Viveks with Bhagyaraj

Viveks is one of Chennai's oldest consumer-electronics retail names, and summer is its loudest season: AC sales climb, and every brand in the market runs offers at the same time. The brief was the crowded room itself. When every brand is shouting deals, standing out is the whole job.

For this audience there was one perfect casting: K. Bhagyaraj, the Screenplay King, the writer, director and actor whose everyman characters Tamil audiences grew up with, and whose screen persona stayed cool in any situation. The idea put him on both sides of his own legend: Bhagyaraj as himself, talking the season's deals and offers, alongside iconic characters brought back from his filmography. The scripts were written to keep his charm and each character's traits intact, so every film landed the way his films always had.

The Chillana Summer Sale had to run for three months, so one TVC was never going to be enough. We planned two shoot days. Day one belonged to the in-house team: a green screen, three looks, and more than 25 short films written in advance, one for each USP of the sale plus the holiday wishes the brand would need across the season, all recorded with live sound. Green screen leaves nothing to improvise, so preproduction planned every interaction and timing before he arrived. Day two was the TVC, shot on a full set with a production crew.

The TVC paired agency creative direction with a film crew: directed by Guru Subramanian, photographed by Jagadeesh Ravi, with copy by Karthik Radhakrishnan. The social films were executed end to end by the in-house video team, the same team from the studio story.