Partnering with Dharma
When Saregama licensed the music for Karan Johar's Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, it marked the first time our team collaborated on a flagship Dharma Productions film. The internal objective company-wide was clear: deliver high-caliber visual products that matched the signature grandeur of a Dharma film to build a strong foundation for future collaborations.
As part of the video team, my assignment was to create official supporting lyrical videos for the entire soundtrack. The standard release strategy required launching each lyrical video exactly 15 days after its primary music video drop.
However, the production house only supplied shortened pre-release music videos containing trailer-style slates, text overlays, and movie release countdown tags. This significantly limited the amount of clean, usable footage. My challenge was to take these constrained assets, extract key frames, and build custom 3D environments, complex rotoscopy layers, and unique typography to create top quality lyricals for the album.
Sound into Motion
To make the lyrical videos stand out, I tailored the visual direction of each track to match the specific tone, setting, and emotional energy of the film’s sequences.
Drawing inspiration from classic cinematic compositions of the music video, I worked around the limited footage by isolating characters through rotoscopping and placing text layers directly behind them in 3D space. I also used motion tracking to make those text layers move along with the camera. To expand the background scenes, I clean-plated the screen grabs and blended them with stock photography. The typography used a custom icy, layered texture in deep blue to stand out perfectly against the snowy on-screen landscapes.
To keep pace with this high-energy, fast-tempo track, I designed quick-cut motion graphics and fast camera zooms. I utilized rotoscopy during the main hook to lock the title text right behind the lead actors, filling the space with dynamic chorus text that shifted precisely with the rhythm.
Mirroring the scale of the grand wedding scene, I placed the motion-tracked character stills inside ornate, royal golden frames. The typography used an elegant gold finish, capturing the aesthetic of the official music video.
As the high-energy club track introducing Ranveer Singh's character, this needed constant movement. I paired animated stills with shifting disco backgrounds, utilizing 3D camera sweeps and bright neon pink and blue glowing text effects to maintain a late-night club environment.
Inspired by the title credits in the music video itself, I designed a custom reveal where lyrics appeared as paint dabs on textured colored paper. Because the track is a slow, emotional ballad, I relied on gentle, slow-moving 3D camera zoom to give the stills breathing room.
Received post-movie release as full-length music videos, these tracks did not require static image extraction and animation. Instead, I focused on seamless, on-video lyric synchronization, selecting a specialized vintage font style and animation behavior for the Carvaan Medley to match its style.
Re-Editing Movie Footage
A unique challenge arose with several tracks on the album that functioned strictly as background scores or dialogue backdrops within the film itself. Because these raw files contained movie dialogues, they couldn't be uploaded directly as clean music releases. I was tasked with editing entirely new, dedicated visual packages for these alternate audio versions using existing assets:
- Rani’s Intro Theme: To build a clean showcase for Alia Bhatt's solo theme, I compiled a fresh video using clean clips from other promotional tracks combined with stylized, animated solo image assets.
- Tum Kya Mile (Shreya’s Version): Built a standalone asset by restructuring footage from the full music video and integrating the custom motion graphics layout established in the lyrical video.
The lyrical videos and alternate cuts served as highly effective companion assets, sustaining momentum across release windows and significantly scaling the digital footprint of the film’s soundtrack on Saregama's flagship music channel.
Official Lyrical Asset Performance
The lyrical videos generated over 60.2 Million cumulative views, capturing massive secondary traffic from the film's highly successful soundtrack rollout.
- Tum Kya Mile: 24.8M views
- Kudmayi: 14.5M views
- What Jhumka?: 10.2M views
- Ve Kamleya: 9.6M views
- Ro Lain De: 712k views
- Saregama Carvaan Medley: 156k views
- Heart Throb: 120k views
Operational Takeaways
Client Relationship Milestone: Delivering high-production-value layouts under tight constraints successfully met the cross-company directive to impress the production house, securing a streamlined review process with zero back-and-forth edits.
Agile Pipeline Design: The micro-approval strategy (pitching 15–20 second style frames) eliminated standard bottleneck friction, allowing full-track execution to continue in parallel with client sign-offs.
Asset Repurposing: Successfully built entirely new audio-visual assets for cinematic theme scores, uncoupling them from on-screen dialogue and making them viable for independent digital distribution.
