Project timeline: 2026 · video publication year. Published as a retrospective on 23 October 2026.
Fanaa lets me explore a darker visual world through music-video direction. With Tia Bajpai performing, Arian Romal credited for music and Mads Nielsen for cinematography, my task is to help the different elements belong to the same unsettling experience. The industrial surroundings and threatening figures are part of that visual identity.
I enjoy the possibilities of horror because a camera can change the meaning of a place without explaining everything about it. A figure at the edge of a composition can make the audience question a space that seemed understandable a moment earlier. That is the kind of tension I want to explore, where attention becomes part of the fear.
What the project asks of me
A dark image alone does not create sustained unease. If the same visual statement is repeated without change, the viewer becomes familiar with it. I want the direction to think about development: how one image prepares another, where certainty is removed and when a new element changes what the audience thought it understood.
A music video compresses that work into a shorter form. It cannot depend on the length of a feature to establish a world gradually. The design, performance and rhythm need to communicate quickly, while still allowing enough uncertainty to make the experience more than a collection of frightening pictures.
The person in the frame remains essential. I want to understand what the performer contributes to the world, and how the world changes the way that performance is read. A singer in an unsettling environment can appear vulnerable, distant or unexpectedly in control depending on the direction of attention around her.
That relationship is more interesting to me than treating the performer as a separate element placed between horror images. The video needs a shared visual identity. The people, the surroundings and the sequence of images should feel as if they belong to the same dramatic intention, even when the intention is to keep the viewer uncertain.
Cinematography becomes part of that thinking. A clear composition can make an unsettling figure more effective than a crowded image in which nothing is allowed to register. The question is what the audience can understand, and which part of the image it cannot yet explain.
I want Fanaa to say something about the range of my directing. It is a stylised piece, but stylisation still needs a purpose. My ambition is to create a world that the performance can inhabit, with images that make the song more particular rather than only making the video look darker.
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