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Designing a perfect occasion
A ROW of brightly lit huts amidst `greenery', flowers made of thermacol springing from plastic bushes made to look like a full-bloomed gulmohar garden, brightly coloured buntings festooned with frills and balloons. These aren't props borrowed from a movie studio, but backdrops that you are likely to come across, when you attend a friend's reception or a birthday party.
Surprised? Don't be, for designing backdrops for stage shows and events is turning out to be one the biggest revenue garnering business nowadays. What's more, these backdrops are not confined to college cultural shows, beauty pageants and background setting for advertisements. These backdrops are slowly gaining acceptance are now being used to enhance the visual appeal while celebrating social occasions.
But then there are few who may still argue that using plastic and thermacol replicas will never match the real flowers, in terms of fragrance or looks. However, flowers, used to bedeck the background, wither away within a few hours under the intense heat from the camera lights and the thick smoke from the yagnam. With help from professional interior decorators, even a bland looking marriage hall can turn into a paradise, a palace, a temple or even a hamlet! If you seek to celebrate your child's birthday party in a perfect style, then the best recourse is have a backdrops of their favourite cartoon characters, such as Popeye, Hidee, Sacoriya, Dragon Ballzee, Power Sparkles, Tom and Jerry or Riche Rich.
A professional approach has been adopted to impart a `customised' ambience to those in the hall. The importance is given more on blending art and culture. "If the decorations do not blend with the customs and traditional background of the people celebrating the occasion, it will end up sticking out like a soar thumb,'' says P. Nagaraj of Backdrop Decorations. ``I can still recollect the day when Ramani Shankar, a renowned architect, took me along and helped me develop these ideas into reality. That was a humble beginning made eighteen years ago, but the concept has come to a stay.'' Though `theme-based wedding' is not new to Coimbatoreans, according to Nagaraj, this concept is spreading to other places like Chennai, Erode and Salem.
The decorations range from the simple to the grand, and sometimes the outcome is simply marvellous. Nagaraj cited an instance of a Rajasthani businessman who celebrated his daughters wedding reception in style. "The entire place wore the look of a typical Indian village.... there was no concrete to be seen except for the roof and the floor. About 30 -odd huts were put up both within the hall and the premises, which served as stalls for the variety of food that was being served, to make it look like a typical Marwadi wedding amidst a Tamil hamlet.''
``The concept has become popular to such extent that prospective marriage parties first book our services before booking a hall. This apart, people are also now coming up with innovative ideas,'' says Krishnagopal of New Deal. "It was not easy convince people, nearly ten years ago," recalling his early days in the field. But things have changed now. There is a steady competition and we are forced to come out with the best, as there aren't many interior decorators involved in such kind of decorations.
Nagaraj and Krishnagopal have dedicated a team of artists and carpenters who have elevated the business of making backdrop decorations into a fine art form. Lightweight material such as thermacol and eco-friendly materials such as jute have substituted the heavy packing materials that were used previously. Apart from birthday parties and wedding ceremonies, these interior decorators are the most sought after people, when it comes to bedecking business conferences and other social occasions.
By Vidyashree Dharmaraj
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Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
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