By Rashmi Ruth Devadasan
Do you have mental fatigue from watching the same old bridal jewellery ads with their same-to-same ‘sentiment’ story lines? What if there was some high-octane action instead of all the feelings and tears? What if there were zombies, machi?!?! Here is my pitch for a jewellery TVC that will fill you with joy like anything.
Opening shot: Outdoor wedding on rolling green lawns, guests are milling about the chairs decked out to the nines. Light music is playing on stacked speakers. The sky darkens a bit. The bride’s mother looks up, her face shows concern for a nanosecond. She almost instantaneously shrugs it off.
The guests are seated in front of the pandal. The pandal is bedecked with either traditional desi flowers (mallipoo, roja, sembaratti) OR – if it’s a quasi-European/Western style ‘do’ – the floral arrangements will be like hazaar frozen waterfalls of cascading purple orchids with color-coordinated carnations and ferns arranged in fan-tail type situations snuggling in between.
Now a quick montage of shots of the groom and his groomsmen doing bro-bonding, quite possibly cracking stale non-veg jokes from the 90s.
The lilting fusion music score (a combo of western faux classical mixed with even faux-er Indian classical) will, at this point, morph into some heavy emo notes. Cue reaction shots of various wedding guests.
The bride cometh. She cometh moving, nay, gliding like a graceful snail across the lawn. After all, who can walk briskly when you’re being weighed down by copious quantities of our noblest metal?
The divine bridal beauty takes a cross legged seat near her to-be. The bride and groom look into each other’s eyes. Suddenly there is a SCREAM!
Top angle shot of a posse of zombies running at full tilt into the seated guests and wreaking havoc. Montage of guests running for their lives. (We suggest mild PG-13, U/A certificate-type maiming, with limited full-on dismemberment. After all, we want this to air nationwide on all family channels and in movie theatres, boss.)
Cut to a close mid-shot of the bride and groom. The bride is super mad. Internal voice: ‘These veena pona zombies are ruining my special day… bleep bleep bleep!’. The music changes yet again: Now we have a ‘going into battle’ type percussion track with extra reverb and double the bass. Taiko-drums-meet-the-force-of-chenda beats. The bride springs up like a wine bottle cork dropped into a bucket of tap water. Hubby-to-be looks stressed and puts a cautioning hand on her wrist. He looks at her pleadingly and shakes his head — which in Namma Ooru Head Gesture Bashai 101 means ‘Venda, kannu.’
Bride takes his hand and squeezes it. She shuts and opens her eyes in the very same instant – which translates to ‘I got this, kanna.’
The zombies (there are, give or take, here and there, approximately 10) are climbing onto the pandal. The bride crouches like a cheetah and leaps! We intersperse this long shot with neat close-ups of her jimikkis flying, another of her bangles tinkling against each other, and one cut of her golussu rising and falling on her delicate bridal ankles.
She lands. By her right ankle, there is a brand new pristine steel plate with fruits on it. She swiftly brushes the apples and pomegranates aside and begins. She attacks the first zombie by whacking the edge of the plate hard into its torso. Zoom into her nethi chutti — it winks with a sparkle. In the next shot, she lifts the steel plate overhead and brings it down on the head of another undead wedding-disrupting lout. Zoom into her glittering bangles.
Next shot, she does a back flip in slo-mo. The camera, in a serpentine motion, follows her beautiful jimikkis that give off golden glints in synch with the fluid flow of her martial combat movements. The next shot is in extreme slo-mo. The camera snakes in again, capturing the soft bounce of the five (or is it seven? eleven?) ‘bespoke’ hefty necklaces around the Bride’s neck. They lift so lightly, it is as if their weight is more gossamer than grams.
For the final action climax shot, Bride does a 360° turn with one sweeping epic kick, with her right leg at 120° bringing down the remaining 3 zombies. Mid-kick, we make a final zoom into her chains and necklaces as they fly in the air, twinkling in her triumph.
It is done. The undead are vanquished. The bride straightens her nethi chutti and tucks back a stray strand of hair. She returns to her groom and sits down next to him. He wears a smug expression that could loosely be interpreted as ‘My Girl! That’s MY girl!!’ The priest – who has all this time been cowering behind one of the floral pillars – emerges and begins the ceremony.
Final product shot with the title super: BBB Jewellers for brides who are Bindass, Bold and Badass.
Rashmi Ruth Devadasan is a co-founder of Blaft Publications. She is the author of Kumari Loves a Monster, a bilingual picture book about South Indian women in love with terrible monsters, and co-translator of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Vol. 3.