MUMBAI: Leading up to the Vh1 Supersonic music festival, digital content studio, Supari Studios conceptualised and produced a film that draws attention to the sense of belonging that music gives us. The film uses a spoken word piece, complemented by interesting match-cuts and catchy music, to weave together a narrative targeting the festival’s tagline and collective ethos- ‘Be There Be Free’.
When did you first discover music? Was it in a quiet corner of your room, when you just got acquainted with the internet? Or was it in an old record shop down the street, a few blocks from home? Or perhaps on a sunny afternoon after school, when you and your friends shut yourselves from the world to write down new song lyrics and string together some tunes? Over the years, music brought us together and made us feel like we were all a part of something bigger, across ages and spaces, irrespective of who we were and what life threw our way.
Through the course of the film, we see a variety of different individuals in their own unique settings- all of whom can truly be themselves in a place that celebrates their uniqueness: the Vh1 Supersonic Music Festival.
Nisha Vasudevan, Director of the film said, “When the brief first came to us, the idea was to highlight VH1 Supersonic’s inclusive ethos and employ a visual language that would make it stand out from other festival properties in that space. We approached this piece with a heartfelt, poetry-based script that was meant to evoke nostalgia and take us back to a time when the internet first opened the world of music up to today's millennial. It was during those moments that we began to identify with specific subcultures, and those are the influences that make us the people we are proud to be today - and we wanted to specifically strike this chord. Visually, we decided to use match-cuts and action-cuts to move the narrative forward from person to person. The idea was to showcase a wide range of personalities while also alluding to commonalities between them all.”
Manoti Jain, Executive Producer, Supari Studios said, “When Vh1 approached us to create a film promoting their Supersonic Music Festival, we tried to put together a narrative that encapsulated the festival’s vibe and inclusive spirit, while also bringing back memories that people associate with music. The team went down a slightly different route from the usual festival videos, conceptualising a spoken word piece that was both nostalgic, as well as hard-hitting, with the aim to immerse viewers into a time and space that they could truly resonate with. We brainstormed on visuals that best represented our encounters with music, as well as on showcasing a diverse set of people, to make the film as reflective of reality as possible. Rather than using actors to play different parts in the film, we also chose to work with real people who were characteristic of each scene, so that we could best represent their stories.”
