SHORT FILMS
Khoda, 2008
La Ritournelle, 2011
KHODA, 2008
Story, Art Direction & Direction
I never got into animation because I watched a lot of animation. I was actually confused. I was torn between painting, filmmaking, advertising, and a lot of different disciplines. Animation was the one medium where all of those things could meet.
When I was studying animation, I fell in love with the paintings of Edward Hopper. Van Gogh had always been one of my favorite painters, too. I kept imagining what it would feel like to step inside one of their paintings. What would a film look like if every frame was painted? If you could walk into an Edward Hopper or a Van Gogh painting?
So I started writing this little screenplay. I didn't really know what it meant. It was just a collection of emotions, and eventually I turned it into a film: Khoda.
The whole thing took me about three years to make. It was around 6,000 painted frames, and I made it together with my friend Adam Thompson, who had graduated from the same university a year before. Funny enough, I actually failed animation school while I was making it.
When the film came out, it completely surprised me. At one point it became the sixth most watched film on Vimeo, which was absolutely crazy. Kanye West even posted it on his blog—I think it was called Kanye Universe or something. I didn't even know who Kanye West was at the time. Someone congratulated me, so I looked him up.
I had music in my head while I was writing it, with certain crescendos and rhythms. So later, one thing I really wanted to do was see how other people would interpret the film themselves, because music changes everything. So I released it online under a Creative Commons license and invited musicians to create their own scores. I received everything from hard rock to flamenco to Mexican music. People chopped it up, re-edited it, and gave it completely different lives. I officially selected three versions, although I only remember two of the musicians now.
Official Selections
Winner of the Best Animation Canary Wharf Film Festival (London) Aug, 2008
Winner of the Best Student Animation Flip Festival (Birmingham) 2008
Winner of the Best Student Animation, Royal Television Society Award, Scotland (rts) 2009
Official selection for the “Best Short Film Program” at Waterford Film Festival (Ireland) November 2008
16TH FILM FESTIVAL CONTRAVISION (Berlin) Sept 2008
Marbella International Film Festival (Spain) Oct 2008
Encounter Film Festival (Bristol, UK) Nov 2008
Exposures Film Festival (Manchester, UK) Nov 2008
Renderyard Short Film Festival (London)
Flip Animation Festival (Birmingham) Nov, 2008
Animated Dreams (Tallinn) Nov, 2008
Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival (Toronto) Nov 2008
Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF) (Alaska, USA) December 2008
LA RITOURNELLE, 2011
Animation Director & Producer
La Ritournelle started in 2009, right after I graduated. There was a lot happening in my family at the time. My grandmother had Alzheimer's, and my uncle, André Arzoomanian, one of the greatest pianists in Iran, passed away from cancer. We had a very close relationship—he was someone I spent hours with, talking about creativity and music. All of that led me to start thinking about this story.
At the same time, I was obsessed with photographs of Paris, especially black-and-white photography from the 1930s through the 1960s. Photographers like Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson fascinated me. I loved the atmosphere of their work and the way they captured fleeting moments. I kept wondering what it would feel like if those photographs could move.
So I immersed myself in the world of the film. I bought countless books, traveled back and forth to Paris, studied the architecture, explored archival photographs of the boulevards, and began writing a nonlinear story set in Paris across two different time periods.
I spent about six years working on it. Back then there was no Zoom or Google Meet—we used Skype. We had artists collaborating from all over the world, from Argentina to Nepal. It was a truly international team of 3D artists. This was years before COVID, when remote collaboration wasn't common and most people still worked exclusively in studios. In a way, it felt like we were doing something ahead of its time.
Some people see images from the project today and assume they're AI-generated, but nothing was generated. Every character was modeled in 3D, and every background was hand-painted. By my calculations, finishing the film would have required around 15,000 painted frames — Khoda needed about 6,000.
I had some support from my family, and I worked constantly to finance the film myself. But after five or six years, I was about £30,000 in debt. I had spent so much money, completed roughly two-thirds of the film, and eventually realized I had run out of both funding and motivation.
One of the biggest lessons I learned is that sometimes a project lasts so long that you outgrow it. After spending six or seven years trying to finish a single short film, you suddenly realize, I'm a different filmmaker now, even though the film itself isn't finished.
I think I finally stopped working on it around 2015. Looking back, though, the experience was incredibly valuable.
I remember reading a quote—I think it was from Neil Gaiman—that has always stayed with me: Sometimes reality shows you who's the boss.