Piecing together the story of the controversies: How Instagram influenced Thallumala’s transformation

Two groups of men intensely face-off in a dimly lit underground parking lot. A quarrel is imminent. However, a group of percussionists playing the Moplah wedding song suddenly appears through a jump cut between them and the scene then turns into a wedding ceremony, leaving the audience with stitches. Khalid Rahman’s experimental action-comedy thallumala Full of such changes, expertly crafted by editor Nishad Yousuf.

social media junkies

first fight sequence of thallumala Featuring the title song gives a glimpse of Nishad’s genius

“All the changes you see in the film were conceptualized and planned before shooting. It was about getting it right during the shoot.”Editor Nishad Yusuf

The action-comedy starring Tovino Thomas and Kalyani Priyadarshan, which was lauded as a technological milestone in Malayalam cinema, owes much to Nishad’s sharp cuts and peppy transitions that have inspired social media reels.

However, Nishad insists that the editing itself was not particularly challenging. “All the changes you see in the film were conceptualized and planned before shooting. It was about recovering while shooting. I was spending a lot of time on the social media reels. In fact, I was more online than I was at the movies. I spend more time watching videos. Luckily, I got to work on a project in which I could employ all the clever changes and edits I could find on the different reels and videos,” he explains. Not surprisingly, The famously quick and quirky makeovers for Instagram reels can be seen in full thallumala,

The famous ‘Theatre Fight’ thallumala

beginning

Nishad started his career by editing TV serials before entering the film industry as an assistant to Vivek Harshan and then as an editor with Vinayan. Raghuvinte Swantham Rasiya (2011), followed by the same director Dracula 2012 (2012). “That was a time when Vinayan sir was finding it difficult to get technicians to work in his films. So, there was no one to help me and it took more than a year to complete the editing of the film,” says Nishad, who did not find any work in the industry for a few years after that.

However, after a brief stint with various Malayalam TV channels, he returned to the industry as a spot editor.

friendship and harmony

This was during Anil Radhakrishnan Menon’s spot editing Answer 24 Kathmi(2016), that Nishad met Khalid. Three years later, he starred in Khalid’s Mammootty-starrer. worked together on unda(2019), which told the story of a group of Kerala policemen who are sent on election duty to a tribal village in Chhattisgarh. “Although thallumala Many doors have been opened for me, unda I enjoyed this work the most because it is mainly a travel story in which these characters are going from one place to another. It has a classic touch to it and it is always fun to edit the interactions between a group of characters,” he says.