Osmann Mumtaz on finding filmmaking before anyone told him to

A borrowed camera and an accidental beginning

The episode opens with Osmann Mumtaz tracing the origin of his interest in filmmaking to something almost incidental: a brother who had a mild interest in photography and owned a Nikon DSLR. Osmann would borrow it, handle it, and slowly begin to understand what a camera could do. At that point, he says, his interest was not yet in video - photography came first, and video arrived later almost by accident.

What shifted things was the internet. Around the time he was in school, YouTube had begun filling up with filmmaking tutorials, and Osmann found himself watching them compulsively. He describes the experience of encountering framing and composition for the first time: “Mujhe badi isme lagta tha ki agar main kar sakta hoon” - the sense that if he could understand something that seemed complex to others, it meant something real about where his ability lay. Framing, he says, felt intuitive in a way that other subjects simply did not.

Muzamil asks him to walk through the early timeline, and Osmann is candid that the process was not linear. It was gradual accumulation - watching, trying, failing quietly, trying again - rather than a single moment of decision.

ICS, college, and the years of deliberate disengagement

Osmann’s academic path ran through ICS - the intermediate science stream with computer science - and then into college, where he describes himself as having been almost entirely checked out. He was not failing dramatically; he was doing just enough. “Main ne nahi parhna,” he says at one point - a flat statement of refusal rather than an excuse. He would sit with a laptop, not studying, watching videos, thinking about pictures.

Muzamil presses him on this period, and Osmann is honest that it was uncomfortable. His parents were watching. The social expectation in his environment was that you studied, got a degree, found a job. Filmmaking was not a legible career path to the people around him. He describes the specific texture of that pressure: parents are not enemies, he says, they are simply working from a different information set. They have not seen evidence that this thing you want to do can sustain a life, so they push back.

His response to that pressure was not confrontation. It was incremental proof. He started doing small jobs - editing clips, shooting weddings - for free at first, then for small fees. “Free mein kaam kiya,” he says, describing it not as exploitation but as the only available way to build a portfolio when you have no institutional credential to offer.

What he actually learned on set - and what no one teaches

One of the more specific moments in the conversation comes when Osmann describes working with a production agency. He had been freelancing loosely, doing things his own way, when he started getting invited to proper sets. The contrast was immediate. There were scripts. There were contracts. There were hierarchies - how you speak to a senior, how you speak to a junior, how you approach a client. None of this had been taught to him anywhere.

He makes a pointed observation here: in Pakistan, someone who comes into the industry without a degree often does not know basic professional conduct - not because they are incapable, but because no one modelled it for them. The technical skills can be self-taught from the internet. The professional grammar of a working set cannot.

Muzamil picks up on this, and Osmann elaborates: what he learned from being on those sets was not just production logistics but the whole structure of how a commercial project actually moves - from brief to script to shoot to delivery, with agencies and contracts at every stage. “Wahan se bhi thodi seekhne ko mili,” he says - even the difficult parts of that experience taught him something.

Pakistan’s content industry: three tiers and a slow maturation

A substantial part of the conversation is given to Osmann’s reading of how Pakistan’s digital content landscape has evolved. He describes it in generational terms. The first wave - what he calls Tier 1 - was Facebook video around 2012, when people were simply putting things online for their friends and their friends’ friends. There was no monetisation, no strategy, just the novelty of the medium.

Tier 2, roughly 2015 to 2018, was when YouTube began to be taken seriously as a platform where money was possible. People who had been making content for free started to understand that there was an economic logic available to them. Osmann describes this as the period when the foundations were laid.

Tier 3, he argues, is what is happening now - a broader, more general audience entering the space, with more varied content and more varied expectations. The problem, he says, is that a lot of what fills this tier is low-effort: prank videos, reaction content, things made quickly for quick consumption. “Woh video site par hoti jaani chahiye thi” - that kind of content has its place, but it is not where the interesting work is.

What is missing, in his view, is storytelling. He returns to this word several times. Editing can be learned. Camera operation can be learned. But the ability to structure a narrative - to know what a scene needs, where a cut should land, how to carry an audience from one moment to the next - is the skill that separates content that lasts from content that disappears.

The case for storytelling as the foundational skill

Osmann is specific about what he means by storytelling in a practical sense. He is not talking about grand narrative ambition. He is talking about understanding structure: what comes first, what earns the next moment, how you build and release tension in even a short-form video. “Editing ke saath knowledge,” he says - editing is not just a technical operation, it is a storytelling decision at every cut.

He makes the argument that these skills are transferable across every format he has worked in. Wedding films, YouTube videos, commercial productions, drama - the underlying grammar is the same. If you learn it properly in one context, you can apply it in another. This is why, he says, he thinks of editing and storytelling as the two things worth investing in seriously, rather than chasing specific formats or platforms.

Muzamil asks him about the relationship between YouTube and filmmaking as career paths, and Osmann’s answer is careful. He does not think they are the same thing, but he thinks they can coexist. The danger, he says, is letting client work on YouTube consume all the creative energy that should be going into developing as a filmmaker. He is deliberate about keeping his own YouTube channel at a lower volume precisely because he does not want the pressure of client expectations to dictate what he makes.

On parents, proof, and the patience required

Later in the discussion, Osmann returns to the question of family resistance - not as a grievance but as a practical problem with a practical solution. He describes the messages he receives from young people whose parents tell them that filmmaking is haram, or simply not a real career. His answer is consistent: “Apne aap ko support par rakhkar khud ko turn on karein unko kuch proof kar ke” - put yourself in a position where you can show results, because argument alone will not move people who have no frame of reference for what you are doing.

He is not dismissive of parental concern. He frames it explicitly as care operating from incomplete information. The job of the person who wants to pursue a creative career is to supply the missing information - incrementally, through work, not through debate.

This is also where he talks about the free work phase with the most clarity. It was not ideal. But it was the mechanism by which he converted an invisible interest into a visible track record. Once there was a track record, the conversation with his family changed.

Where the industry is going - and what is still missing

By the end of the conversation, Osmann is thinking out loud about the future of Pakistan’s film and content industry. He is cautiously optimistic but not uncritical. The infrastructure is improving. More people are making things. The audience is growing and becoming more sophisticated.

But he keeps returning to the same gap: the industry still lacks a deep bench of people who understand storytelling at a structural level. Technical skills are more available than ever - you can learn camera operation, colour grading, and editing from YouTube in a way that was impossible ten years ago. What the internet cannot easily teach is narrative judgment: knowing why a scene works, or why it does not.

Osmann’s implicit argument, running through the whole conversation, is that this is the gap worth filling. Not by waiting for institutions to teach it, but by studying the work that already exists, understanding its structure, and then making things - consistently, experimentally, with a willingness to be wrong and try again. “Experimentation karni chahiye har kisi ko,” he says - everyone should be experimenting, and the people who are not are the ones who will be left behind when the industry matures into something more demanding.

Muzamil closes the conversation by noting that Osmann’s path - self-taught, incremental, built on free work and borrowed cameras - is itself a kind of argument for the accessibility of the craft. The barriers are real, but they are not the ones most people assume they are.