A panoramic motorcycle diary

Many things can happen when four friends, with similar passion come together.

For Nishanth Pio, Ravikiran Vissa, Arjun Kamath and Tapass Naresh, it was to make a travel documentary about their bike trip from Chennai to the Himalayas. The film, aptly titled Send it Upwards, essentially shows what happens when a bunch of friends go on a long bike ride meeting people from various cultural backgrounds. “We know each other for more than 10 years and we decided to do something interesting. That’s how the idea of a travel documentary came up. Initially, our project was called Send it Sideways — we planned to travel from Chennai to Vietnam, and ride across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand and come back from the latter. We decided to make a movie and a travel book out of this. But it didn’t work out and we decided to ride upwards to the mighty Himalayas in 2015!” starts Arjun Kamath, who doubles up as the executive producer of the documentary.

Directed by Nishanth Pio, the 1 hour 25 minutes film covers travel in North India, with music by Tapass, and Ravi Kiran as the DOP. Despite North India being a frequented destination, there has been minimal video documentation on a production scale. Arjun  adds, “We have always loved motorcycle touring and the ‘Mecca of Motorcycling’ lies here in our very own country! That said, there isn’t a single documentary, which has done justice to either the awareness of the place or the concept of motorcycling in the Himalayas.”

Motorbike with travel and filming gear

Though the trip was in 2015, the team has completed the post production work now. “We are giving the final touches and are planning to send the film to International and National film festivals that starts from July,” comments Arjun.

Director of the film Nishanth Pio says that the filmmaking process didn’t take away the experience of travel or vice versa — “Many interesting things happened during our journey, like meeting a family of five who mans an entire town called Batal in Himachal Pradesh! It was one of the highlights of our trip. None of the narration in the film is scripted.”

Though it was difficult to shoot a film while travelling, we tried to capture as much footage as possible. Every time we needed to shoot, we were unpacking and then repacking! We were anxious about the timings for the first couple of days. But once we had chalked out an itinerary, we could do it well, and the process became easier,” Nishanth says.

With the locals during the trip

Though it’s been two years since the team ventured out, the foursome claim that the landscape or scenery hasn’t changed much and the film stands the test of time. “A few things have definitely changed. But the lifestyle of the people is preserved the same way. We want to capture the essence of things and people at a certain point in time, combined with our personal experiences,” says Tapass Naresh, the music director and one of the fellow travellers. He adds, “Along with the samples that we have recorded from the journey, I’ve composed separate music to add to the cinematic experience. I have added guitar parts played by the city musicians.” The four adventurers admit unanimously that the film project was a learning curve and helped them push the boundaries of creativity.