One-minute videos capture Chennai’s vibrant culture

Chennai’s vibrancy is one of its aspects that would strike anyone when they visit the city. From its food cultures, dance, music to its historic buildings — the city is always teeming with life. While it may seem nearly impossible to showcase any aspect of the city in a minute, photographers’ forum, Madras Photo Bloggers is doing exactly that. Their ‘One Minute Chennai’ series is capturing various aspects of life in the city in short 60-second videos. While one of the videos was dedicated to everyone’s favourite thirst-quencher, goli soda, another one talks about traditional martial art, silambam. A video from the series also informs people about the scenic Broken Bridge in Adyar, and its history. At a time when the attention span of tech-savvy youngsters is getting shorter, these videos can also come in handy as informative tools.

Photographer and founder ofMadras Photo Bloggers, SrivatsanSankaran, says the idea of the series is to convey the message in short and crisp videos. “Nowadays, we don’t see people watching videos for longer than five minutes. So, we decided to introduce ‘One Minute Chennai’ to reduce the skip. The project involves covering the real essence of our city. It can either be unfamiliar food joints, unknown public spots, culture or inspiring people who make a difference to the city. Our aim is also to capture this in the shortest time possible — so we chose 60 seconds,” explains Srivatsan, who ideates the videos for the project.

Even though the video clips last just a minute, they require a lot of work. With a team of three people working on the series — a cinematographer, a director and a video editor — the group plans to publish around three videos each month on their YouTube channel. “It is really challenging to capture everything in under a minute, but we are trying our best to keep the videos compact and containing only the important information to understand a place or person. This helps inpiquing viewers’ interests and helping them know and visit an unknown place,” adds the photographer.

For instance, a video in the series explores the street art culture in the city through a vox populi, drawing people’s attention to paintings on the walls by a main road. Lotuz Head, a street artist who has been colouring Chennai’s walls for the past few years anonymously, is featured in the clip explaining about the city’s connection with art. “The city has been witnessing different styles and ideas being portrayed through art. As a metropolitan city, Chennai has very diverse cultures, and art can help one learn about other cultures. Unlike gallery art, which can be very elite, street art allows everyone to view and connect with it. The idea of the video clip was to bring people’s attention towards street art,” the artist remarks.