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Music videos in the spotlight

Lecturers at the University of London, Anna Watson and Angela Sasse, have discoverd that “a video without sound is incomplete and sound with irrelevant video misleads.”

The research touches on several parts of video images and audios and exposes gaps on quality of videos being produced in the world.

Malawi is on the rise in video making, and musicians top the list. However, if the findings of the research are to be weighed against Malawian music, the country would score less on relevance of messages and pictures in the video.

However, as agreed by Musicians Associations of Malawi (MAM) president Reverend Chimwemwe Mhango, gospel music would perform the worst.

The Nation in an analysis of some of the gospel videos found that there are a lot of gaps in achieving relevance of messages and pictures used in videos.

As witnessed in one of the videos, a gospel artist is singing about the death of a mother and what it means to her family. However, the pictures in the video show happy faces and female dancers in tight and short skirts gyrating their waists.

Mhango, a gospel artist who has released many videos, said the situation is worrisome. He said he has observed this with great concern such that his office has been tasked to source funds to civic educate musicians on video shooting.

“It’s worrisome to observe that an artist has produced a good song, but messes it up with a poor video. As a country, we are far behind in video quality more especially gospel artists. I appreciate what our friends in secular music particularly urban music do. You are able to identify relevance and value that the pictures are adding up to the song,” said Mhango.

On why it is like this, Mhango says there is lack of direction when making videos. He says most artists just rush into shooting without proper planning.

“Most gospel artists do not ask themselves the importance of videos on their songs. What they know is just to have people dancing in the video. It should not be like that. A video complements the message in the song and there is need for accurate relevance between the two,” he said while pointing out that this is because many of them do not produce video scripts and employ a director to direct the shooting of the videos.

Chancellor College graduate in music Montfort Manyozo concurs with Mhango. However, he says the infection is not only in gospel music.

“Irrelevance of pictures and images in a video is a big problem in both secular and gospel music and as a country we need to do something. I know the problem is always excitement. Many artists think having videos of their songs is an achievement and disregard the importance of the quality of the video,” he said.

Manyozo, however, said some artists and video makers are scoring high in camera setting and quality of the pictures in the video, but score less on selection of pictures to match the messages in the songs.

As pointed by Mhango, Manyozo says lack of video scripts and professional video directors is contributing to the malaise.

However, urban music artist Piksy’s recent video of the single Uncle Short One is a classic example of an artist putting thought into productions.

Shot by international standard visual magic hot-shot Chipiliro Khonje the video which took almost six months to produce is a masterpiece. With over 12 000 views since it was uploaded onYouTube on April 10 the video has proved that Uncle Short One is really a popular beat.

Uncle Short One trails Unamata as Piksy’s second music video off his Maso album released in September last year.

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