the five Pancharatna Kriti compositions of Tyagaraja, as performed during Tyagaraja Aradhana. The aradhana, held on the fifth day of the festival, witnesses exponents of carnatic music from across the world converging at his samaadhi, where they sing his pancharatna kritis in unison as an homage to the saint. Shankar approached violin maestro Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, a regular participant at the actual event, to conceive and orchestrate the sequence. Vaidyanathan was serving as the secretary of Sri Thyagabrahma Mahotsava Sabha, the committee which organises the aradhana. The scene features him in a cameo and was shot in June 2004 at a studio in Chennai. Realistic sets were erected to resemble the actual venue and leading carnatic vocalists Sudha Ragunathan, Sirkazhi G. Sivachidambaram, O. S. Arun, P. Unni Krishnan and instrumentalists such as violinist A. Kanyakumari, mridangam exponent Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman were recruited to add a touch of authenticity. The two-minute scene was brought to life in "painstaking detail". The sequence was much talked about and well appreciated. In a fight sequence, Anniyan encounters about a hundred martial artists inside the fictional International Martial Arts School, Vodao. The stunt scene was shot at the JJ Indoor Stadium in Chennai over a period of 25 days. Peter Hein, the stunt choreographer, is a native of Vietnam. 127 professionally trained fighters were brought in from Vietnam for the shoot. During the rehearsals, the rope, to which the stuntmen were tied and hung upside down, gave in. About a dozen stuntmen crashed down from the balcony, injuring themselves badly. The action sequence was shot using 120 cameras for employing the time slice photography technique, a visual effect known as "bullet time" and popularised by the American film The Matrix (1999), to achieve the frozen-time effect. Shankar had earlier toyed with the idea of time-slice and tried it while filming the song "Ale Ale" in his Boys. While the time-freeze sequence in Boys was achieved by the linking of 60–62 cameras to attain a 180° rotation, Anniyan employed 120–122 cameras for a 270° rotation. The scene where Anniyan addresses a huge gathering was shot in a stadium in Hyderabad. As he speaks to the audience, the lights turn on and off in the background. Speaking on how the sequence was filmed, Ravi Varman said that they decided not to light up the entire stadium as they felt it would have looked flat. As the sequence was