Over the years, South Indians have been shown, stereotypically, as dark-skinned, lungi-wearing, sporting heavy accents, which cannot be further from the truth.

The South is rife with culture, and their contribution to the arts is often overlooked by mainstream media when painting them with the same brush.

Netflix wanted to announce their commitment to telling more local authentic stories in Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada - languages of the South and truly represent the nuances of the regions.

The brief was open and expectations were high. And as is the case with most music videos, the biggest challenges were a tight budget and an even tighter timeline.

We built a stage to showcase the rich South Indian culture and on that stage we put on a performance that could tell their stories.

Given that 72% of the OTT audience prefers to watch content in their native languages. We wanted them to see their stories represented authentically.

The anthem featured 4 prominent South Indian artists performing in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam about the contributions of their region to art and culture, all woven together seamlessly to create a sense of storytelling, all the while shattering the existing stereotype of South India.

The crux of this music video is simple yet powerful - storytelling. We all grow up with stories, some told to us, some we tell others, some we see on screen.

With the arrival of Indian hip-hop as a major force that has managed to combine both commercial appeal and underground credibility, we leveraged the fervour with Hanumankind, Ariv U, Siri Narayan and Neeraj Madhav.

Humankind, the Kerala-born, Texas-raised MC had long been earmarked for his ability to pen razor-sharp bars and trade punchlines with the best MCs the country had to offer.

Chennai-born Arivu’s career always had a politically conscious insight. With his music he often draws parallels between oppari (an ancient form of lamenting in southern India) and hip-hop as a move to restore the art form to its originality.

Siri Narayan, a female singer, rapped her way up to the top of the competitive, male-dominated and mostly Hindi-speaking space by spitting hypnotic lyrics in Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, and English.

Malayalam actor-rapper Neeraj Madhav is one of the first Mollywood actors to make a pan-Indian mark on OTTs.

To give a sense of personal tales being told, we extensively researched each artist’s background, their culture and specific stories that they wanted to tell.

Our aim was to understand each artist’s words and present them in a manner that highlighted their individual styles, environment and language, while still being a part of the same music video.

We came up with a different visual theme for each artist rooted in the same celebration of local storytelling. Local inspirations and influences were added to each setup which reflected that region’s proud storytelling traditions. Like gossip as a part of oral storytelling culture at local addas of Karnataka, fusion of the western world and south India and different art styles coming to life.

The song struck a chord with the audience and as such was streamed 1.3Million times on Spotify, the video garnered 36.6Million impressions and 7.8Million views. Reaction videos to the song have garnered upwards of 2M views whereas dance covers have added 1 Million views to the mix.