Scribe Bassist Srinivas Sunderrajan Extends Funding Deadline For His Second Film

Crowd-sourced initiative to gather funds for ‘Greater Elephant’ was supposed to wrap up today, has now been pushed to September 9th

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Still from Greater Elephant

In an age when Bollywood gloats over hefty 100-crore budgets, Scribe’s bassist and now indie filmmaker Srinivas Sunderrajan or Vaas as he is known, managed to surprise many with his 2010 film, The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project (TUKKP). Made on a miniscule budget of Rs 40,000, the film used guerrilla filmmaking technique with friends stepping in as actors, permit-free locations and Vaas even settling for a borrowed Macbook to edit the final cut. This was before Anurag Kashyap took notice and decided to lend a helping hand to promote it. The film, which features Sunderrajan’s bandmate and Scribe frontman Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, was recently showcased at the Mumbai edition of Live From The Console.

Srinivas Sunderrajan

Now Sunderrajan is ready with his sophomore attempt, Greater Elephant. Currently Greater Elephant is being screened at CPH PIX festival in Copenhagen and has already won the Jury Award for Best Film at the South Asian International Film Festival 2011 in New York. Ask Vaas if he would rather settle for an alternate space than a multiplex for its India release and he says, “I would love to have an ‘unconventional’ release platform for the film but those depend on a lot of factors like projection format, sound setup, ticket pricings, rentals etc. We are trying to go the unconventional way – so only time and money will decide that for us!”

For now, with the help of cinephiles and friends, Sunderrajan has manage to raise Rs 4,88,200 of the 6 lakh that he needed. Since he hasn’t met his target, his August 31 deadline has now been extended to September 9^th.  Sunderrajan feels that Greater Elephant is more “mainstream” than his debut film since people can relate to it. The comedy captures a mahout’s journey to find his lost elephant. Though Vaas’s Scribe bandmate Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, who is known for his comic delivery, is not in the film. Says Vaas, “I would rather approach Vishwesh for a serious role than a comic one because as an actor, I believe that would be challenging for him to explore as well.” Vaas plans to approach distributors and cinemas himself. “It’s hard to get funding for any type of films – but comedy usually finds its way. Till David Dhawan ruled the roost, comedy films were considered to be ‘profitable’,” says Vaas. 

Go here to support Greater Elephant

Watch the trailer of Greater Elephant here

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