Voiceovers and Wong Kar Wai
The voiceover went through multiple drafts until we eventually settled on one that everybody liked.
The initial idea was to remove the full-fledged multiple flashbacks of the band into more fragmented, shorter scenes and discard any dialogue while keeping only the initial paragraph of the voiceover. This was done because of various reasons, e.g. we realised that the people in our cast may not be the best/most confident in terms of delivering dialogues convincingly, and we needed to minimise the amount of action happening to ensure we did not exceed the time limit.
However, executing this change in the voiceover made us end up with the exact opposite problem: the new version of the voiceover seemed much too short for a 2-minute-long video, and we definitely did not want our audience to be sitting through over one minute of just background music—or worse: awkward silence.
Esha and I soon had a random epiphany to begin our voiceover with a list of words in Urdu that would indicate the duo’s downfall.
I asked my mother to suggest some synonyms to "zawaal" ("downfall" in Urdu) so I could incoporate a semantic field of words associated with downfall into the script (yes, I am a post-colonial child, and my Urdu isn't the best, so I took my mother's assistance in confirming whether the words I wanted to use would be suitable).
One idea led to another and I finally came up with a newer, longer (but not too long), and more dramatic draft of the main voiceover that could perhaps be considered a manifestation of my love for Wong Kar Wai’s profound voiceovers:
Slight adjustments were also made to this, i.e. I switched the positions of the last two sentences, and then we had our final-est version of the journalist’s main voiceover (excluding the interview bits):
Breaking News
To heighten the film opening’s dramatic impact and add that additional spice, if you will, Esha proposed the idea of coming up with more headlines that she could incorporate into the ending montage of the project.
Since we all agreed, I ended up modifying the headlines to not only make more logical sense according to the alterations made in the narrative (e.g. the change from a band to a duo) but also have a higher number of titles to create more enigma than before and appeal to a potentially curious audience.
Some of the headlines I wrote were inspired by real-life headlines about rock icons like David Bowie to add another layer of authenticity to the narrative.
Shakespearean Layers of Meaning
Representation
One of the things I really wanted to keep in the final draft of the script was the homage to Romeo and Juliet in the voiceover. This was primarily because the intertextual reference to an incredibly popular romantic tragedy in a subversive context would immediately intrigue an audience in my opinion. By urging the audience to view Romeo and Juliet in a queer context instead of a heteronormative one, and a local Pakistani context (i.e. the replacement of “Verona” with “Lahore”) instead of a European one, I hoped to add additional layers of meaning to the text in a way that might not have been possible without such a nuanced referential code that solidifies the theme of the representation of the LGBTQ+ community in our film opening.
Moreover, the journalist’s voiceover starts in Urdu and immediately sets the foundations for the cultural conflict present at the heart of our hypothetical film, one that is solidified even further by the controversial headlines that are both in English and Urdu—the humorous interweaving of the two languages in earlier drafts of the script were replaced by a more serious tone to convey to the audience the weight of the impact of challenges our central characters may have been facing in ‘90s Pakistan.
The Journalist Takes a Semi-Backseat
After much contemplation, the group realised that our film opening seemed a little stagnant and monotonous. Hence, we decided to incorporate interview scenes and scrapped the journalist’s flashback scenes that were initially written by me in one of the earlier drafts of the script. Maroosh, Myiesha, and Esha worked on the additional dialogues that were included in the interview scenes.
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