Madras Photo Bloggers’ new initiative captures places, people, cultures and buildings iconic to the city in under sixty seconds

The clink of ball against the glass in your favourite goli soda, a vista of coloured walls flanking the streets, the deft twists and turns of the silambam stick, a broken bridge whose crumbling facade looks out to the sea. What do these have in common? For Madras Photo Bloggers, all these are iconic of what makes Chennai the city it is today.

In their latest initiative, One Minute Chennai, the group is scoping the integral parts of the city to showcase to their audience, under a nifty sixty seconds. It is the brainchild of Srivatsan Sankaran, the man who founded Madras Photo Bloggers in 2017, so as to build a network of photographers who could bring out the various facets of Chennai through visuals,writings, photo walks and heritage walks.

“For One Minute Chennai, we were inspired by NAS Daily videos,” admits Srivatsan, “The subject could be anything Chennai — people, places, culture, food, lifestyle and buildings.”

Gopinath A, videographer with Madras Photo Bloggers, has been with the One Minute Chennai project since its inception. “A lot of people these days have very low attention spans. They like their videos to be crisp and full of information. That’s why we thought the one-minute format would work.”

The duo started out with an interview of silambam artiste Aishwarya Manivannan in February this year. “Our first video had to be about a person. It’s the people of Chennai who make a difference to the city,” says Srivatsan. Within the course of the next few months, they followed it up with videos of goli soda, Broken Bridge, poli, and anonymous street artist Lotuz Head.

Cut and compress

For a while now, Srivatsan has been attempting to go beyond the regular photo walks, and bring in more video content. He believes it is a space for his subjects to speak for themselves, and allows for better documentation of the city.

The team first researches on an interesting subject — relatively unknown but talented local artistes, lesser known food stalls and so on. “We do a lot of ground work before starting the shoot. Ground work includes getting the subject’s background, deciding if the video will help them in future, whether it would inspire others and so on.”

However, Gopinath is quick to point out that editing, led by Charan Ravichandran, is perhaps the most crucial step in the process. “We get about 45 minutes of footage, including interviews, that has to be compressed into one minute,” he says. Most of the videos include a vox-pop section, getting quick reactions from a multitude of Chennaiites, all of which come in quick frames. Agrees Srivatsan, “It’s a one-minute video, so it’s difficult to prioritise the information. But cinematography plays a major role in conveying the message quickly.”

Both Gopinath’s and Srivatsan’s favourite of the lot : an interview with anonymous street artist Lotuz Head, which took two days of shooting to identify his artwork and interview people in front of it, asking them if they knew the artist behind the works they pass by. “The interview with Lotuz himself was even more fun! He had a mask over his face the whole time!” says Gopinath.

The next subject, reveals Gopinath, would be a mridangam maker and player. Srivatsan, on the other hand, looks forward to covering all the heritage buildings of Chennai.

One Minute Chennai videos can be found on the YouTube page of Madras Photo Bloggers