The thought process behind this ad because it was being shot with Sachin Tendulkar was to break out of the clutter of very similar Sachin visuals. Sandy, the creative director came up with this brilliant idea of visualizing Sachin in an under-construction site but having a projection of finished buildings on him.

In the first meeting with the client, the creative person and photographer knew it would be impossible to take him to an actual construction site so we decided to create a set which looked like an under construction site.

The first studio that came up to my mind was Studio no. 5 in Mehboob Studios, simply because it has a bunch of pillars running through its middle. After sharing the studio pictures with Sandy, we decided with a few construction details such as half finished pillars, partly constructed staircase and a bunch of big concrete blocks would give it a look of an under construction site.

We had four layouts to shoot and since studio number 5 is large enough, we decided we could do two proper setups and two could be shot against a flat grey wall. On one side of the studio, we used a couple of un-constructed beams with iron rods sticking out. We also threw a few concrete blocks against the wall, added a wheel barrow and a few bags of cement. On the other setup we built up a flight of stairs and left it unfinished without a railing and again added some blocks and cement bags. The entire studio was then painted mid grey to make it look like cemented.

The biggest difficulty we faced was the utter lack of time with Sachin and where we were promised four hours with him we ended up getting only two, so the challenge was to have all the multiple setups ready and lit up so all he would have to do would be to change and move from one set to the other. Thankfully for us, the clothes were simple and consisted mostly of track pants and t-shirts in blues, blacks and greys.

Since we had such limited time with him and we had to crank in addition to these four images a bunch of "bank shots", we convinced him to save time by not going to the vanity van to change and requested him to change in an enclosed area in the studio consisting of four large thermocol pieces.

The lighting approach had to be dramatic with a bunch of spots to light up Sachin as well as parts of the set. We literally used up our entire studio lights so that each shot was completely lit up and ready for him; all of our 16 lights were used in the process and we had a dummy model stand in all places with the positions marked and ready at least a couple of hours before he came.

The projection of an image onto the subject was also tried out with a regular projector but since the exposure was a long one(04 to 05 secs) we decided against doing it because it could always be done later on the system. So, though we initially wanted to shoot it old school with the projector, we sort of compromised and decided to do the projection bit later, but in doing so we did ensure that the images with Sachin were flawless and also didn't take up that much of his time.

Net net we ended up getting all our intended campaign visuals plus the "bank images" which was the client's biggest concern mainly because of the fact that it was his first shoot with Sachin. The post work was handled by Sandy and his team and the end result was exactly what we had visualized before the shoot. So whenever I drive down to Pune and see the hoardings along the highway the campaign definitely stands out and I am quite proud of calling it my own.

Photographer: Ronny Sequeira
Client: Amit Enterprises
Agency: JWT
Creative: Sundeep Sehgal