June 21, 2012 Y. Sunitha Chowdhary
Installation art is no joke, it's a cerebral piece that establishes an intimacy between imagination and physical space and art director Ramakrishna brings forth some fifty beautiful pieces made from scrap for the up and coming film Andala Rakshasi. This is his first film in Telugu as an art director and luckily for him he's being spoken about on the same length as the cast and the story.
"In the film the hero is an artist and gifts the heroine a bird made out of scrap, here we used plenty of pen nibs, there are many more items made from discarded type writers and it's parts, automobile material, etc, we didn't buy anything new. We also made a portrait of a heroine out of 25 thousand empty beer bottles at the aluminium factory.
I had two assistants in Mumbai helping me and we plan to hold an exhibition after the film's release. We wanted to send a piece each to every theatre screening the film to promote it. The producer of the film, Suresh Babu, Chandrasekhar Yeleti and few others evinced keen interest in buying the art." Ramakrishna who is a grad in the Film and Television Institute from Pune has worked with Sabu Cyril for around eight films, worked with Priyadarshan and Vishal Bhardwaj too.
On Priyadarshan he says, "Most directors come prepared to the sets but with Priyan it's different. He does improvisation on the spot and he can ask just for anything and it's a challenging task for a technician to conceive an idea and get it approved and appreciated in that moment, it's like an exam for him. Execution is not a big deal though.
He takes available matter and uses it to the maximum and is known for his framing and aesthetics. Shankar works on a bigger scale. In one week we gave 100 dummy villains - black robots."
Finally, Ramakrishna avers that people will laud every technician after seeing the film and the entire credit goes to it's director Hanu Raghavapudi for spotting talent, giving an opportunity and exploiting it to the maximum benefit of the film. His next film as an art director is for Chandrasekhar Yeleti, Gopichand is the hero of the film.
