A set of films and stills made after dark in Lahore: Mall Road, the old bazaars and the rooftops of Gulberg. The brief was simple. No daylight, no generators, and as few lights as we could get away with.
We worked with three LED tubes, a ladder and a lot of gaffer tape. Most of the look came from practicals already in the frame: shop signs, a kitchen curtain and a sodium streetlight that buzzed through every take.
The stills came out of the same nights, on the same cameras and graded to the same rules, so the set reads as one city rather than a collection of locations.
![Photo: [2005] West 42nd Street...](https://pub-b14204095e4d4b36b8bc71225ecd4c3a.r2.dev/c2dee2b8-e7ba-462b-8676-6b9c789276f4/5feb8377-0315-5193-9b0e-3532183c12c8/photo/img-post-001.webp)
Mall Road at one in the morning. We had forty minutes before the traffic police came back, so the whole scene was built around one practical lamp and a tungsten bounce off a wet street. Most of the grade was decided by the puddle.
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Ten seconds of the bazaar before the call to prayer. I shot it on a gimbal, then spent a week deciding whether the rickshaw should stay in. It stayed.
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Behind the monitor on a rooftop in Gulberg. The bicycle was not in the script. It was the best thing that happened all week, so we kept it in.
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The whole kit is three LED tubes, a ladder and enough gaffer tape to wrap a small car. This is how I light a stairwell.
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Changing magazines by feel in a room with no windows. The trick is counting the sprocket teeth under your breath.
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Kites start going up before dawn on the rooftops and nobody tells you when. This clip is three minutes of waiting and eight seconds of luck.
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