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The music video has long been described as cinema’s unruly cousin: too short to be a film, too narrative to be dismissed as ephemera. At its best, it condenses the scale of cinema into three or four minutes, carrying the same weight of mood, world-building, and narrative urgency that a feature might demand. Mark Romanek once called them “short stories set to rhythm,” and in India, they have become an essential language for a generation of independent artists. At a time when Bollywood still dominates radio play and reels, the indie music video has turned into a testing ground for risk-taking, where directors and musicians create with fewer resources but greater artistic freedom.
Over the last decade, these films have become something more than marketing add-ons. They have become cultural artefacts in their own right — mirroring social anxieties, defining the image of new genres like Indian hip-hop, and building worlds that listeners step into as much as they hear. With limited budgets, directors work with friends, collaborators, and small crews, stretching imagination in the absence of money. The results are proof of an entire landscape of creativity and resistance, where to make a music video is also to assert independence from all that is formulaic.
Through conversations with four young directors, Yuvrajaago, Bhavna Kankaria, Anurag Baruah, and Kyabc, a portrait emerges of an art form in flux. These filmmakers approach the medium with different biographies and aesthetics, yet they all return to the same idea: that music videos offer a canvas unlike any other, a place where experimentation, intimacy, and emotion come together in a form that is both fleeting and enduring.
Yuvrajaago is just twenty-six but has already directed close to ten music videos in the past two years. Trained as an animator and motion graphics designer, he entered filmmaking almost accidentally. For him, the music video is both liberating and constraining. On the one hand, the song itself offers a kind of “safety net”. “It allows you to make a film under a certain safety net where you know the song will only let you go these places. So you have this limitation in which you can do a lot,” he explains. . At the same time, those constraints force invention. He grew up watching VH1's catalogue of 2010s music videos, a period he calls “classic,” where each frame carried an experimental boldness. Yuvrajaago now tries to channel that sensibility: building whole worlds around songs, treating them like miniature films. “The music became a soundtrack to a movie,” he says of his approach.
His most talked-about project so far was 'ESWY', a wildly ambitious video produced with almost no money but with a hundred people volunteering their labour. Inspired by Everything Everywhere All at Once and Om Shanti Om in equal measure, Yuvrajaago stitched together a maximalist vision that turned into a cultural moment in the indie scene. “I was trained in the art of fooling,” he laughs. The medium is a proving ground: the chance to experiment with cinematic language while preparing for a larger leap into features and series. But even as he looks outward, he remains rooted in the music video as an art form of its own — one that can, at its best, eclipse the song itself.
Follow Jaago here.
Unlike Jaago, Bhavna Kankaria’s path into music videos came through more traditional routes of advertising and documentary. Over the past year and a half, she has built a body of work with artists like Gini, balancing small budgets with the ambition of cinematic storytelling. Bhavna says that her process begins with emotion. “One of my first conversations with any artist is, what do you want people to feel out of this? Once you boil it down to the simplest emotion, you can tell the story in any way possible. As long as you’re honest to that emotion, the visuals will work,” she explains. This emotion-first philosophy allows her to avoid being too literal with lyrics. Instead, she treats the song as a compass, using it to build mood boards, synopses, and visual cues that eventually take the shape of a narrative or performance piece.
What distinguishes her work is how collaborative she is. She credits artists like Gini for being open to experimentation: “Music videos are almost always on a shoestring budget, especially for indie artists. But you push yourself out of your comfort zone — physically, emotionally — to make the vision real." Directing is about building trust with artists, producers, and crews who often work without glamour or resources, united only by a belief in the song. The result, she says, is like making “a mini film in itself,” with the challenge of telling a complete emotional story within three minutes.
Follow Bhavna here.
Anurag Baruah’s journey into filmmaking began with still photography. Growing up in Assam and later moving to Mumbai, a chance last-minute call from OAFF (Kabeer Kathpalia) led to their first collaboration in Udaipur. Music, Anurag says, was always in his blood. His father sang, his mother sang, and he himself was in college bands. “You need to feel the music in your veins,” he says. That musical sensibility translates into how he structures his videos — listening for rhythm, colour, and mood rather than approaching them purely as visual spectacles.
His work with OAFF, particularly the track, 'Falling', embodies this. With almost no crew and no lights, he turned limitations into features, using natural light and improvisation to create a performance piece that felt both intimate and expansive. With Kabeer, Anurag describes a relationship where both push each other: “He trusts me with my craft, I trust him with his. We’re flexible to incorporate each other’s changes.” The music video is a way of showing India differently — colourful, vibrant, layered — even against a backdrop of political gloom. “India is beautiful,” he says. “And especially when you merge that with fresh sounds, you can tell stories that feel modern without losing their roots.”
Follow Anurag here.
Kyabc represents a slightly different lineage. Born in Gwalior, he studied engineering before moving to Mumbai in 2022 to pursue filmmaking. He has now directed and edited music videos for some of Indian hip-hop’s biggest acts, including Seedhe Maut. Music videos are above all else an “interesting playground". Drawn to hip-hop since he was in school, he relishes the chance to translate the rawness of rap into images. “You can go wild with it,” he says. His process reflects that looseness. Sometimes the artist already has a concept; other times they simply play him the track and tell him to imagine.
He listens obsessively until an image sparks. He then breaks the song into 30-second chunks, building a graph of what will happen across the video, before heading into production with cinematographers and crews. He recalls his biggest project so far, Seedhe Maut’s Red, as one that pushed him both logistically and narratively. “Being on a shoot elates me so much that I come back to that chaos every time. It starts with a thought in your head in your room, and then when you’re finally rendering out the final piece, it’s priceless.” For Kyabc, the music video is a way of living inside the chaos of creation.
Follow Kyabc here.
