Q1.

How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social
groups or issues?

For our Advanced Portfolio, Fateh and I made a musical promotion package for our Eastern Soul and
Folk artist, Raza. The musical promotion package included a music video, digipak and website for the
artist. We decided to film a music video with the hybrid style of performance based, concept based and
narrative based music videos, following a non-linear style in the narrative of the story.

Our music video followed a narrative of two main protagonists after experiencing sexual abuse and
assault. Adding conceptual shots in our music video was also important to us as it helped us show a
sensitive topic on screen in a sensitive and controlled manner. Adding performance to our music video
was also essential as although our singer, Raza, plays the part of one of the main protagonists in the
music video, our aim was to promote his music and adding performances aided us in doing so. It
reinforced his star image as well.

Our digipak is very similar to our music video in terms of aesthetics, as the aim of our video and the
album was for our artist to speak up about his own story. We kept similar colors in both the music video
performances and our digipak to create a connection between the two. This is why it was vital for us to
do photoshoots continuously throughout our video shooting process. We also kept the aesthetic for our
website similar, but decided to stick to black and white colors to keep it clean and simple.

I wanted to portray an important message through our music video so coming up with a strong idea was
vital. Dealing with an issue such as sexual abuse and harassment was extremely important to me, living
in a society that deems such issues to be unimportant and brushed under the rug. Not being taught the
difference between a good touch and a bad touch, as talking on a topic with any sexual context is seen
as taboo children grow up to learn all of this information on their own. It was only recently with
allegations raised against famous Pakistani stars such as Ali Zafar, and models such as Eman Suleman
speaking up about her own experiences on social media platforms such as Instagram that the topic has
been given any importance. As the director of the music video, I felt it would be important to start a
conversation on a topic that should have been talked about a long time ago. We decided to go with two
storylines, including the narrative of our male performance as although, according to statistics, women
face this problem more than men do, it is not only a problem faced by women.

Fateh and I searched for the perfect song for a few days, thinking of possible songs from the top of our
heads as well is listening to songs on YouTube hoping something will work, which is when Fateh told me
to listen to Saathi Rey by Arko. He was already pretty eager about using the song and once I heard the
lyrics, which are about losing someone close to you, I knew it would be the perfect song.

When discussing how we would go about shooting our music video, looking at and studying codes and
conventions of genres, styles of music videos we used and showing social issues was important for us.
Simply, codes are a system of signs which create meaning of media texts and conventions are the
‘accepted’ way of doing something. Conventions are important when creating media texts as it is easier
for the audience to decode the texts. When dealing with a specific genre, for example the folk genre in
reference to music videos, using conventions of the genre will be a sense of familiarity to the audience,
so it will be easier for them to understand the aim of the producer of the text.

Our song was of Eastern Folk and Soul genres, which went perfectly with our music video idea as music
of these genres is usually driven by emotions and a lot of meaning. Folk music videos usually tend to
revolve around a simple and strong narrative with no flashy editing or post production effects added,
which is much like our own video. Although our storyline was somewhat complex, it was strong and we
focused more on telling the story rather than including special effects and crazy images. We stuck to
simple shots such as close ups and mid close ups, with little use of long shots as close up shots are more
personal and help the audience understand the feelings of the actor in different situations. These genres
tend to have simple mis-en-scene which is easy to understand with conceptual meaning behind most
props, locations and actions, which is what we incorporated in our music video as well, for example a
possible connotation for fire used in the video can be the pain our artist is suffering through. We have
used dark colours such as blues and blacks in our music video, which is a convention seen in Soul music
videos, but we also used brighter colours when dealing with performances especially at exterior
locations and the use of colour in Iman’s background and Wali’s paintings. Although this is not seen
often in the conventions of these genres, we felt it was important to add the pops of colour, for example
the green in both paintings develops a connection between younger Wali and his older self.

Since our music video was a mixture of a conceptual, performance based and narrative based music
video, we mixed conventions of all in our music video. When editing our music video, we knew it was
important to keep in mind that this would be a musical promotion package for our artist, so it was
important he received more screen time than any other character. Adding conceptual meaning to props
and actions was a vital part in explaining our story line to the audience. Wanting to show such a
sensitive topic on screen was hard as these media texts can be triggering to many and sensitivity when
talking about or showing such a topic is important. So conceptual scenes such as the scene of Iman
getting out of the bathtub whereas Wali stays in, signifies that getting help might save you unlike Wali,
who was left to drown. We also desaturated the footage in post-production as eastern folk and soul
music videos usually lack colour, we especially desaturated scenes of abuse taking place as it signifies
that the scene is from the past and did not take place at the same time as the rest of the events in the
video.

I also wanted to attach the #MeToo movement to our musical promotional package. Although we talked
about the movement on various occasions on the blog, the attachment of the movement would not be
clear to someone who is buying or seeing our products without looking through the blog. This is why I
decided to attach the hashtag to our digipak in a subtle way. When opening the digipak, the inlay
contains a message from the performer to the audience which I felt would be necessary as it is a sort of
explanation to the choice of songs in the album as well as the music video. The message clearly shows
that he himself uses the hashtag #MeToo which shows his support for the movement. We did not want
to show the incidents in depth in our video as it is insensitive which is also why we obeyed the codes
and conventions of dealing with a social issue such as sexual assault and sexual abuse. If we did not do
this, the image of our artist may have been turned to controversial and this was not the aim of our
video.