The grand manner -- common between the producer and director -- permeates every aspect of the film and its making.

Thus, the Shakalaka baby song (A R Rahman's music, Vasundhara Das' voice) which is the opening highlight of the Tamil film (the identical song, slightly reworked, figures in the Hindi remake as well), involved a new form of film-processing. Which is what director of cinematography K V Anand (who made waves when he won a National Award for his very first film, the Priyadarshan-helmed Thenmavin Kombathu, and whose Hindi credits include Doli Sajaake Rakhna and Josh) went to the US to learn from Spike Lee, who had used the process in a song video.

When shooting the Hindi version, Shankar and Anand figured on a shot: "On screen, you'll only see it for about 10 seconds," says Anand -- for which they used 34 Arri III cameras simultaneously.

"Normally, you set the film speed at 24 frames/second. Here, we had one master camera recording the sequence and 34 others set at 100 frames/second, strung out in sequence," explains Anand. "It is very expensiv. The logistics of getting 34 such cameras all in one place is bad enough. I remember there was this do in Madras, when members of the Australian film industry came down to sell their country as a shooting location. I was chatting with some of them and told them about this shot. They were stunned. They told me, 'We don't even have 34 Arri III cameras in all of Australia'!"

"The idea is," says Anand, explaining the shot, "that you have this sequence, say a stunt. The fight composer ('Kanal' Kannan) sets it up. Together, you compose the shot and can it. Here, we have the master camera recording the sequence. But we also have these 34 other cameras shooting from slightly different angles. So, at the precise instant in time that we want to highlight, we have 34 images, separated by millimetres, that we can superimpose into one spectacular frieze."

That many cameras, for the one shot, is a record. Only, the unit was so charged about canning the shot, they didn't stop to think of such things. "If we had invited a collector or police commissioner or someone of that kind for the shoot, we could have applied for a Guinness Book entry."

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