Ravi Babu is undoubtedly a filmmaker with a difference. Contrary to the trend followed by Telugu cinema directors, Ravi Babu’s movies don’t follow conventional scripts or regular pattern. This time, he is back with another experimental film - a movie with a piglet in a lead role. Titled 'Adhugo', the movie has been made with lot of VFX. The pre teaser created a buzz - all thanks to the piglet’s sarcastic replies - giving us an idea that the piglet does have dialogues in the film. Tollywood has seen already seen a film with a fly in a lead role. Unlike ‘Eega’, where the movie runs on a fly's series of emotions with no dialogues, ‘Adhugo’ seems to be an out and out sarcastic film.
The Idea of having a pig! At times, a lot of us are hit by some crazy thoughts which, even we know, are too foolish to even think of. However, there are very few people who take them seriously and think of “yea..why not?” This is what happened in Ravi Babu’s case. He said, one day, he got this crazy idea of casting a pig in his movie and then gave his thoughts a wild touch when he decided to cast piglet as the main lead.
Hollywood Reference: Now that he had the idea to do a film with piglet, RB said he had seen a lot of Hollywood films to see how animal-based movies are done. Besides Walt Disney’s films, he says he watched movies like “Babe”, “Brothers” and other movies that had animals in lead roles.
Animatronics; JNTU : After deciding to go ahead with the film, Ravi Babu says he felt that he couldn’t do all the scenes with a real piglet. He then heard of the concept of ‘animatronics’ that he thought would help him get the movie done. The concept runs on robotics where the technology would be inserted inside the piglet model. A top sculptor has been roped in to design the clay model of the piglet that would be used for animatronics. Later, a silicon mold has been crafted for the same. However, when the testing began, RB decided to go against the wiring idea and wanted to have a remote-controlled testing. The idea failed and the 5-6 months hard work put in designing the equipment got wasted.
Seamless Integration: Taking Jurassic Park’s technology as a cue, Ravi Babu decided to have a mix of animatronics, animation and live action. A 2-month research on the same has been done before the project officially kicked off.
Shooting with the piglet: For the live action, all the scenes involving BUNTY ( piglet) were shot in controlled environment. Unlike the film ‘Eega’, where the fly’s emotions are expressed through background music, Bunty (the piglet) in ‘Adhugo’ interacts with all the characters involved in the film. Besides the piglet, the movie stars newcomers Abhishek and Nabha. Ravi Babu says the advantage of having new artists in the film is one of the biggest advantages to shoot freely with the piglet.
A Telugu Masala Film: The director says “Adhugo” is an out and out Telugu masala entertainer which has comedy, sentiment, action and many more commercial aspects in it. It is interesting to see how the first of its kind escapade where piglet is used for catching the live action impresses the Telugu audience.
Watch the trailer here:
