When he was growing up in Pakistan, Usman Riaz loved watching Stubio Ghibli films. "They helped me see the beauty in the mundane, and the tragedy in the beautiful," he says. Riaz would constantly scribble his own drawings and dreamt of becoming an animator, one day making his own masterpieces like My Neighbour Totoro.
The only problem? "Pakistan has no hand drawn animation industry," he says. Now Riaz, a TED fellow, is starting his own. His company, Mano Animations, has just successfully Kickstarted its first picture, The Glassworker.
The film, a love story between an apprentice glassworker and a virtuoso violinist, he says, is "a comment on the affects of war on children". For the last year, Riaz has hand-drawn the film’s storyboards -- primarily using an ipads Pro and Apple Pencil with the Paper app -- and composing the score. (In addition to animation, he’s an accomplished guitarist.)
Creating such an animation studio in Pakistan hasn’t been without its challenges -- but it’s also been liberating, he says. "The cool part about there being no industry is that there were no rules to follow," says Riaz. "We really could do whatever we wanted. I attended workshops and found cool people. It snowballed."
Mano’s animators -- who work around the world online, and include artists in Pakistan, the UK, US, Malaysia and South Africa – then work the storyboards into the animated frames, all finished by hand using Wacom tablets and Photoshop. "We are doing traditional hand drawn animation. The only difference is rather than drawing on paper and scanning the artwork onto the computer to ink and colour the frames, we are just directly drawing our frames using the Wacom tablets," says Riaz. "It’s a good balance of traditional and modern techniques." "Hand drawn animation is timeless, just like the renaissance paintings we have on display in museums," he says. "It will always look fresh. There is just something so special about it."
The Glassworker is now hoping to reach its stretch goals, and plans to release the film in four parts; the first is scheduled for spring 2017. But for Riaz, that’s just the start. "With this film and our studio, we hope to lay the foundation," he says, "for artists to come and work on beautiful works of art that they can be proud of. Mano Animation Studioses means that we can support new work and seed opportunities for a new generation of artists in Pakistan and beyond."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK