The Untold Story of How Some of Our Great Ideas Come To Be
The Serengeti Bytes team boasts multiple qualities but one thing I am so proud of about this army of talents is their ability to bring the best out of what may look ordinary to many.
Informal talks foster ideas in contexts where mistakes are tolerated and critical thinking is encouraged. Pregnant minds generate ideas, just as newborns emerge from their mothers' wombs. What causes a mind to be fertile? For one thing, it is the freedom to explore without being constrained by conventional thinking or the weight of practical considerations.
Some will be hesitant but some will start challenging the idea. From the friction of arguments and contradictions eventually, something amazing happens. The culture of complementing one another's talent is a powerful weapon that enhances creativity and productivity at Serengeti Bytes.
To cut a long tale short, the idea to produce a song for the #IshiKismati campaign started out with the great thinker, Kennedy. He sent a message in an office WhatsApp group asking if I can write a song about the campaign, you can predict my response.
Songwriting is one of my underutilized talents. I penned down the lyrics and tried to come up with a melody that was later trashed by the super talented Rodjazz.Â
Kennedy revised the lyrics before sending them to Rodjazz who did an amazing and mesmerizing job of improvising the lyrics to come up with a breathtaking melody. Then sent to Kita who invited Rodjazz and me for a studio session.
I'll spend more time explaining Kita next time, but he did what he does best by creating an excellent rhythm and mixing. The talented Rodjazz entered the recording booth to kill the beat and guess what, after an hour of our studio session everyone was smiling effortlessly.
When I thought I was done and it was time to concentrate on my weekend and let Kita do the mixing and mastering. I was caught off guard by Kita who suggested that we ad a voice-over as a closure to the jingle. I was like OMG, what the f*ck, I have never done this before. The exclamation was insufficient to keep me from entering the booth to record my first voice-over. I found myself having to pronounce Ishi Kismati more than 15 times in the studio simply to come up with a two-second piece. It was a difficult combination of rehearsing and executing it for the first time, but listening to it now makes me feel like a pro-voice-over artist.
Finally, after a few days of mixing and mastering, we had a final version of the jingle that everyone including the producer enjoyed. It became 'a jingle on repeat' by most of us at the office. We started to use it in campaign videos and everyone was happy with the value it added to the campaign.
The beauty of the music inspired the team to create visually appealing images in order to convey the song's substance to as many people as possible, including you. Murtaza, our multi-talented audio-visual Captain, generated outstanding images and lyrical video for the jingle.
You can see by yourself how this beautiful combination of talents has resulted in the beautiful video attached with this veeeery long caption.
Please spend your less than 60 seconds watching the video and have your genuine say for further improvements.