We took a smaller handi-cam and composed the shot. What we did was I tied the camera to myself. Shankar sir told me that this needs to be a one-shot take. There’s a scene in Anniyan where Vikram keep’s switching between the three personalities of his character: Anniyan, Ambi and Remo. Eventually, a dragonfly did fly into the shot and it sat on the sword making that the final shot of the film. In the end, I simply waited and kept the camera rolling with a focus on some swords in the shot. It might not sit on one’s hand but it could easily have sat on a prop. I was sure that when we began shooting, a dragonfly would come into the frame and sit somewhere. Even when we catch a dragonfly, elders ask us not to because they’re our ancestral souls. There is a belief that after we die, our soul turns into a dragonfly. When I went to the location, I saw a lot of dragonflies flying around. They’re both on different sides of a river and in the last scene, they meet at the river. In the story, there are two characters one who has murdered someone and another person who is searching for him. I have to talk about the climax sequence of this film even before. The glass tank could have broken at any time because of the heat from the lights. What we didn’t think about back then was that this shot was indeed dangerous. The art director finally came to our rescue when he brought some substance like karpuram (camphor), which made sure the condensation didn’t happen and we used a thin rod to make ripples so that the glare could be cut. Once I lit up the shot, we noticed reflections in the water and water droplets were forming on the sides of the tank because of the heat from the light.
This gave the illusion that the mermaid was inside water. We placed a black cloth at the bottom and asked the actor to be inside the tank and placed another tank over it that was filled with water. I clearly remember the first day of shooting this. There’s a sequence with a mermaid in a tank in this TK Rajeev Kumar film.