You see the camera, but you feel the sound,” says Viraj Singh Gohil, the cinematographer for Amazon Prime’s latest visual delight, Harmony with AR Rahman. For a person whose sole agenda is visuals and images, that statement seemed rather odd, but it’s this resolve and commitment to bring together music, visuals and travel in a fluid narrative that makes the 41-year-old perhaps the ideal man to have shot the five-episode series. Shot in scenic locations like the Kalamandalam in Kerala, the mountains of Maximum city and forests of exotic Manipur, the show follows AR Rahman as he makes way into the remotest corners of the country, in an attempt to explore native Indian music, and give them a fresh new voice. From nanoscopic ripples in the water, to an arresting shot of the mountains in the background, Viraj’s viewfinder hasn’t missed a thing.
We ask him where this love for visuals came from, and he says with a laugh, “I don’t have as romantic as an answer for that, but who doesn’t like visuals?” Viraj also surfs, motobikes, hikes and snowboards, which makes the outdoors his oyster. “I have been doing camera work for 18 years now and it’s only in the past four years that I’ve finally cracked my style,” he says. The Chennai-born cinematographer, who is now based out of Mumbai, first started out with documentaries, something he says came naturally to him. Although Viraj didn’t go to film school, he doesn’t like to call himself ‘self-taught’. “I think all this knowledge was hammered into my brain during my assisting phase, where I got to work with DOPs like Ravi K Chandran.”
It was in the year 2009 that Viraj worked on his first independent film Mere Khwaabon Me Jo Aaye, starring Randeep Hooda. He has also worked on documentaries like Ask The Sexpert (2017), Silent Snow and Office Tigers. This is the third time Viraj is joining hands with the director of Harmony, Sruti Harihara Subramanian. “It wasn’t just a good story we were looking for, it was also for someone who was good on camera.” The travel-based music show is produced by Kavithalayaa Productions, incidentally the same banner that introduced Rahman to the world with Mani Ratnam’s Roja in 1992.
Walking about in jungles and atop rocky mountains, the team must have faced some challenges. “Some? We faced a tonne,” says Viraj adding, “The sound guys had a lot of trouble. We wanted you to not just see the visuals, but feel the sound too.” True to his word, music is the nucleus of this show. From Kalamandalam Sajith Nair playing the instrument mizhavu in the forest in Wake Up Jungle, to Manipur’s Iron Lady Lourembam Bedabati Devi interacting with the birds, trees and flowers in Listening to Nature — sound is the very fabric that the show is stitched on.
Amidst everything, it was watching AR Rahman himself performing that had Viraj star struck. “The first day of shoot had me in a jumble of nerves. But towards the last episode, we had become pals, sitting on a boat on a lake in Manipur.” Viraj will be seen working on a possible superhero movie set in Kenya, and will also team up with an American director on a indie project on race, in the ghettos.
Streaming on Amazon Prime.