Diasporan
Diasporan is an award-winning animated web series that tells the stories of the daily struggles of immigrants. The story is about an Iranian girl who comes to the US to study for her Master’s in Architecture and the changes that her lifestyle goes through during her journey while she meets different people from diverse cultures and different backgrounds and beliefs.
The series focuses on Parastoo’s (the main character) and her friends’ immigration and lives in diaspora and it intends to explore two main areas:
1. Psychological effects on immigrants, cultural differences, and language barriers that an immigrant experience including different aesthetics and standards that makes a person suitable for a job or even personal life choices, not sharing common childhood memories due to different education systems, miscommunications due to distinct cultural behaviors, etc.
2. Raising awareness of the effects mentioned above to the hosts, creating empathy and thus, a dialogue that can remove the gap between the hosts and the immigrants that exist due to the fear of the “unknown”: details hidden in an unfamiliar culture.
The project was triggered in 2016 by shaping the main idea and scripts by Deniz Khateri, an Iranian-American director, playwright, actress, animator, and shadow puppetry artist. Deniz and I started everything from scratch, designing the theme, style, characters, etc. Later, Bahar Royaee, a Berklee’s graduate composer and sound designer joined Diasporan, taking the responsibility for all sound designs and music tracks of the series. This way, Diasporan has its completely original soundtrack(s) for each episode. Eventually, the first episode was released in April 2018. The first season includes 10 episodes and a special episode on Nowruz (Persian new year). After the first season, Deniz and I began a check and revision phase aiming to release the second season with higher quality. As the character designer and concept artist of the project, started redesigning the characters and improving the visual identity of the series so changes were applied but meanwhile I had to be careful to keep the visual connection between the old and new season.
The season 2 finally release in November 2021 containing 15 episodes with some extra clips focusing on some featured soundtracks. The new seasons episodes have more personal stories which touch the deep emotions every immigrant may have in their life journey in the new country. Season 2 emphasizes on friendships, emotional bounds, and ting but severe anxieties. Technically, visual details and animating methods methods got more elaborated which increased production time. In the sections below you can find some scene details and sketches from our second season.
For the next phase we are investigating the audience feedback and we are deciding whether to keep going with a third story based season or drag the project into a single-episode series. We also have plans or extracting comics out the theme, so we can release contents in a faster measure and stay more updated aiming to increase our engagement with the audience.
To watch the full series visit Nutz Design youtube channel