Seminar at Hunerkada

The seminar yesterday went quite well and the turnout was inspiring! Halfway through my presentation, I noticed the organizers squeezing in more chairs and there were still people who had to stand. Click on the images below if you'd like to read the article that came in the paper today. Thank you Saadia Khalid for your pleasant article:

Errors I must point out:
- My last name is spelled 'Abbas'.
- I was slightly misquoted. No single film to date, including animated ones, have been able to bring in a billion dollars. Shrek is an animated movie series with which episodes 1 and 2 together, along with their merchandising and everything that goes with, have been able to pull in 8 billion dollars by Dec. 2007 for the Dreamworks studio.


Update: Photos! (Click on each to see larger)

Sorry about the blur. I wasn't the camera-person.

This is at the very beginning of the presentation. Double the number turned up halfway through.

Hunerkada Seminar - 29th November

The 'finished' poster jpg has finally been sent to me with final amendments made at the Hunerkada end. Drop the flyers from planes, attach as a virus to computers, distribute to beggars to hand out at traffic signals! Well, do what you must, but tell interested people to come anyway.

PLEASE NOTE: Time is 11:00am - 1:00pm (10:30am for people who like to take their time)

Moleskine - Event: Writers Guild Annual Meeting 2008

I went looking to meet creative writers, humorous writers, fiction writers at the fearfully literary sounding: 'Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq'. Yep. That's the official name in Urdu. It roughly translates to - the 'circle of members of taste'. I had my trusty moleskine with me as usual and observed some entertaining faces.

Moleskine - Mehndi Sketches

I went to a Mehndi (the official party thrown by the brides friends before the actual wedding) last night. I got bored for a lot of the time before the dances started so I took out my trusty moleskine and had fun drawing people.

By the time the dances began I had lost all inhibition and went right to the front to draw their movements in clear view. One of the dancers clearly had no inhibitions either and I'm sure a parent or two took their children out of the room for the while she had her 3 minutes on stage.


Oh and a girl next to me told me 'your drawings are amazing'. Wow. Now thats a compliment! ^_^

Coming Soon - Seminar at Hunerkada

As part of my initiative to do my part in spreading animation as an art and career choice in my country that is quite devoid of it, I am signing up with several universities/colleges near and around Islamabad to teach the subject as a regular course. It's quite an endeavor in itself but if I take all these things step by step I hope it'll be worth my efforts.



The course at Hunerkada will be starting very soon. In the meantime I've prepared a flyer to be sent advertising a 2 hour seminar presentation in which I will introduce the subject. It will most probably be held on the 29th of this month at Hunerkada (the address on the flyers above is incorrect) As far as my observation has been, I feel that animation is a lesser known subject here still. So most of my seminar will be an attempt to explain what it is and why it is so exciting to me. If I manage to interest students, they can register for the upcoming course right there.

These are the two designs. I like the flat white design but since this is an introduction of animation to a lot of people who might not be completely acquainted with film, I'm wondering if the more obvious one is the better choice. Anyone want to help me choose?

I'll be looking forward to teaching at NCA (Pindi) and FJWU starting somewhere around January.

p.s. If there is anything anyone would like me to talk about in the seminar, please do let me know in the comments section of this post. I want to do my best to inspire more people to extract as much knowledge of Animation and what I learned living in Hollywood from my brain.

Meeting With An Old Friend In Animation - Taqi

Taqi Shaheen, an old friend from NCA and talented film-making animator came over to my place yesterday and we caught up on things. He is teaching stop motion animation (they call it 'Table Top Animation' there) regularly at the Fatima Jinnah Women University in Pindi. I was excited to get his updates. We talked for hours!

Eventually I asked to see his students work if he had any with him. I got to see the above films, 12 of them in all. These are the first attempts at animation for these students. I think they are a good start and show promise. It seems that these are exercises rather than attempts at complete films, so I appreciated that some did try to present a legible storyline. I particularly liked Jojo's Adventures by Sidra Iftekhar. It had a reasonable sense of story, the characters were nicely designed and it showed plenty of attention to detail (like the face on the door). Duddoo Mian by Anoshia Hamid and Hammad was cute although it seemed to drag a little bit for me. But once again, there was a cute story to follow and was well designed. All of them were cute to watch and showed enthusiasm and the energy to create animation using whatever is available. Good luck girls and I would love to see more from you!