Indie composer scores for first tamil film on digital platform

Kumar Narayanan, the independent music composer known for his thematic collections on women empowerment, CSK and breakup albums, has scored music for the first time for a film named Ethirmarai. This is the first Tamil feature film to premier on the digital platform Netflix. Kumar speaks about his experiences working for a film which will cater to digital audiences and the challenges involved.

“Ethirmarai featuring Ajai Kumar, who is also the director and Bhanu Mehra in the lead is a psycho thriller where a series of murders takes place. The hero is a cop who is caught in a web. The assailant is inspired by mind control and hypno-programming. There’s no comedy and the onus of keeping the audiences glued to home theatre fell on music as well. After completing the BGM for the movie, I felt it would have been easier had I done a mass commercial film (smiles).”

The composer says it took more than 7 months to complete the music for EM. “That may be mainly because we were working for the first time in digital platform and it was my debut movie as well. There were some issues like soundtrack was in analog and the output format for digitalised version was different. The songs were recorded in vocal tracks, which needed to be converted in digital format; we had ‘sample rate issues’ then. Every hurdle vanished when we saw the final output,” Kumar quips.

The young composer is a trained animator and designer and has worked in some K’town films. “I did the designing of posters and promo materials of Bharathiraja sir’s Bommalaattam. Also 3D animation is my pet subject. I did the 3D animation logo for Ethirmarai and now a few films are in the floors.”

On the work front, talks are on for music direction with two big actors’ flicks, and Kumar is busy with a music album on love — as what he or she goes through when they are in love.