Basheer & the Pied Pipers: Shooting wild with Rahim Khan

The director discusses Basheer and the Pied Pipers’ upcoming music video.

ISLAMABAD:

The buzzing of insects, the sound of wind breezing through hollow space mixed with the blare of distant sirens and distinctive electronica beats. This is the haunting opening of Basheer & the Pied Pipers’ (BPP) “Margalla Winds” from their extended-play called Paperclouds. The song evokes a deep nostalgia for Islamabad nights — like the city itself, the track is at once organic and artificial.

This dichotomy of synthetic versus natural took director Rahim Khan to the green areas of Islamabad’s jungles and forests. For the soon-to-be-released music video, he envisioned fusing electronica motifs with the natural environment, while maintaining the song’s essence and focus. Like a magician working under the dark shadows of tall pine, bamboo and eucalyptus, Khan lit up the wilderness, literally, with a menagerie of strobes, disco, laser and fairy lights.

Short of using a machete, he admits, it’s nearly impossible to navigate through the lethal, dense foliage — Khan ripped tracksuit bottoms (in half) offer sufficient proof.

From hearing uncanny sounds at night to wrapping leagues worth of lights around trees on site, Khan’s got the inside scoop and agreed to a ‘behind-the-scenes’ interview with The Express Tribune.

Shooting wild

“It wasn’t easy,” he explains. “In addition to the difficult foliage, something happens to the trees this time of the year. They go black with ‘pine soot’ and I got covered in that stuff too,” adds Khan. Other challenges included, transporting ladders and a generator, 200 metres of blue and 150 metres yellow fairy lights and 100 metres of electric wiring. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any ideal forests with built-in sockets and plugs,” he says. The threat of wild boars also shadowed the crew. Khan states, “There was some rustling in the trees last night that scared us. It was really creepy, could’ve been a boar or something even bigger.”

 The vision

“Islamabad’s mountains and forests were immediately implied. I felt it was a nature song and wanted to bring that out,” he says. Even BPP agreed that the song captures their love of the city’s natural setting. Khan adds, “For the video, I imagined a dark forest in the moonlight, which lights up during the climax. When you listen to electronica, you’ll think of a club, maybe even flashing lights. I thought, ‘Why not put that in a natural setting?’.” Khan wanted to complement BPP’s music, which he admires greatly (“Their sound is completely unique. I haven’t heard the like in Pakistan yet; these guys are pioneers”). Hence, the video is devoid of distractions and people, it’s entirely focused on hybridising nature. “The guys agreed to this, which I really appreciated. It’s rare for up and coming artists to deny themselves screen time,” sates Khan.

The procedure

Khan mentions that the crew approached the Assistant Commissioner City and the SSP to get a No Objection Certificate (NoC) to shoot in the city. Remarkably, it went smoothly and the crew got certified within three days. Khan shot at Hotspot and the woodsy terrain between sectors F/5 and F/6 near Marriott.

“We’ve been working on the video since Ramazan,” says Khan. “Did a seven-hour shoot last night — from setting up to taking everything down.” The set attracted many a passerby, as Khan shares, “A lot of people, from aunties taking walks, to guys to motorbikes, would stop and check out the set and ask us questions especially when we lit up the trees. It was nice to see people genuinely curious about what we were doing.”

The video is set to launch in Islamabad before the upcoming Eidul Azha and will be released on Facebook, YouTube and Koolmuzone.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 21^st, 2011.