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

-by Shahbano Munir

Conventions are the one of the common things audience expects to see in a media product. Before making my music video I did a detailed research to find out my generic conventions.

  Our video is non-linear narrative and performance based; the story is based on how a female is shown as a weaker sex in our society. It revolves around the life of our main lead character Ayela. Instead of doing any experiments we have followed the conventions in our music video. Our genre is “Sufi rock". Which is a sub genre of rock. It combines rock and classical Sufi music.

My team and I used various conventions from different music videos that we have seen and we tried to adapt as many conventions as possible.

The first convention we have used is the establishing shot in the start. We have used the natural realistic lighting and tripod is used for shooting to follow our generic convention. The historical location and mise-en-scene used in the video represents the typical culture of Sufism.

Kailash kher (Teri deewnani)

The representation of our music video stereotypes the typical Sufi music artists. We have shown our characters in our traditional dress code (Shalwar kameez) dull and dark clothes accessories e.g. beads, necklaces, scarf, and Afghanistani hats these convention are also represented in different music videos of the same genre e.g. “Sayonee” by junoon and “Teri Deewani” by Kailash kher. The band artist is doing the lip syncing which is was so far the most difficult but the most important part for our music video to look real.

We have used the simple camera and editing techniques that are mostly used in the music videos like midshot, long shot, fade-ins, fadeouts, dissolve and close-ups of the instruments and characters to emphasize on their expressions. In most of the Sufi music videos a girl is shown doing the whirling darwesh dance, which connotes the ecstatic ritual. By using conventions I can make the audience relate to our video.

We are targeting specific audience from teenagers to adults. My group and I wanted to throw a light on variety of social groups and issues that are present in our lower ,middle and higher class societies through the personalities of our characters. 1.Women are considered as weaker sex and there is a significant amount of male dominance in the society. We showed both the cases and also changed the idea of how the women takes a strong step, gives up and runs away from everything in search of peace. 2. Another issue we chose to enlighten our audience was about the drug use. Which is common among the teenagers and the consequences of being a victim of it.

However, we tried to challenge a convention like other Sufi music videos there is always a love story shown where couples are trying to find love within each other we have showed an opposite concept of a girl who wants to get free of every problem her husband has caused her and one day she gives up and runs away from all the worldly matters to a place where she could find peace.