I spent the day digitizing dv tapes. 2 or 3 digitized fine, but the rest have dropped frames which means when you play them back there are clearly spots missing.

So, it turned out that the “client” was not the client. There were at least 3 levels of approvals, with no direction or connection in between. The pressure came off.

The client came in to look at the cloud shot and offered a vastly different direction to the many I had been chasing down on previous days.

I had suggested that it might be better for someone else to take the shot as nothing I had created seemed to be in the unclear direction that the client wanted. With quick turn around projects, it is important to make decisions to switch tasks, methods or even artists quickly to save time.

I spent the day redoing the shot several times. Each attempt involves recreating the many layers and reworking how they look based on each change of the camera or overall movement change.

I needed to create some clouds to fly through for a shot.

We head over to Hafeez Center to get a single cable to replace the cable with two adapters I was using. As usual, you walk to several shops, explain what you want, reexplain, and after a couple of minutes they tell you no, there is nothing like that in existence. Then they look away like you have disappeared.

To hear the challenges regarding work prospects and how people are trying to build their futures outside the country is sad and interesting.

Let’s see how many obstacles I need to get around to accomplish that.

It is sweet to see my relatives and enjoy a nice meal together. In the afternoon, we head over to Shalimar Gardens.

It was good to work on some more tests. Every round brings me closer to being able to work on the puppetry portion of the film.

Afterwards, we went over to Nisbat rd, home of Lahore’s camera shops and picked up a couple of light stands. I’ll use them for the backdrop in my film.

After working on some background designs, we head over to Shalmi, the wholesale market near the old city.

Each new place I stay brings with it a new set of challenges.

So, we packed up into a rickshaw and head to Imran’s.

I picked up some cloth from Imran’s collection, hung out for a while, then caught a rickshaw to the Landa Bazaar.

Afterwards my cousin dropped us off at a theater workshop by my friend Imran at the Institute of Performing Arts.

I’m glad we have figured out our main sources for cloth and the workflow for creating these backgrounds. That is a huge bit of progress this week.