Manav got a call in september 2024 from a creator called Ishpreet balbir. It was an offer to shoot Imran Khan. He said yes. He asked me. I said yes.
It was pro bono.
We ended up doing five videos with Ishpreet across two series, Ishi ki khushi and How I met you. Shot in public spaces, different people in every one. One of them had an a-list Bollywood actor in it.
The Imran Khan shoot was the finale of Khushbu Chandarana's series. Khushi has said we were not just DOPs on it, we were co-directors and mood stabilizers, which is generous and also roughly accurate given how hot it was.
Tarini Shah's first shoot with us was not even her booking. It was Ishpreet's.
The hardest thing we did there was a ninety minute timeline that had to come out as ninety seconds. Ishpreet taught me most of what I know about cutting during that. You cannot get from ninety minutes to ninety seconds by trimming. You have to decide what the thing is actually about and throw away everything else, including the parts you are proud of.
That is where vertical cinema opened up for us as a format.
And it worked. We got real credibility out of it.
Then I looked at what we had credibility In.
We were now known in the influencer market. The work was beautiful. The economics were not. Creators do not have budgets, they have deals. Tech companies and cmos have budgets, and more than that, they can tell the difference between good and bad, and will pay for good.
So we moved. We pointed the whole thing at enterprises and stopped chasing creator work.
It feels ungrateful written down like that. It is not. That series was a genuine high point and it is the reason anyone took our calls afterwards. But the market that gets you in the door is not always the market you should stay in, and it took getting into that one to find out.