A poet and a musician, Faheem Abdullah is currently riding high on the acclaim and love his song, ‘Ishq’ has been receiving all this while. Interestingly, unlike so many other videos, this isn’t a ‘music video’ per se and instead is called a music film.
In an exclusive conversation with IWMBuzz, we asked how he managed to differentiate himself amid the increasing trend of music videos and still reach the maximum number of people, which led him to create and ideate a ‘music film’ and other things.
As a musician, with the constantly increasing trend of music videos, how do you make sure to differentiate yourself to have your song reach the maximum number of people but also stay true to its essence?
A. You know, as a musician, I think your primary focus needs to be on music. It needs to be the audio because it’s the audio; is the music part that people are going to listen to if they are listening to it from different audio streaming platforms. But now that the trend of music videos is growing, I think music videos are like a promotional tactic. That’s where the music videos come in. But of course, if there is a song that you have visually thought of, just like I mostly do when I make music, I think of a story running parallel to it. So, I think music videos also are very important. But now, to differentiate myself from what other people are doing, it’s not a conscious step that I take that I need to be different from the rest, but it’s just that I want to be true to the story. I want to be true to what I think or what I imagine. So, to me, a music video in itself has to be a translation, in my way, of the music that I create out of the song that I have made. So, I think that’s my ticket. Now, the music and the music video relationship kind of work there, and the essence is not supposed to be lost. Never. It should revolve around what you have made in terms of the audio, so the audio and the video need to be in sync.
Q. The concept of ‘music film’ is still a lesser explored factor. What made you think and conceptualize a music film that clocks approximately 8 minutes instead of a standard music video length that clocks not more than 4 or 5 minutes in the times of decreasing attention span?
A. I really like this question. So when we called ‘Ishq’, a music film and when we intended to make the video for Ishq, I knew all along that it could not be told within 4 minutes or whatever the runtime of this song was, because it is a very complex emotion and there had to be purity, there had to be a lot of stuff to it when a music film. When you hear “music film”(quote/unquote) and not a music video because of the runtime being 8 minutes and not 4 minutes, I believe, you know, when you look at Ishq, it looks like a micro cosmo film, like a microcosm of a feature film. So when you look at this, you can already imagine what else would be going on in their lives, you add seems to it in your mind. So I believe, now that the attention span of people, the audiences, is decreasing day by day, I think we should come closer to the original formats of how visual art used to be. We used to have short films, we used to have proper longer music videos, and now the attention span is decreasing. But why not work on it differently, and why not make people watch it? Why not get their attention and then make them watch a certain thing that is 8 minutes long? If it’s worth it, they will watch it. People still do watch 3-and-a-half-hour movies in movie theatres, so I’m sure they can spend 8 minutes of their day, I mean 8 minutes of the time, watching this musical film if it looks nice then if it really makes them feel good. So I think that’s the mantra, let us not follow what everybody is doing, let’s try and do something out of the box, so that that is what your USP is then.