This past year, 2021 has been hard on most people around the world. One thing that has helped me, is to keep building on my creative projects, to have a sense of accomplishment and find hope in times that are uncertain.
Through that process, I found some wonderful support for my project ‘Risalo’ with a micro commission from Handmade Puppet Dreams. That lead to reconnecting with Puran Bhat the master puppeteer and puppet maker in Delhi, India, who fabricated the custom puppets that I designed. In lockdown, we still managed to create some collaborations (Ras Dhari, Aatish Baz) and some social media posts of their own (Camel Puppet Demonstration, Dhola Maru Episode 1). I did some social media and basic film storytelling trainings with his sons Lucky and Akshay via Zoom. Friends helped raise funds and art commissions for custom puppets which was vital in helping during COVID lockdown as no performances and thus no income was coming in for the artists.
In turn, Puran ji and his sons graciously shared videos of puppetry performance lessons for me to bring my skills up to create ‘Ramkal’, a short film excerpted from my longer project, ‘Risalo’. I worked for months on puppetry skills, and learning from workshops along with my excellent cohorts in the micro commission. I tested lighting, camera, puppetry and color grading, all skills I have been building since not being able to film the project in Pakistan, several years ago.
The short film, ‘Ramkali’ has been completed and my dreams to see the feature film through have begun to materialize. Work has continued on ‘Kalyan’, the opening chapter of ‘Risalo’ and I am revisiting storyboards for ‘Sorath’, which I intend to film later this year.
In addition, I have continued to explore techniques in Unreal Engine, Houdini and Maya for creating my animated projects. Thus far, I have created tests that lead to being hired to work on projects like ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’, as well as custom tools for Metahumans and tests for my Punjabi animated film and further work related to ‘Risalo’.
My illustration work has focused on storyboarding and awareness work related to the genocide being commit against the Uyghur people by the People’s Republic of China government as well as some pieces based on the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli occupation. I have illustrated aspects of culture as well as making paintings based on Uyghur poetry as a grass roots effort to amplify the voices of oppressed people.
Here’s to creating more this year, while combining artistic development and amplifying voices of beauty and justice.