Wonderla

Raavana has ten heads, and every one of them is about to be blown. A silhouette in a gold crown steps out of the smoke, ten faces fanned out across his shoulders, and gets on a boat ride. The boat drops. One head goes off in a burst of orange and purple. Nine to go.

Wonderla Dasara is a 45-second festive film for India's largest amusement park chain, written by Talented and directed by Nitin Menon for First December Films. It takes the villain whose effigy burns on Dasara night, sends him round the park, and lets the rides do to him what the festival does. It went out on 2 October 2024 with a buy two, get one free ticket offer.

At a glance

• Brand: Wonderla Parks and Resorts
• Agency: Talented
• Production house: First December Films
• Director: Nitin Menon
• Director of Photography: Yash Khanna
• Launch: 2 October 2024, for Dasara
• Running time: 45 seconds
• Line: This Dasara, get mind blown at Wonderla
• Offer carried: Buy 2 Get 1 Free

The brief

Wonderla runs parks in Bengaluru, Kochi, Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar, and festivals are when families decide to go. Dasara in the south is the big one: ten days, a holiday week, and in Karnataka the Mysuru celebrations that make it the state's festival. The park needed a film that owned the festival rather than borrowed it, sold a ticket offer, and did both in the language of a brand device Wonderla had been building: the blown mind.

That device is the whole positioning. Wonderla's rides are meant to be so much that your head goes. Talented had already used it for Onam, and would go on to build a full campaign around the mind-blown emoji in 2025. For Dasara the question was who to blow the mind of.

The idea: ten heads, ten rides

The festival gives you the answer. Dasara ends with Raavana, the ten-headed king, going up in flames. A man with ten heads is a man whose mind can be blown ten times over. So the film casts him as the guest.

• He arrives out of darkness and smoke, crown first, the ten heads fanning out as he steps into the light.
• First ride: a boat plunge. The splash hits and one head bursts into coloured smoke.
• He throws his arms wide and roars with delight, palms and sky behind him.
• The Rockin Tug swings him against a painted wave. Another head goes.
• Strapped into a spinning ride, mouth open, two more heads burst at once.
• A Dasara feast on a long table under festival lights, plates of puris and sweets. He eats. Heads keep going.
• Night. A procession of drummers and dancers in red and gold, the kind that walks a town on Dasara, surrounds him.
• The park's own Raavana effigy goes up in fireworks and flame, and the ten-headed guest stands in front of it, every head blown.
• A boy in the crowd, face painted for the festival, looks up open-mouthed. Super: This Dasara, get mind blown.
• End card over the burning effigy: Buy 2 Get 1 Free, book now at wonderla.com.

The joke is structural. The effigy burns because Raavana is defeated. Here he is defeated by rides, one head at a time, and the burning at the end is the park's own Dasara celebration, so the mythology and the product are the same event.

The villain of the festival is the happiest man in the park. Every ride takes a head, and he asks for the next one.

Performance and costume

The film lives on one performance. The actor playing Raavana has to be both the demon king and a delighted child, and he does it with his whole face: eyes wide on the drops, arms thrown out at the sky, mouth open on the spinner. The ten-headed headdress is a practical build, a gold crown on a broad shoulder piece with nine moulded faces, and it stays on through a water ride and a spinning ride, which is its own small achievement. Production designer Sharath and art assistant Nivedita are credited for the build and the festival dressing.

Every head that bursts is a coloured smoke effect added in post by Philm CGI, and the colours are chosen to sit against the park: orange and purple against the pool blue, orange and pink against the terracotta arches. It is the same blown-mind effect Wonderla uses across its campaigns, multiplied by ten.

The shoot

Yash Khanna shot it inside a working Wonderla park, on real rides, with the camera mounted on the boats and the spinner so the guest's face is always in the frame as the ride hits. The daylight sequences are bright and saturated, the park's own colours. The night sequence changes register: string lights, a drum troupe, fireworks and a real effigy burn, shot to look like a town's Dasara rather than an amusement park's.

Line producer Santosh Kumar R ran the park days. The film was cut by Navneet Pant, with Rohit Padwal at After Studios on the online and Vineesh Vijayan on the grade, which holds the bright park and the firelit night in the same film.

Where it sat

• 2 October 2024: The film goes live on the Wonderla channels with the Buy 2 Get 1 Free Dasara offer, with the parks' Dasara Fest programming running alongside.
• 24 December 2024: First December Films publishes its cut.
• March 2025: Talented and Nitin Menon follow it with the Mind-Blown campaign for Wonderla, three films built on the same device, which the trade press described as building on the earlier Onam and Dussehra work.

What the film proves

This is the reference to reach for when a brief needs any of the following:

• a festive film that uses the festival's own story instead of decorating with it
• a brand device (here the blown mind) turned into a plot
• a comic performance in prosthetics and a practical costume, on real rides
• a shoot inside a live amusement park, day and night
• an offer message carried by a story rather than a price card

See more of our work, the director's reel and credits, or send us a script and a date.

Credits

• Client: Wonderla Parks and Resorts
• Agency: Talented
• Production house: First December Films
• Director: Nitin Menon
• Executive Producer: Ganesh Pareek
• Senior Producer: Imran Patel
• Producer: Ankit Singh
• Director of Photography: Yash Khanna
• Production Designer: Sharath
• Offline Editor: Navneet Pant
• CG: Philm CGI
• Online: Rohit Padwal, After Studios
• Grade: Vineesh Vijayan
• Line Producer: Santosh Kumar R