Before he was the cinematographer behind ‘Luca’, ‘Kurup’, ‘King of Kotha’, ‘Rorschach’, ‘Lucky Baskhar’, ‘Lokah: Chapter 1’ and ‘Vishwanath & Sons’, Nimish Ravi was a schoolkid with an obsession of clicking display pictures for his friends.

"My biggest obsession was to take DPs for my friends," he recalls, tracing it back to the early Facebook years, long before cinematographer was ever a career plan.

That obsession snowballed into a group of school friends making short films together, an extracurricular chaos that had classmates whispering about whether they were "doing something" or just skipping study time. In hindsight, they were doing both.

By the time Nimish reached college and enrolled in a visual communication program, the hobby had turned into intent.

"I decided that, okay, this is what I want to do," he says and college is where he found his people, a circle of like-minded collaborators who kept making short films, sharpening a craft with no formal film-school pedigree behind it.

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That's the detail Nimish keeps returning to in interviews, he never went to film school. Everything from lighting, lenses, composition was self-taught, stitched together from YouTube tutorials and whatever film guides existed online at the time.

"It was all out there and you just needed to seek it to find it," he says of that era, drawing a contrast with today's phone-in-every-pocket culture.

When he started, access wasn't universal, you had to actively go looking for the knowledge. That hunger, more than any formal training, is what built his eye.

It's a origin story that goes neatly against his filmography, no forced ‘signature style’ or fixed visual formula.

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Ask him about his aesthetic and he'll tell you the same thing he told us, the script decides the look, not the other way around. It's an ethos that traces directly back to a teenager with a camera, chasing friends around for the perfect DP.