Shah Rukh Khan himself wrote the ending: One Hand Clap on Amazon Prime's Pathaan promos
The founders Aakash Shah and Naveed Manakkodan of One Hand Clap share the low-down behind conceptualising the promos starring SRK and Deepika Padukone
There's nothing that fans love more than seeing their favourite stars being candid on camera. With that insight, the team of One Hand Clap conceptualised the promotional films of Pathaan, which have been receiving rave reviews. The promo videos feature leads Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone in hilariously self-aware avatars, baulking at cliched inputs given by the directors.
The founders Aakash Shah and Naveed Manakkodan of the agency spoke to us about the making of these two quirky films. The agency is the retainer social media marketing agency of Amazon Prime for over four years.
Many times, celebrities actively take a part in creating films and are part of the writing process and the same happened with the film featuring Khan alongside YouTuber Bhuvan Bam. The founders shared with us that the film was written but the ending was written by SRK on set itself.
Speaking about the brief given by the OTT platform, they said, “Pathaan on Prime” was the brief. Because while it is coming on prime it is still running in theatre so Pathan on Prime had to be attributed well. We brainstorm with the Amazon team a lot so this specific idea of an artist getting pestered because of bad ideas. The challenging part for Amazon and us was to attribute the film more to Prime," said the founders.
“It was written, the ending was something different, it was the iconic Shahrukh pose, but everyone said that cannot be the ending. SRK came on set and we narrated to him the two endings in our mind and then he came up with the ending himself. The ending was written by SRK.”
Deepika Padukone's promo is also made on a similar vein with influencer Danish Sait. While Bam and SRK has worked together previously and so did Padukone. That's why the agency deicded to go with the pairing.
The founders said, “Bhuvan is the internet’s rockstar, SRK and him coming together created a moment.” Sait and Padukone, they have already worked and their chemistry which helped the founders to get the quirkiness out.
The only challenge that the founders had while making the film was the time crunch, in one day they had many things to do apart from making these films. They said, “We shot it in an hour. We had less time. 1 hr for SRK and 45 Mins with Deepika Padukone.”
Pathaan revived people’s love for Bollywood movies and gave SRK a major comeback. The film is a great case study for many film marketers to work on a smart strategy, slowly seeding hints in the minds of the audience thereby creating buzz.
