Musicians place faith in visuals

For a long time, local artists have communicated through their singing, but now they are slowly incorporating good visuals as part of the package.

For long, most of the music videos produced by the local artists left a lot to be desired. They lacked depth in terms of scripting, the cohesion of the visuals, budgets were evidently low and the general set-up at times lacked direction.

But if recent developments are anything to go by, one cannot fail to notice the efforts that the artists are investing in producing videos.

Film producer Gift ‘Sukez’ Sukali says the budgets and quality of music videos depend on what the client wants. But he said for a basic video, he needs a budget not less than K600 000.

“We consider a number of factors depending on what the artist wants. We think of developing the concept, booking of sets and travelling where necessary. This is all determined by what the client wants. I have ever done videos with budgets as high as K5 million,” he said.

This week, three urban artists, Driemo, Saint and Merchah released music videos which had the social media buzzing with admiration. Driemo released his first single in 2023 Pano, Saint released a video for his last year’s song Pillow and newcomer Merachah released Nanji.

Within four hours of its release, Pano had attracted more than 10 000 views on YouTube, with many people praising the quality of the video.

Chris Ngoma wrote: “This is fire bro. The track is on point. The video is very hot.”

“The video is something else. You are so talented man,” commented Frank Alick on YouTube.

According Driemo’s  manager Van Ngongo,production of the video, which features renowned actor Kelvin Ng’oma, had a budget of K1.9 million. He said the plan is to match what musicians from other countries are doing.

He said: “If you are to match the international standards, you need huge investments. It is crucial now since globally people are united online. The standards have gone high and that leaves us with no choice.”

On his part, Saint, who invested K1 million in his video, said he has always tried to maintain a good budget for the production of his videos to keep in line with his ambitions to break into the international market.

“The only setback is resources. We always consider that if we invest this much in a video, how long will it take us to recoup that money. That is why we are still operating on small budgets. People are appreciating our talent, but we are not yet there.

“A good music video is one which will sell internationally and bring recognition to Malawi,” he said.

Seasoned music producer Tapps Bandawe said he is satisfied with the quality of music videos being produced at present. He said in this era of television, the success of the song is directly linked to the quality of the video.

He said: “You can see well-developed concepts which are well thought through. Our work is getting competitive. This week I have seen videos from Driemo and Saint, they are absolutely wonderful.

“They are using Malawian models and that is one thing I love about the videos. We are not trying to look too foreign, we have maintained the Malawian feel which is good.”

However, filmmaker and art critic Sam Mwakanema said though there has been some improvement there is need to adopt a more professional approach when producing videos since filmmaking is both a science and an art.

“There is little you can do by trial and error that can have a meaningful impact. There is a deficit in capacity. We can no longer give excuses to answers that have already been given. We lack originality to an extent,” he said.