ZORoastrianism 101

Funded through Go Fund Me with my close friend and religious academic Pablo Vasquez, Zoroastrianism 101 is exactly what it says in the title; an educational series introducing the native religion of Iran from its pre-historical origins, to its beliefs, to its modern day followers.

Filming primarily took place in 2024 across London, Cambridge, Berkeley and San Antonio. Pablo writes the scripts and lines up the interviews and I do essentially everything else from filming, to editing and animation. All assets used in the animations are either designed by me, found through archival research, or are created using Persian miniature paintings (and other more modern illustrations).

As Zoroastrians see light (and by extension fire) as sacred, I wanted to emulate light physics for our style, using lens effects for transitions and simulating fire for our backgrounds. I also wanted to communicate that Zoroastrianism is a modern religion, avoiding the more typical motifs of Persian runes and sandstone for something touching on sci-fi or computer related when it came to font choices or cards and frames.

The animations depicting legendary stories are, where possible, accurate to the tale, taking care to identify which person is which in a given illustration. I carefully cut out the characters in a given painting and fill in the gap so that I can move them or isolate them from the background, which makes them easier to repurpose later. Some of these cut outs, particular the phoenix-like Simorgh, took forever!

As of writing, we are currently on episode 4 out of 10, with episode 5 in the works. As part of a venture we’re calling Soul Roots, it will be the first series we plan on doing before moving on to other topics relating to spirituality, esotericism and obscure tales about humanity. We have a plan for another series and some more one off topics in the back of our minds once we complete Zoroastrianism 101.