To be honest, I knew people were going to like this video. From the day I read the pitch for this video, I knew this was going to be great and I was very excited about it. But I didn’t expect it to go as nuts as it has,” is Prateek Kuhad’s honest admission about the music video of Kasoor, which has already notched up over a million views since its release on June 30.
The Delhi-based singer-songwriter who enjoys cult status — riding on hits such as cold/mess, Raat Raazi, Kho Gaye Hum Kahan and Tum Jab Paas — has used Kasoor’s video to give us an eclectic assimilation of emotions surrounding love, sourced from a mix of his fans and friends. This mix covers an interesting milieu, starting with fans from his mailing list wearing a cold/mess sweatshirt to familiar faces like Jim Sarbh, Kavya Trehan and Mallika Dua. Each of them react to prompts and reminders of things such as first kisses, hardest break-ups and a person they are missing, which are all then strung together with the song. “I think the questions are so relevant that there will hardly be anybody who has not experienced at least one of those things, which is probably why everyone can relate to the video,” said Prateek, as we caught up with him over the phone. Excerpts from a chat with The Telegraph.

What gave you this idea to involve your fans and friends for Kasoor’s music video?

We wanted to put out Kasoor last year and we reached out to Jugaad (Jugaad Motion Pictures), who are the same people behind cold/mess. We sent them the song last year around July-August and then Dar (Gai) came back to me with three ideas, out of which two were more traditional music-video ideas with a narrative and actors in it but the third one is what the video is — asking a bunch of people these questions and making a video out of their reactions. I was immediately excited by this idea.

In contrast to cold/mess, which was very personal and autobiographical, Kasoor was not that much of a personal song — it was more of a love song that I wrote and is pretty much what the listener takes away from it. Last year was crazy with the tour and the scale was massive so we put the video on the back-burner. When everybody got back to working a couple of months ago, we decided to do this video. The good thing was that I already had a strong email subscriber base that we had been building for the last six-seven years with a good 15,000 people on it. So we could send a bunch of emails out and get responses for this video.

How did you go about the logistics for this?

It was all very well-planned. We basically sent everybody a video with instructions about how to place the camera and just respond to the questions. We had just asked them to not watch the video till it was over to get real reactions. There were a few more questions than you see in the video actually but it is basically a three minute-long video with Kasoor playing in the background and people reacting to these prompts. It was a three-day process as we gave them a deadline. There was a lot of pre-production involved like sending out the emails and getting everyone’s consent regarding being in the video. We got back around 500 videos but we couldn’t fit all of them in. I reached out to some of my friends and asked them myself. But the bulk of it was made up of fan reactions.

How did you shoot your parts for this video?

Last year when we were planning this, my parts in the video were supposed to be shot properly in a studio with lighting and done professionally. But we could not do that so I just shot my parts at home with the help of my girlfriend — with tripods and a hand-held digital camera. We had Dar and Aditya (Varma), who is the cinematographer, on Zoom the whole time. They were looking at the frames in my house through the call and checking the videos immediately.

The good thing is that 95 per cent of the video is just with fans and friends. Last year, we had talked about having actors in it too but the reactions we received from the submissions were so real that we did not need to have anybody else. I am barely there in it and only my parts are shot and planned, that too to break the monotony of it. In general, I don’t get too involved in the music videos. With Kasoor, it was easier because we were just looking at these reactions and that’s something that Jugaad did completely on their own. So for me, it was just shooting my bits, which took three hours each for two days and was quite simple.

So how was it reuniting with the cold/mess production team for Kasoor?

The whole reason we did Kasoor with Jugaad is also because I had such a great time working with them during cold/mess. It’s rare to find people who pay a lot of attention to detail and all of them are perfectionists and really finicky. For example, when we were trying to pick the font for the video, they went through nine different designers and I must have seen 50 font options. I am also picky and they are also picky, so it really works. I am sure editing this video must have been a nightmare, especially to pick out little moments from so many videos and then put them together!

Ritwika Pal Sourced by the Telegraph

We spotted Kia and Cosmos girl Ritwika Pal in the latest Prateek Kuhad video for Kasoor and asked her what it was like to shoot her bit for it. “It was actually a very simple process. They mailed us a video with messages. And we had to record ourselves and send. Must have been a nightmare for the editor. The messages really tucked at your heart. Like it took you from a very sad memory to a very awkward or happy memory in matter of seconds. So I was sitting alone in my room, smiling, frowning, making faces, dancing and sending flying kisses to my phone screen,” said Ritwika. “It was the range of emotions of the people that really struck me after watching the completed video. Because what people might feel about the same experience can really be different from yours,” she added.