I just had to put this out there. A couple of months ago I worked on a project with some colleagues of mine. The Project was called “Notes of Chagla”, and it was a TVC (televison commercial) to commemoradte 75 years of Pakistan. Instead of going the more generic route of giving tribute to our nations creators, we took a more artisitc turn and gave tribute to the person who composed Pakistans national anthem. Tributes have been given to Hafeez Jalandari (who wrote the natioanl anthem) but not to Ahmed G chagla (who made the original composition).
The story is about an university student who studies in the department of musicology. His thesis gets rejected just weeks before public display and the reason cited is for the compositions being to cliche and generic. His supervisor gives him the ultimatum to either come up with soemthing new or give up and try again net year. Devastated he locks himself up in his room. He is in a creative block and sees a picture of his father with a harmonium. (Just to give a backstory here, his father used to be a musician and one the first people who sang the national anthem). His son goes through his old stuff and comes across an old VHS tape that says “Interview”. His plugs in his old vcr and plays it. Up comes an old interview of his father. The host asks him what kind of music he prefers?. To give it a more patrotioc touch he replies that the national anthem is the only musical piece that resonates with him. His son gets an epiphany and goes on a search to find his fathers band together. These people are the only ones who know the original compostion of the national anthem. He brings them together for his thesis. Cut to the day of the thesis show and sadly his thesis is rejected again. He calls up his mother and tells her that he is giving up as his work got rejected again. His mother composes herself and tell her what his father used to say. “A musicians job is to spread music” and this is exactly what he does. He starts a live feed on his social media and shows a live perfoamce of his thesis.
Now cutting it down to 30 seconds would be unjust and even then I would not have ample time to animate. Will leave an animted version of my project for another day.
References
Notes of Chagla. 2022. [Film] Directed by Sarmad Cheema. Pakistan: Filmbaily.
Arsalan Awais 