Director Notes

The 26-episode Kind Friend animation series was based on the texts of children books. Kind Friend was one of the first digital animations in Iran, made in 2D from 1995. Kind Friend is one of the pioneers of mass production of animation in Iranian TV. The series had two other directors beside me, and we each wrote our scripts separately and made them with the small teams we had. Making digital animation was considered a new horizon in those years. But no one knew how to make mass digital productions at the time.

It wasn’t my first encounter with digital tools as those tools had come to Iran since a few years earlier and I had made short commercials with them. But the circumstances for mass production were different. In the making of Kind Friend, aside from scriptwriting and direction, I oversaw a part of production management as well. We had to make a bridge between analogue and digital. A bridge that would lead us to an exciting world of fast animation productions. Saying goodbye to traditional production and its tools was an industrial revolution in animation.

Withing the first weeks of the project, I used my experiences and studies of digital productions, cast the production team. And in the short while I worked at the Hoor Studio, by designing a new production model for the Studio, I made 4 episodes of the series in just six months. La Vallee dans la Brume, based on a book by Arcadio Lobato, Le Voyage de Plume, based on a book from Hans de Beer, Tooka, based on the book Tico and the Golden Wings by Leo Lioni, and Alex Y Ei Polizon from the ‘Alex’ stories by Norbert Landa, were the TV animations I designed and made at Hoor Studio.