Director Balaaji’s upcoming thriller ‘D3’, which features actors Prajin and Vidya Pradeep in the lead, will be about a series of events that happen in just a day.
Giving out details of his film, Balaaji says, “I have created the story based on a real incident that I got to learn of and about which the public aren’t aware. This element will keep the screenplay racy from beginning till end.”
On the experience of shooting ‘D3’, the director says, “We have shot the movie despite serious challenges posed by nature. We started shooting the movie during the non-rainy season in Kuttralam. However, despite this, 70 per cent of our shooting days had a heavy downpour of rain. We had to complete filming, overcoming this challenge.”
“When we had finished 60 per cent of the shooting, Covid-19 hit the world and a 30-year-old actor, who had played a prominent role in the film, passed away due to Corona. Due to this, we had to reshoot his entire portion with another actor.
“Similarly, we had planned to shoot a few scenes in a famous hospital in Chennai. The cost of renting the place was Rs 2.5 lakh per day. On the morning of the shoot, we had made all arrangements when we got we the disappointing news that actor Varghese Mathew, who had landed at the Chennai airport from Hyderabad, had tested positive for Covid-19.
“We had no other option but to cancel the shoot. Such have been the challenges that we faced during the filming of D 3.”
Manoj of Bmass Entertainments and Samuel Godson of JKM Productions have jointly produced the film ‘D3’, the title look of which was revealed by filmmaker Venkat Prabhu recently.
While actor Charlie plays an important character, others in the cast include Varghese Mathew and ‘Mogamull’ Abhishek.
A 2018 drought and heat wave led to forest fires in Europe (Getty)
As the world warms, droughts and heat waves are – but what happens when they happen at the same time?
Researchers from the UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research investigated so-called ‘compound hot-dry events’ where .
The researchers warn that such events will become much more common due to global warming.
The researchers define ‘compound hot-dry events’ as summers in which the average temperature was higher than in 90 percent of the summers between 1950 and 1980, and precipitation was simultaneously lower than in 90 percent of those years.
One example is the 2018 drought and heat wave in Europe which led to forest fires and wildfires across the continent.
Read more:
The researchers warn that compound hot-dry events will increase with global warming: while the frequency lay at 3 percent between 1950 and 1980, which statistically is an occurrence every 33 years, in a climate that is two degrees warmer, this figure will be around 12 percent.
This would be a fourfold increase compared to the historical period studied.
Climate researcher Dr Jakob Zscheischler of UFZ said, “In the past, periods of drought and heat waves were often sidered separately; there is, however, a strong correlation between the two events, which can be seen in the extremes experienced in 2003 and 2018 in Europe.
“The negative consequences of these compound extremes are often greater than with one single extreme.”
The researchers used simulations to compare historical results with a future climate two degrees warmer than pre-industrial times.
Dr Emanuele Bevacqua, first author and climate researcher at the UFZ said, “The advantage of these multiple simulations is that we have a much larger volume of data than with conventional model ensembles, enabling us to better estimate compound extremes,”
Read more:
Last year’s UN climate change report warned that extreme weather events like heatwaves and droughts which previously would have happened every 50 years could soon happen every four.
The report was the first to quantify the likelihood of extreme events across a wide variety of scenarios.
The researchers also warned that other ‘tipping point’ events are a possibility.
The researchers wrote, “Abrupt responses and tipping points of the climate system, such as strongly increased Antarctic ice sheet melt and forest dieback, cannot be ruled out”.
Dr. Robert Rohde, Lead Scientist of Berkeley Earth said, “What were once-in-50-year heat extremes are now occurring every 10 years.
“By a rise of two degrees celsius, those same extremes will occur every 3.5 years.”
The report found that (for example) once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are already 1.3 times more likely and 6.7% wetter, compared with the 50 years leading up to 1900 when human-driven warning began to occur.
Read more:
Droughts that previously happened once a decade now happen every five or six years.
Xuebin Zhang, a climatologist with Environment Canada in Toronto warned that as the world warms, such extreme weather events will not just become more frequent, they will become more severe.
Zhang said that the world should also expect more compound events, such as heat waves and long-term droughts occurring simultaneously.
Zhang said, “We are not going to be hit just by one thing, we are going to be hit by multiple things at the same time.”Last week’s UN climate change report warned that extreme weather events like heatwaves and droughts which previously would have happened every 50 years could soon happen every four.
