Sarmad Shafique

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

When producing any media text, conventions are followed and broken. Media texts with similar conventions fall under the same genre. There are general conventions in every medium, eg; establishing shots in films.

To produce our music video we had to follow and break many conventions of the sufi rock genre and conventions of music videos in general.

The music video does not have a proper start or an end, this is a common conventions of music video, this gives the video a dream-like feel. The narrative represents a young couple who have an abusive relationship. The guy does drugs and is carefree, the girl is a victim of domestic violence and depression. Here we broke one of the common music video convention, that objectifying women as sexual objects, present in the video to please the male audience. We broke this convention, in no way did we portray the character as an object or a prop but we created a character who develops throughout the narrative. She is being suppressed in the beginning, later she begins to stand up for her self, she confronts the suppressor and burns the pictures which connotes a new beginning, and after she runs away she’s free.

We picked up a few conventions from sufi rock music videos on how to represent the band, what shots to use, what the location should be like, how the mise-en-scene should be handled etc.

An establishing shot is a very common convention in film and TV, without it the video starts abruptly. Shalimar Gardens, the location of the shoot is a part of ancient Mughal architecture, the use of these types of locations in sufi rock music videos is a common convention as these buildings age back to the time of the sufi poets and derveshs.

Khailash Kher’s “Teri Deewani”

Junoon’s “Sayonee” Our music video

The representation of the artist or the band also follows conventions of sufi music videos. We show our band members wearing traditional Pakistani dresses and accessories. They’re wearing beads and bands, shawls with Arabic writing on them. They’re dressed as typical sufi rock artists. They use western and eastern instruments.

The whirling dervish dance performed by the the character in the narrative is also a common convention in sufi music videos as that dance represents Sufism. The dance shows that the sufi dervish is taking knowledge from god and passing it down to the people. Junoon’s Sayonee also features this dance.

The band in our video Junoon’s Sayonee Our Video

We’ve used close-ups for each band member, expressions are shown and when the lead singer looks into the camera he’s trying to connect with the audience. This is a common convention of music videos. Close ups of the instruments is a convention of a performance video. We used parallel cutting to show the band preforming and the narrative, this too is a convention of music videos.

A common convention in music videos is that after going through a breakup the person is devastated in the narrative. He or she does are often seen using drugs or something negative but in our case we showed that she was free after the breakup she felt happy during the dance, the process brought a positive transformation.

We’ve represented social issues such as illegal drug use and domestic violence. Women are thought of as the weaker sex in this society and we broke this stereotype. Another stereotype that we broke is that it is often assumed that women need men to be happy, in several music videos and films women are portrayed as helpless and expect a “prince charming” to save them but in our case our character is strong and she does not need a man to be happy.