After spending two long years hard at work on what became the most successful film of all time, Karim Sahai took some much-deserved time to unwind. Like anyone looking to relax, Karim flew into Rwanda to hang out with angry gorillas.

A photographer and visual effects artist at Weta Digital in Wellington, Karim has worked on films such as Lord of the Rings, King Kong and, most recently, a little flick called Avatar.

“We work 17 to 18-hour days, seven days a week” says Karim. “Going to places like Africa is kind of getting away from being in front of a computer for many, many months or years at a time. I spent practically two years on Avatar.”

Just after the project wrapped in December, Karim flew to Africa, where he planned to spend three months travelling from Rwanda to Mali in the west, then track south into Kenya.

For his long journey, Karim made sure he had absolutely everything he needed in his kit bag. Along with his Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, a full-frame pro-level camera, he packed two 7Ds, Canon’s recently released prosumer sports model.

For safety’s sake, he threw in a selection of 16-35mm, 24-70mm, 70-200mm, and 400mm lenses, plus the 4.5kg 800mm super-telephoto lens. Of course, these were with him just in case he needed to shoot with something other than the prime lenses he prefers to use, which included a 35mm f/1.4, a 50mm f/1.4mm, an 85mm f/1.2 and a 135 f/2.0.

Are three cameras and nine lenses, along with the rest of his incidental kit, really necessary?

“I didn’t really have a choice,” Karim explains. “If you’re going to go to places like that you’ve really got to take the kit, because you never know… You’ve got to take what you need.”

Landing in Rwanda, Karim was surprised by what he found.

“Rwanda is an amazingly beautiful country,” says Karim of the nation that was the site of perhaps the greatest humanitarian disaster of recent history. “I guess that a lot of people know about Rwanda because of the events of 15 years ago, the genocide, but if you look at the country now, the turnaround and how incredibly beautiful it is, photographically, it’s heaven.”

While impressed with Rwanda’s places and faces, like many travellers, Karim was drawn to Rwanda to visit its population of rare mountain gorillas. After spending some time making images, the photographer was struck by the similarities between the gorillas and ourselves.

“It is quite an experience to be so close to a majestic animal like that, and knowing that there’s so few left. You feel privileged,” he says. “You feel like you’re in the company of other human beings.”

However, a certain silverback wasn’t as impressed with the photographer’s presence as Karim was with his:

“I had a long lens, and I was trying to get a tight shot of the silverback when he basically charged me,” Karim recounts. “He started running towards me and stopped at about two-and-a-half metres. He sat there and looked at me for 10, 15 seconds.”

Perhaps drawing on his experience working on King Kong, Karim stood his ground, but realised just how close he was to receiving a beatdown from the great ape.

“You’re within their territory … so they’re going to have displays of who owned the place,” he says. “He definitely owns the place. He would probably have owned the lens, the camera and myself.”

Luckily, Karim survived the confrontation and journeyed west to Mali, where he took almost a month’s sojourn between the capital, Bamako, and the historic site of Timbuktu. Karim’s ambition was to capture as much of the reality of daily life in Mali as he could. However, the photographer found the enormity of such a project daunting.

“I got to the places I wanted to go within that allocated time of three weeks before I headed back to Kenya. But of course, the thing about going to a place like this and seeing it … is that you’re only ever going to take a slice, barely scraping the surface,” he admits. “It’s easy for a photographer to go in and they get a great picture and that’s great, but they don’t get the whole story. Do those images do justice to the complexity and variety of the reality of Mali? Maybe not. In order for me to do this I’d probably need to be posted there for six months to a year.”

Karim also found that cultural differences between himself and Malians had the potential to create conflict, particularly around the sensitive issue of photography.

“Photographically, it’s a little bit difficult because people tend not to like having their photo taken,” he admits. “People do have a tendency to what can be interpreted as being aggressive toward foreigners, especially when it comes to taking pictures. They basically shout and refuse to have their photo taken.”

That initial resistance to having a photo taken can be overcome, however. Karim advises that having a local guide can make all the difference.

“Personally, I find that you need to have somebody with you, somebody who is there to back you both with the language and to help immerse yourself, insert yourself in the closer circle,” he says.

He also suggests that by being persistent you’re likely to make a breakthrough, even if people are unwilling at first.

“You’ve got to keep taking your pictures otherwise you’ve got no pictures,” he advises. “But once you’re in, you’re in. By the end, they don’t want you to leave because they want to have more photos of them taken.”

In Karim’s opinion, what’s important is using photography as a tool to really find out about people, forming genuine connections rather than just taking a snap and moving on.

“Once you’ve established that contact, you try to communicate beyond just photography, but using photography to link your own personal history with theirs and try to find some kind of common ground,” he says. He adds that people in Mali are generally very curious about New Zealanders. “They’re as interested in us as we are of them, except that they don’t have the means to come to New Zealand.”

Karim feels that working as a travel photographer is a natural extension of his background in visual effects.

“The thing about working in visual effect for feature films is that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s kind of a continuation of what I’m passionate about, which is images and creating images,” he explains. “The tools that we are using are migrating to the general public, which is quite interesting to see, because of course it’s a different application. But it’s fascinating to see what people do with those tools and techniques.”

One tool Karim is especially enthusiastic about is the Canon 7D, and its ability to shoot HD video while still being relatively affordable.

“I’m really amazed by how fast things move, technology wise. The 7Ds were really great. They basically exceeded what I expected,” he says. “It’s so much simpler. If you were going to carry a video camera with a kit and adapters, compared to carrying a 7D and the lenses you need, that’s a no-brainer.”

What particularly impresses Karim is the fact the 7D shoots true progressive scan video – where the odd and even lines of pixels in a frame are shown in sequence – despite being compressed into the H.264 format. In his professional opinion, the quality of 7D footage once transcoded and processed is far superior to something like 1080i interlaced video, in which the odd and even lines of pixels are displayed alternately.

“It’s night and day,” he says. “With the way people approach shooting high-quality video, being able to shoot any sort of lenses, and being able to shoot in progressive, because progressive really is the key; that’s really changed a lot of things.”

Back in Wellington and already hard at work at Weta, Karim feels he’s merely scratched the surface in Africa. Later in the year, he’s keen to head back to visit Rwanda (despite the angry Silverback).

“I just feel like that was a little bit too short, so I want to go back,” he says. “My objective is to take a small group of photographers with me … both to Rwanda and Kenya, to witness these things. Not just to photograph, but to witness and to be there.”

But before he gets there, he’s got something else to take care of.

“The next project that I’ll be working on is Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg,” he explains, rather nonchalant about the experience. “The whole thing is a computer-generated film, using similar techniques as Avatar, except that there’s no live action.”

He explains that the film will require many months of intensive work by the team at Weta, who’ll need to create and texture every single object, all the characters and backgrounds used in the film.

“I think it will be a technically challenging project,” he assesses. “But I’m always up for a challenge.”

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