Film school came first. A BS in Film & TV Production — four years learning how a story is actually built, shot and finished, long before anyone let me near a client's budget.
I started out producing TV commercials. Thirty seconds is an unforgiving format: there is nowhere to hide a weak idea, a slow crew or a budget that was never going to work. It taught me to plan backwards from the final cut.
Around the same stretch came Naunehal, Hamdard's monthly magazine for children, running since 1953. I managed the creative look and feel along with the brand and marketing side, working with the creative and marketing teams, on the edition that took it bilingual for the first time — Urdu and English in the same issue.
That took me agency-side, producing commercials and brand campaigns for major FMCG and financial brands across Pakistan — bigger budgets, bigger rooms, and the first time I was answering for a campaign's performance rather than just its delivery.
From there the work widened: digital content, social strategy, animation and short films — including Nanu Aur Mein, an award-winning short feature that travelled further than any of us expected.
Today all of it sits in one place. I take a brief from first insight through to final launch — strategy, story and production under one person — across Pakistan and Canada, now based in the Greater Toronto Area.
Plenty of people can make you a film. What I do is build the campaign around it — and come back with the numbers that show it worked.
