Homayoon Nasiri (Co-Director, Animator, and Storyboard designer)
I’d better start the story of Shadow (in-team name for Shadow of Naught) production where it hasn’t left my mind over time and is still fascinating to me. Let’s go back a few years, the first few days I went into Avatech’s entrepreneurial space with the encouragement of one of my friends. There I started making motion graphics for a real estate startup. I was a graphic design student but I had not produced any animation until then. They gave me a desk and the Internet and said: You have a month to learn motion graphics and produce a product! I started drawing on paper. With the help of YouTube and trial and error, I prepared something, but there was a fundamental problem in syncing the sound. My inexperience and disorder of the work had caused the work to be locked up and I probably had to produce it from scratch.
Until I found out that there is a person named Hassan Golshan in the game production department called Avagames who works with the same software. I showed the product to Hassan. “The work is very irregular and its editing requires more energy than its reproduction!” he said with his eyes protruding. Anyway, I decided to edit the existing work! Wherever I had a problem, I would go to Hassan and get a guide. I also peeked at his screen and saw how well it worked.
One day, Hassan said that a game-jam is going to be held and there are two weeks left to send the work. He asked me to help him with animations. Honestly, he said that he can’t pay for what I was doing, but if he got anything later, he would definitely share it with me. I think it was honest and clear. The state I did not experience much in those days. So I said I was ready to work with him. With the start of the contest, I realized that it is vice versa. I always had to ask him for help with what he had given me, more like an internship!
Our project was a storytelling game. I was very interested in storytelling and even wanted to change my Field of Study to Movie Directing. I read the story of the game and felt that the dialogues could be much better. I told Hassan my thoughts a little with fear and trembling. I was worried that he would react harshly, but he welcomed my comments, and since then he assigned me other tasks in the same fields of writing and directing.
Finally, the game was sent to the festival. This was my first experience participating in a world competition. Despite the fact that the competitors were very professional and there was not much hope for us, we won! This was probably the best thing that happened to me during my time at Avatech. My participation in the project that won the best position in a worldwide festival was very valuable and attractive for me.
After that, I wondered if there was a chance that we would be able to work on it again.
