship, unblemished by any Hollywood influence.
His sightings of poothams (a ritualistic dance) and other ritualistic figures bleed onto his interpretations of the extra-terrestrials, as recently witnessed in the music video Vimal directed of Sushin Shyam’s ‘Ray’. It is Sushin’s first independent solo and has garnered over one million views on YouTube.
“Sushin made this song around 12 years ago, and I happened to hear it last year at Ajay’s (cinematographer Ajay Menon) house. Sushin was looking for ideas to visualise an English song about finding light in darkness, titled ‘Light in your eyes’,” says Vimal, over a call from Palakkad.
As he set out to envisage Sushin’s vision, Vimal broadened the idea of what or who is an alien, exploring different forms of displacements prevalent in the current world.
Vimal Chandran
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‘Ray’, set in the ‘90s, begins with a family moving to a new place — one of them is a boy, who turns a few heads with his “unusual” blue-coloured hair. His only companion is an MP3 player. One day, he encounters an alien, a young boy. Even though he feared the alien at first, they eventually became friends and realise the similarities between them. The alien’s planet was on fire, and he, too, had a family there. The song ends with the alien finding a new home with the boy’s family.
“We took four days to shoot it and gave the visuals to Sushin. He was moved by it and decided to rework his song. He decided to do the song in Malayalam and Vinayak Sasikumar wrote the lyrics,” says Vimal. “Each of us brought a different interpretation to the song. And the story provided a surface level structure to it. It was Vinayak who brought in the idea in one of the lines about how an alien sand particle becomes a pearl inside an oyster.”
Vimal Chandran during the shooting of ‘Ray’
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The alien
Vimal explores the idea of “the other” through this work and how people are alienated in our midst. “In one of the sequences, the father is reading an article in a magazine, which has a cover about the immigrant crisis in the ‘90s. If you look at human history, everyone came from somewhere else. I wanted to show that people can coexist.”
A still from ‘Ray’
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The appearance and aesthetics of the alien in the music video can be traced back to 2021, when Vimal was developing a digital art series, Folk SciFi, set in Palakkad. Initially, he struggled to integrate an alien into the setting, but later incorporated native cultural influences into the character, making it easier.
“They are mostly inspired by South Asian culture with their bright red colour. Their dress shares similarities with a kimono, a theyyam or a sadhu’s costume.” He created 20 illustrations in this series and used them in creative films and brand collaborations.
“Developing the alien for the video was difficult, since it is present throughout the song. We had Ronex Xavier (makeup artiste) use prosthetics on his face during shooting. We had to transform the alien’s face to remove that human look. A VFX team from Mumbai painted each frame and changed his face. The video has 65 per cent VFX, and it took seven months.”
A still from ‘Ray’
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The early days
Vimal began painting at the age of three with watercolour as his medium. “My father had a keen interest in painting even though he was a maths teacher. He was my first guru,” says Vimal, who worked as a software engineer in Bengaluru.
His foray into Photoshop was in college, when he was the editor of the college magazine. Since he could not afford to hire a software expert to design the magazine, he taught himself how to use the software.
The Visit by Vimal Chandran
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Once he started working, Vimal invested his salary in a camera and got into photography, which later developed into cinematography. He started with shooting small videos. In 2013, he resigned from his job and became a full-time artist. He worked on multiple brand collaborations including a campaign with Lamborghini in 2021, using influences from his Folk SciFi series featuring ritualistic forms such as poothan, kaali and so on.
Vimal says, “Growing up, I have lived here and experienced all of these things. After the pandemic, I attended a pooram, and the whole atmosphere felt like a sci-fi festival to me, which was a perspective I had never tried to explore. And as an artist, I had a chance to look back and reimagine these ideas.”