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.

Umar is a fantastic artist. I am fortunate to have him on board to work on these beautiful cloth backgrounds. His skill set is very complimentary to my own, as in he knows how to do a lot of stuff I do not, but need.

I worked on some more designs for backgrounds. There are several ways to reuse backgrounds, so that should help cut down on the number we need.

I started work in the morning with Umar on background designs. We discussed and worked on the design for the first one we plan to make a bit further.

cloth shopping for backgrounds

Ice cream and nihari

I worked on designs for backgrounds. In the evening we had dinner with a friend of Kristeen’s from the Peace Festival in Chandigarh back in 2009.