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

Our Latest Episodes

Nominations and Awards

Diasporan in Media

Character Design

Characters designing for Diasporan was one of the first things to be done early in 2017 alongside with the scripts. We started with our main character, Parastoo and so, the other characters were created based on her design. the evolution in characters can be seen in Parastoo in the gallery below in season 1 and season 2. other characters also had the same evolution from seasons 1 to 2. Shading details, articulation, clothing features, etc. changed in the transition from season 1 to 2. Each character -even side characters- was discussed between me and Deniz based on the scripts and some had three to four variants before being used. That was because some characters needed to reflect a part of society and so their features had to be designed carefully to avoid stereotypes from one side and to make a proper meaningful connection to the audience from another.

Having characters and scenes ready, Deniz did the riggings and animating in the next step. Lip-syncing was another challenge in animating the series. Deniz had to use the time-remapping technique and we have to conclude how many lip forms we need to cover Persian and English dialogues and of course facial gestures. So we started with a few gestures and ended up with 22 different  mouth forms in latest episodes.

characters in the first episode on season 1 are designed based on pixels and were animated mostly by using puppet tool in Adobe AE, but from the second episode on, there have been all vector based and animated by different joints, rigged together.

Parastoo, our main character is the one we have it with different customs, the rest are mostly appear with a fixted outfit. We also make characters of our level 3 patrons and fit them into story.

Background Design

Background design for the project is another important part of its visual identity. During the first episodes of season 1, we used more simple backgrounds but as the project went on, the backgrounds got more elaborated with so many details. This trend also continued in season 2 and the last episodes, making backgrounds became one of the most time-consuming tasks to be done. In episode 12, as our story occurs in New York, I made more realistic artworks with the city’s skyline and famous buildings. Time Square and Manhatan skyline took about 100 man-hours to be finished.

Storyboarding

Another responsibility of mine in creating Diasporan mini-series was making the storyboards based on the scripts.

This was one of the first things to be done prior to creating illustrations, animating characters, recording voice-overs, and producing music and sound effects. Although every team member had an idea about each episode’s story-line, without a clear story-board neither of my team members could understand what exactly to do. So, before making either of Diasporan episodes, the playwright and I used to have multiple sessions and subsequently I started to depict the story-line in a dozen of frames with the characters in their places, backgrounds’ sketch, and all other objects and details.

there were also text clues related to the parts of the script, so everybody could have a clear image of how things should be going on through the episode.

Interested in Supporting this project?

You’ll be able to support the project by donating via our Patreon page, Selecting a membership from three different levels. The first level is a general contributor donating €1 per month. The next level with a monthly €9 payment will come with mentioning your name in the outro and so you’ll get credits for your support! The third support plan is to become a part of Diasporan! with donating €17.50per month you can be a part of this series. As Diasporan is based on real stories of real people. We’re grateful that people send us news about immigrants in the world, stories or issues that they have run into regarding immigration, etc. However, the episodes aren’t long enough to cover all of them. With this tier, you will be in touch with the creative team and your ideas will be prioritized to get under consideration for future seasons and episodes.