Singing a soulful tune

HERE'S A story about a song. Boy wants to be pop star. Boy composes music. Does not find takers. Finds friends. Friends help boy make music video.

Music video goes on air on Channel V0 and MTV. Sounds like a movie? But that's just half the story.

The song `Jo Tum Gaye' is Chennai-based sound engineer, Arun Aravind's maiden venture, a dream only partly accomplished. Partly because the recording companies are yet to wake up to the video.

With refreshing music, punctuated by his soulful voice and framed in a slick music video shot just outside Chennai, sound engineer/song-writer/composer/singer Arun Aravind is more in the league of music that we usually hear from Shaan or KK-the non- bhangra, non-rock, non-filmi types, genuine pop.

Though the song is about the singer going into a flashback mode reminiscing about his first love, the video is different to the extent that it breaks away from the usual glam- doll model music video convention and features young Akshaya, a child TV commercial model.

``We were lucky to find the right people to help us,'' Vijay of Hallucinationz, the team behind the music video says. Hallucinationz consists of Arun, Vijay, Alfred and Murugesh.

That was the creative team. And then the finance part of it. ``I'm grateful to Kalesh and Alfred for that,'' Arun says, explaining how they still needed some money in spite of getting a lot of things done free. He had a friend in Donnan Murray for the music arrangements of this number and a few other songs which would be part of his album `Yahan Se Kahin Bhi' once he finds backing from a cassette company.

The video is also a good break for Shanki, who has handled the camera. It sure would make his Dad Balu Mahendra one proud man.

Shanki, Vijay, Murugesh and Franklin (who did the editing for the video) incidentally, were students of the Visual Communication course at the Loyola College.

The team scouted for locations and narrowed down to the old Airport Base at Red Hills. ``We wanted the ruins of the buildings to give an eerie feel to the video,'' Arun explains.

The sequences of the childhood dream girl (Akshaya) were shot around Mahabalipuram.

``That we shot on the day of the cyclone. It was one dramatic day, especially with all those warnings of the storm,'' he recollects.

Once the video was shot, the friends took the song to the music channels that readily agreed to put the video on air.

The song now appears as a ``single'' sung by Arun Aravind directed by Hallucinationz.

The song is now complete. The story isn't. Will Arun and his friends make it big? Will they find a genuine record company to release Arun's album? Will the dream become a reality?

Ah! If only life were a movie! Who knows, maybe it is.

By Sudhish Kamath

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Section  : Entertainment