The movers and shakers of ‘Mariam’

Team behind Mooroo’s latest stop-motion music video pieced together 2,600 pictures for the project

KARACHI:

For those who have spent their childhood watching Lego cartoons or tagging along  with Wallace and Gromit on their hair-raising adventures, stop-motion remains nothing less than a triumph for the imagination.

However for those behind the scenes, this kind of film-making remains one of the most painstaking works of art that requires extraordinary attention to detail and hours and hours of hard work.

Not many would sign up voluntarily for something that requires the recreation of each movement and gesture with careful precision and artistic execution, for a video that will last for a few minutes only. However, a team of aspiring film-makers and media sciences students from Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist) took up the challenge when they were tasked with the responsibility of creating a music video for singer-songwriter Taimoor ‘Mooroo’ Salahuddin’s latest single, Mariam.

Having heard the track even before he got involved with the project, director Salman Noorani told how he always had the idea of stop-motion animation for the video in his mind. “When I first heard the track and its melody, I instantly felt that there was a certain lag and that a few frames were missing,” Salman told The Express Tribune. While the music video may be Salman’s first mainstream venture, his tryst with the art of stop-motion goes way back. For the young director, the genre was like love at first sight. His work pays homage to a famous stop-motion video that inspired him several years ago — Coldplay’s Strawberry Swing.





Wanting to create a “desi-fied” version of the video for a long time, Salman cooked up a story for the project alongside his partner-in-crime Fariha Afzal Khan. The plot shows four different love stories in  a local setting; with all of them meeting a tragic end.

If coming up with a unique story for the music video was no easy task, perhaps the trickiest parts of the entire process was creating the set. Eruj Hadi, another Szabist alumnus, who was the art director for Mariam, shared the difficulty of making a set that would transform an otherwise morbid and dark concept into something funny. “Salman has this trademark style of using death as a major theme in his work. While the innate jerk in stop-motion videos does make visuals come across as funny, I also used bright colors such as red, orange and green to counter the dark overtone of the story,” stated Eruj.

Shot over a span of over two weeks that saw the team piece together, bit by bit, a series of 2,600 stills in the 12-frames-per-second video, the filming process was not supposed to go beyond seven days. “We had people who left the project after two days of filming since they were unable to cope with its demanding nature. Many people in my team were not well-versed with stop-motion but they still gave their level best,” said Salman, explaining the delay.

Recalling how single shoots would last more than 18 hours, both Eruj and Salman said the project was a “total team effort” and credited Mooroo for showing a tremendous amount of faith in their vision.

Apart from Salman, Fariha and Eruj helming the project in their capacities, Wajahat Baloch and Meer Farhad Jamali took charge of the camera and lighting, and Mooroo himself edited the sequences. Salman and Fariha co-authored the storyline.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 18^th, 2015.

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