He then moved on to the Central School in the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and finished at St. Sarathkumar started his schooling at the Raja Muthiah High School, after his family relocated from Delhi to Chennai. His mother Pushpaleela died on 26 October 2013. Sarathkumar is the youngest child in his family, he had two siblings an elder brother, the late Sudarshan Ramanathan and an elder sister Mallika Kandaswamy. His father Ramanathan worked at the All India Radio before joining the Press Information Bureau of India while his mother Pushpaleela was a housewife. Sarathkumar was born on 14 July 1954 to Ramanathan and Pushpaleela a Tamil family in New Delhi. I’m sure Tik Tik Tik will appeal to children as well," he said.R. When we made Miruthan, it was passed with an A certificate by CBFC, so it was not suitable for children. “I really hope children warm up to this film. Having grown up watching space films such as Deep Impact, Armageddon and 2001: A Space Odyssey among others, Ravi hopes that children celebrate Tik Tik Tik as this generation’s space film, which also stars his son, Aarav, in a pivotal role. We’d shoot from morning to evening and most of the times we don’t even take a break because taking off the suit and putting it back on was a time-consuming process.”
We’d wear the space suit and then be attached to the harness for long hours. “As most of the shooting took place in zero gravity conditions, we had to be attached to the harness. A race against time thriller, it’s a story of five astronauts, who go on a mission to stop an oncoming attack of a meteorite. Nearly 80 percent of the film was shot in zero gravity condition. What the actors couldn’t touch which was mostly everything in the background was created with the help of CG.” Everything the actors could touch was actually built from scratch. A lot of planning went into the shooting process. This is a film with a lot computer graphics and most scenes were shot on green mat. Shakti was well backed by art director Murthy.
We had to make sure that everything looked believable. Since it’s about science and space, he had to keep in mind several things when on the sets.
Even while shooting, Shakti had to look after so many things as this is a script that’s powered by logic. “A project of this scale and vision requires a lot of research work. It’ll be a milestone in my career and in Tamil cinema,” Ravi said, heaping praise on his director. Even though the execution was very strenuous, we were thrilled with the output which was beyond our satisfaction. But I was quite confident because audiences have always supported whenever I attempted something different. I could foresee the result when I read the script but nobody believed in us expect our producer.
The bigger challenge for us was to script a movie like this in the first place. “When I told some well-wishers and friends that I was going to do a space film, nobody believed in me or in the project. We gave them some test shots to work upon and they came out really well.”ĭespite his faith in Shakti and the script, Ravi said a lot of people couldn’t believe they could pull off a space film. But Shakti and I had faith in our script and we found a VFX studio (Ajax) in Chennai which delivered the kind of output which was beyond our expectations. A lot of people didn’t attempt a space film so far is because of the misconception that we can’t shoot in India and the high cost involved. When Shakti pitched the idea of Tik Tik Tik, I saw many positives. But I always look at positives over negatives in anything I do in life. I conveyed the same thought to Shakti and that’s when he pitched the idea of Tik Tik Tik.”Īs much as Ravi was excited about the idea of starring in a space film, deep down, he was hesitant. Even if I do one film, the experience should be equivalent of doing five projects. I told myself that I’m anyway not going to be around to do 200-300 films. Recalling how the project materialised, he said: “After the release of Miruthan, Shakti called me one day and said he has two scripts – a big project and a small film. Directed by Shakti Soundar Rajan, the film marks Ravi’s second collaboration with the director after the zombie actioner Miruthan.