User:AlexWelby/sandbox

Ali Asad’s an award winning cinematographer. His passion for cinema came to him at an early age. He describes the childhood experience of sitting on the floor of his local cinema watching art house movies on a big screen as ‘pure magic’.

Originally trained in fine art at Goldsmiths, Asad’s obsession with light transformed the still-life classes into a ‘still-life theatre’ when he persuaded his tutor they should light their models, and even build sets around them, to enhance the drama of the subject. On leaving college, he briefly worked as a painter but his ambitions to work in film lead him to film school where he came to the attention of cameraman, John Simmons. Now a close friend and colleague, it was John Simmons who gave Ali his first job as a camera assistant on a documentary, and then took him to America on ECHOS OF AMERICA, a film about the history of blues music.

Asad worked his way up the ranks to the position of focus puller but, by his own admission, he wasn’t very good. “I was a really bad camera assistant and a really bad focus puller. I just wasn’t concentrating on what was on the camera, I was always looking at what they were doing with the light. It was then that I realized I should really be working as a director of photography.” Again, it was John Simmons who provided the opportunity and Ali went to work as DOP on a music video. Since then, Ali has worked consistently in music videos, television and film, collaborating with the likes of Rankin, Michel Gondrey, Badger Smith.

Ali has just wrapped on the film Mad To Be Normal, the story of the R D Laing and his Kingsley Hall Experiment.

www.aliasaddirectorofphotography.com https://pro-labs.imdb.com/name/nm0038266?ref_=hm_nv_mp_profile https://twitter.com/AliAsad1110