Nitesh Tiwari's much-anticipated project Ramayana, featuring Ranbir Kapoor, Yash and Sai Pallavi in the lead roles, is one of the most eagerly awaited films right now. The actors have been travelling to different cities and promoting the film, creating buzz ahead of its Diwali weekend release.
The film's director of photography, Pankaj Kumar, has now detailed how he executed the project's most challenging sequences. In an exclusive interview with Variety India, he revealed the kind of complex camera movements and technology involved in bringing some of the film's scenes to life.
Pankaj said, “One of the shots involved a camera moving rapidly from a great height before getting extremely close to the actor, while the camera operator had to move alongside it and detach the gimbal from the techno crane and run along circular and go very close to the actor.” It was a very complicated shot.
The sequence also required extensive rehearsals before the team could achieve the exact movement they had planned. “It took us around 50 takes of rehearsals to get it exactly how we had pre-visualized it,” he said.
The film features several other sequences involving elaborate camera movements, including shots where the camera travelled a long distance before moving closer to the actor. Since these movements were not going in a straight line, even the cable camera rig required careful planning and execution.
“There are many exciting sequences like that,” he added, crediting the team behind the film for bringing the ambitious shots together. He also said that working on the project gave him exposure to equipment and technology that he would not normally get to work with.
“Because of its huge budget, it provided us with resources that are inaccessible to most of the films,” he said, highlighting how the scale of the production allowed the team to experiment with more advanced filmmaking technology.
Ramayana features Ranbir Kapoor as Lord Ram, Sai Pallavi as Sita, and Yash as Ravana. The film also stars Sunny Deol, Ravi Dubey, Lara Dutta, Arun Govil, Kajal Aggarwal, Rakul Preet Singh, Vivek Oberoi, Kunal Kapoor and several others in key roles.
