Seldom a client gives you an opportunity and a magnificent venue to express your artistic strength. Such was the day when Mr. Prashant Lahoti called Zakir Alladin and requested for our services at the Krishnakriti Annual Festival. We, at Mowzz immediately jumped at this opportunity as the venue was the historically beautiful, Quli Qutb Shahi Tombs.
To experience Meera & Muzaffar Ali’s life unfold through storytelling, fashion, dance, drama and featuring French World Music Band ‘Hyleen’ with folk singer Mukhtiyar Ali & group, the events that were lined up for two days. It was set against the amazing backdrop of the Quli Qutb Shahi Tombs and Prakash Savio told Zak, “Let’s do this in Mowzz style”.
Prakash Savio aka proxy, who loves to get on board dream projects and bring stages to life, was the Lighting Designer for this project. This is what he had to say after working on this show.
Lighting makes a huge difference in an event; both in how one perceives and how visually entertaining it is for the audience. We see lighting in almost every kind of event but the real treat is to get an impact on what you see and what it makes you feel. The visual treat can imprint ones mind beautifully giving calmness to your eyes and mind, bringing the right mood and essence of what you are watching and lastly, adds a lot of value to the artists’ performance and the message they want to communicate.
To bring this all together, it is indeed, a light designer’s job to dig in deep and find out what and how he can complement the artist or the subject on stage.
The same understanding was put forth for this event. It was an honor and a dream come true to light up the historic and architectural marvel, Quli Qutb Shahi Tombs at Hyderabad as part of Krishnakriti Festival 2018 by Kalakriti. Being centuries old, we kept in mind to take precautions not to damage the texture of the monument through the heat of the lights. We used LED lights, which emit less heat than the conventional lights. For better depth and to bring out the fine and intrinsic details of the structure of the tombs, I designed in such a way that we have a 3-dimensional effect to the structure of the tombs.
The show brought in many reviews like ‘Fabulous’, ‘Mesmerizing’, ‘Never seen anything done like that before’, ‘It was like looking at a life-size painting’’, mentioned an art and craft teacher from a prestigious school and we all were overwhelmed with these responses.
It is not about the number of lights but it is about understanding the design for the show, maximize the output and keeping the right balance of illumination, that is the key to a successful light design, which comes from a lot of real-time experience.