Rediscovering RajaRajeshwaram - The Great Temple of Thanjavur!!

Rediscovering RajaRajeshwaram:

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For someone who fought with his grandmother and vowed never to set foot in temples again for all the stupid superstitious rituals associated with it, I have come really a long way. I don't know exactly when the fascination for Thanjai Periya Kovil started for me. I think it was after i finished reading “Ponniyin Selvan” novel. Ponniyin Selvan changed me completely.... it made me to explore the Tanjore temple and trasnformed me as someone who has interests in historical temples, sculptures,architecture and their heritage.

Thoughts about making the documentary film: 
 

I have been planning to make a documentary film on thanjavur periya kovil for a long. time I wanted to make the film so as to bring out the architectural finesse of the 1000 year old temple in a video so that it reaches a wider audience. The idea is to make the viewers aware of all the unique features of the various structures, scriptures and statues of the tanjore temple and make them appreciate the rich Tamil history of the Cholan era. 2010 is the 1000th year since the temple was constructed. So I discussed with my friends who are part of 3ifactory design studio – Sreejith and Vishwaant and they readily agreed to make the documentary film. I have seen few documentaries which includes Thanjai Periya kovil like the one from BBC - Michael Wood's "The Story of India" - Part4 (Ages of Gold) (video link) and NGC's "The Lost temples of South East Asia" (video link).Though they were visually spectacular there were lot of errors with respect to the history of the temple and they didn't cover the Periya kovil in its entirety.

RajaRajeshwaram – the movie: 
 

Next was the planning and scripting stage. We also had to think of unique angles (since we want to show the temple from never before seen angles :P). The plan was to explain the great history of the Cholan Empire, the achievements of Raja Raja Cholan, his vision about the temple, the wonderful way the temple was constructed, the 1000 year history of the temple, the various specialties about the temple and the historical and mythological significance of every part of the temple. We decided to name the documentary as "RajaRajeshwaram" as it was the original name of the place and the temple. In pure tamil it would be called as RajaRajechuram but we thought it would be confusing and decided on "RajaRajeshwaram" as the name of the documentary film.

Shooting:

As of now we have completed 2 phases of shooting - Phase1 was completely with DSLR's since we didn't have a handy cam then... we got lot of pictures from each panel of the temple which helped us to study and plan the shoot further. In Phase2 though we had a handycam and tripod we were not allowed to take our tripods inside the temple, we were supposed to get prior permission from ASI office in Georgetown, Chennai. So the footage that we shot was shaky and also the video quality was not that good. But still we managed to create a trailer from that footage for the documentary.

Rajarajeshwaram Trailer link --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVHYmTctIfg&feature=related

Script Work:

I also started working on a draft script for the narration part of the documentary with materials that i got from http://www.poetryinstone.in/ site, http://varalaaru.com/ site and "Ponniyin Selvan" Yahoo groups files. Meanwhile i met some awesome people from Orkut Ponniyin Selvan group - Jayakumar, Jothivel, Nandha, Sriram, Sathiyan and Lakshmi Ma'am. They have great interest in architecture and temple conservation. They have also started a site http://www.prastara.in/ for this.

Since a documentary of this magnitude has to be historically and scientifically accurate, expert help is very much needed and my friends have agreed to help me with the documentary script. There is a mountain of information about the thanjavur temple in the web. I started reading about "Yaazhi Riders" which can be found along the side walls of the thanjavur temple and that itself took me more than 10 days to complete reading. So we are having meetings every weekend with prastara members to discuss the final script.

Finally,

The Tamil Nadu government has decided to have a state celebration for the temple's1000th year anniversary on September 25, 26th in which 1000 Bharathanatiyam dancers are going to perform in the temple. We have made arrangements to cover the event and then with one more day of shooting we can complete the documentary.

In all probability we will release the documentary film in 2 months time in true High Definition  [HD] ... 

Stay tuned! :)