Filmmaker says producing shorts helps relieve boredom

Like many kids, Zainab Siddiqui wanted to be a film star when she was a child. As she grew older, however, the aspiring filmmaker realized that animation was her passion, coupled by the ability to create a world from nothing.
“I realized that wasn‘t what I wanted, but I was still drawn to the film industry,” Siddiqui told eVent over coffee recently. “I like that I get to play god – I can even control the laws of physics.”
Siddiqui is an IT student at the Centre for Arts and Technology Okanagan, where she‘s already completed a course in video game animation and has one more year to go in the audio engineering department.
Last April, she received the award for Best Home Grown Talent at the Okanagan International Film Festival for her animated short, A Light Obstical (sic). The three-minute flick, which she created for her final student project, also won Best Film at the school‘s own film festival.
The self-proclaimed “cartoon geek” actually finds it amusing that she won Best Home Grown Talent. Siddiqui only moved to Kelowna about five years ago from Dubai, where she lived for 13 years before that. Up to the age of nine, she lived in Pakistan.
“We just wanted to start fresh, to start over,” the 27-year-old said on the reason for the jump to Canada, which she made with her mother.
“We really like it here. It‘s not that different from back home – although there are a lot more trees here. And it‘s very welcoming. I don‘t feel like an outsider at all.”
Growing up, Siddiqui said she was weaned on cartoons and animation. Even in her teens, when her friends were all about the latest boy bands, she was more into her ‘toons than their tunes.
Even now, when she‘s chilling at home, Siddiqui is most likely to be found watching the Adult Swim cartoon network – but she adds that she enjoys everything, from high-end Disney Pixar stuff to more mainstream shows like South Park or The Simpsons. She tries to learn from whatever she sees.
A Light Obstical (she originally titled the film in the Photoshop program, which doesn‘t have Spellcheck, but decided to keep the quirky spelling) has influences from the old-school Merry Melodies cartoons from the 1930s and ‘40s, to where inanimate objects would come to life and develop an attitude.
Siddiqui‘s 3-D, computer generated film is about a man trying to cross the street. The villainous streetlights toy with him, not letting him cross, in a man versus light scenario. (Spoiler alert: he does manage to sneak across in the end).
The three minutes of animation took nine months worth of eight- to 14-hour days.
“Before I started going to school, I thought you just push a button and the computer does it for you – but it‘s not like that. Like stop motion animation, you have to do every little thing,” she said.
While Siddiqui specializes in 3-D CG animation, she still had to go through classic animation studies to get there, and she says that she loves both.
“Asking me to choose between them is like asking me to choose between my right and left hand,” she said.
She also has a soft spot for gaming and, being in a video game animation course, actually excelled in that department. What she‘ll do career-wise, after she‘s finished her studies, is still up in the air.
“The ultimate plan is to send out demo reels to as many places as possible and then see what the best option is and follow that,” she said.
Ideally, Siddiqui would like to land a job in a gaming studio that would allow her to shuffle back and forth between the animation department and the sound department.
“I get bored really easily,” she explained.
Aside from the creative side of animation, Siddiqui also feels drawn to a field where you can work independently and don‘t have to depend on others you work with, like you do in live film. While that means more work, without a crew of people to assist you, it also means more control.
That said, she‘s nursing an idea for a film with three of her former classmates. She‘s also working on an idea for a second solo project that she hopes to start soon.
But first, she wants to do a bit more tweaking on A Light Obstical and get it into more festivals – including some on the East Coast, as well as abroad.
“Once it‘s done, it‘s kind of like your baby. There‘s a fulfillment you get out of a job well done, something you‘ve done yourself and had full creative control over.”