From a Mumbai Movie Theater to Taylor Swift’s Set: Cinematographer Shubham Gosalia on the Path That Led Him to Launch His Own Production Company

Photo courtesy: Shubham Gosalia

For cinematographer Shubham Gosalia, the road that eventually led to sets with Taylor Swift and Patrick Mahomes started with a weekly ritual: Friday nights at the movies with his parents in Mumbai, in the same seats no matter what was playing. It wasn’t until high school, when a friend asked him to help shoot a short film about a man’s relationship with his cup of tea, that Gosalia began to suspect filmmaking might be more than a habit picked up in a theater seat.

That interest eventually took him thousands of miles from home. Choosing a film school meant a six-month search that moved from Mumbai to Pune, Dubai, London, Miami and Canada before landing him in Los Angeles at the New York Film Academy. It also led him, a few years later, to a chair in a Los Angeles studio that happened to be occupied by Taylor Swift.

Gosalia was accepted into Gold Rising, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ summer fellowship for early career filmmakers, on the strength of a submission he describes as unpolished but sincere, a collage of his work rather than a traditional reel. He recalls a program coordinator later telling him he was chosen because he was eager to learn, even without a finished showreel. The eight-week fellowship put him in rooms with producers from Disney and Marvel, took him to a private screening of “Top Gun: Maverick” at the IMAX headquarters, and got him a seat in the audience at the 2023 Oscars.

At the end of the program, the Academy paired him with a mentor, Jess Hall, the ASC and BSC-recognized cinematographer behind Marvel’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Gosalia’s first assignment shadowing Hall arrived with a stack of contracts so heavily redacted that the artist’s name had been scrubbed throughout, save for one unremoved reference to Taylor Swift Productions. Days later, he was on set in Los Angeles, camera assisting a music video shoot with Swift over four days. He recalls introducing himself to her without meaning to, by accidentally bumping her chair before the two had been formally introduced, only realizing who she was afterward. The second production Hall brought him onto was a Super Bowl campaign for Subway featuring Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

Those two projects, Gosalia says, reshaped how he thought about a career that, until then, had mostly meant student productions in Los Angeles and India. “It is not even in my dreams, because I don’t know what to dream at that level,” he says of the run of work.

Now splitting his time between Los Angeles and Mumbai, Gosalia has started his own production company, Sure Shot, built around a concern he says is reshaping the industry: the instability of a career built entirely on freelance camera work, as AI tools and tighter budgets change how and where productions get made. Sure Shot is built around story-led commercial work, music videos and podcasts rather than straightforward product shoots. Its first campaign, in production this month, is for a Mumbai-based vegan leather footwear brand that has built a following across the Middle East and London and is now expanding into the United States and Canada.

Gosalia has also spent recent months shooting for the vertical, mobile-first format that has taken over platforms like TikTok, a discipline he describes as fundamentally different from traditional cinematography. Vertical productions move fast, often covering multiple pages of script in a single day across two or three cameras, prioritizing coverage and pace over the composition choices that define feature and music video work.

Gosalia’s most recent on-screen credit remains Diljit Dosanjh’s music video “Saanvle,” shot across a single day on a Beverly Hills property, where he served as cinematographer.

Written in partnership with Tom White