Vineeth Mohan walked into the world of ad filmmaking and motion graphics by chance. Having begun his career as an actor in 2005 by doing a supporting role in the serial Sthreethvam, he later moved into script writing, film direction and finally into ad film direction. “I worked as an assistant in three movies — Lokanathan IAS, Kanaka Simhasanam and Kalabham. After those movies, there was a gap. I had two options — serial and ad filmmaking. I chose the latter and that provided me opportunities to explore the creative sparks, which were lying dormant,” says Vineeth.
In 2009, he started doing independent works and Vineeth has directed almost 60 ad films so far. In 2014, he entered the Limca Book of Records for creating an ad film using stop-motion animation technique in double compositing layer method, for an ice cream brand. It took him three months to complete the shoot, which was extremely risky.
“Two glasses covered with safety sticker was used in parallel to get a 3D effect to the advertisement. We fixed the camera from the top angle. In the bottom layer, we set the background and in the second layer artistes enacted each scenes lying on the glass. There were 247 frames and we ran the frames in a particular speed to create the ad film. The shooting was highly risky because we shot the entire thing on a glass piece. But, luckily it came out well,” says Vineeth.
“I was inspired by Oren Lavie’s album Her morning Elegance to do this advertisement. He had used the 2D version of this technique in his album,” adds Vineeth, who works in films and advertising simultaneously.
He has been a part of the VFX team of the movie Baahubali. “I took some time out of advertising to work with them. I was the line producer of the VFX team and I was assigned to control the creative team. It was a great experience working with the whole team. I love doing visual effects. It is a big canvas.
You can make anything you imagine real in VFX. In Mollywood, this technique is gaining momentum as we are trying fantasy subjects now,” says Vineeth who is all set to join the team for the second part of the film.
He is also working on his own project. “Feature film has always been my dream. I have the story with me and scripting is almost over. I will soon start working on it,” he concludes.
