From cell phone photos to shooting Pasoori

Ahsan Raza’s journey has made him one of Pakistan’s most sought after cinematographers

KARACHI:

Ahsan Raza always had a fascination for dizzying visuals. But not even in his wildest dreams had he thought about shooting one of the world’s most popular music videos when he started as an amateur photographer while a teenager in Karachi.

It has been a long and challenging journey for Ahsan, who turns 29 this year. He already has major music videos and ads under his belt. His crowning glory remains the music video of Ali Sethi and Shae Gill’s Pasoori for Coke Studio, which has won a variety of accolades, including being the most searched song on Google last year. Over the years, he has worked on some of the biggest projects and with the biggest stars.

It all started with a Nokia 6300, a gift on his seventeenth birthday. Primitive by today’s standard, the phone offered several features and Ahsan experimented with depth of field, soft focus, contrast and other cinematic options.

While he dabbled in photography, including on his cousin’s DSLR, his first love remained music videos. “I would shoot random videos and upload them on my Facebook,” says Ahsan. “In that, I would experiment with camera angles and realized the impact of lighting.”

Alongside this, he also wrote to photographers and videographers he found on social media. One of those was Zain Haleem, one of Pakistan’s leading cinematographers. After months of effort and pleading, Haleem agreed to take him on as an assistant in 2015.

This was Ahsan’s first foray into the professional world, while still a student in the media sciences department at Iqra University. An unpaid hanger-on at the start, he quickly became the first to arrive at locations and the last to leave. He would spend days at the office during shoots - sometimes not going home for entire weeks.

A few months on, Ahsan became Zain’s go-to man. “I was responsible for nearly everything from managing the camera and light teams to preparing the shoot frames as required by the DOP.”

His first major shoot was the Pakistan Super League anthem by Ali Zafar in 2016. Then came the 45-day shoot of Teefa in Trouble, where Ahsan officially served as second DoP to Aleem.

“The film had a lot of fighting and shooting sequences. I realized the importance of body strength, reflexes in handling camera,” says Ahsan. “I saw a distinct improvement in my work over the 45-day stretch.”

It was not easy, notes Ahsan. While my friends were having a blast, I would be spending hours preparing for the shoot. “You need to do the homework, reconnaissance, followed by research, including how the camera angles and lights would appear on those visuals. It’s a painstaking process that involves trial and error.”

But it also has its benefits with Ahsan having more than 300 projects under his belt by now.

 

It included one of the most popular music projects in the country, including Coke Studio, with Ahsan working with some of the biggest names in the industry from Abida Parveen to Zeeshan Parwez.

“We have been in both tight budget and lavish setups and in all cases, Ahsan gets the best out of every shot that I would have in my head. Details matter to him so he takes into account composition, the whole movie as is in the director’s head and tries to decipher the output in the most beautiful way possible,” says Parwez, who has worked with Ahsan on multiple projects.

On the advertisement side, he has work with leading ad makers including Murtaza Chaudhry, with their ad on a fertilizer brand lauded for capturing the rustic beauty of the Punjab and its agricultural land.

Pasoori

Coke Studio remains Ahsan’s most memorable project to date. It took nearly six months of brainstorming and back and forth to get the visuals, the lighting and the photography right. The actual video was shot in an arduous 20-hour spell that ‘felt like a breeze because of the song’s vibe’, says Ahsan.

He says his Instagram was flooded with congratulatory messages from around the world, including a lot of love from India, over the music video.

“When you see someone putting so much of honest thought and energy into contributing to collaborative work, you somehow feel it’s going to make a difference,” says Zulfiqar “Xulfi” Jabbar Khan, who led the Coke Studio project last year. Ahsan has a simple mantra to whet his appetite for excellence: You need to step out of your comfort zone. There are no shortcuts.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2023.