Jess's new film

We're still continuing the work of making short animated films based on extracts from our interviews with the first generation of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to arrive in Rossendale. Anyone visiting the Different Moons exhibition at the end of last year would have seen four such films. The latest is from Jess, our apprentice Jessica Royle. 

Jess is making an ambitious coloured stop-frame animation using part of the interview with Mrs Samina Hussain. In it Samina recalls her surprise at discovering how the local Asian women nearly all stayed in the home, with no social life or interaction outside of their immediate families. She goes on to describe how she set up the first Eid party for women and children, and subsequent women-only events.

Above is a photograph of the rostrum where Jess is filming. It shows her backdrop set to the animation, and the colour-coded tabs for animating the opening of doors in the terraced street. Below is a close-up of some of the cut-out characters she has made and is using in the film...

...below this is a photograph of the animation computer, and it shows the rostrum camera's view of the same image that we see in the top photograph. 

The animated film is made by gradually moving elements such as figures, or chimney smoke, or doors, and then running them together in sequence. It takes 12 such images to make one second of action in the film. Jess expects that her film will be about 4 minutes in length, and she's currently just over half-way through. A four minute film will require 2880 different images to complete it. 

Samina Hussain

Yesterday we interviewed Samina Hussain about her life and work for the Different Moons archive. Samina was born in Karachi, and had been an air-stewardess with Pakistan International Airlines when she came to England, having married Mazhar Hussain in the early 1980s. 

Samina was surprised to find that, when she first arrived in Rossendale, the Asian women she met in Haslingden 'stayed in the house' and there were no opportunities for them to participate in social gatherings. She went about changing this; starting by organising an Eid get-together for women and their children. This was very successful and went on to develop into regular events including mushiara, poetry meetings that brought important poets to Haslingden - meetings that often went on late into the night, and encouraged local women to take up writing for themselves.

Samina is passionate about her community, particularly the potential for the women of her community. She has won awards, has worked as a JP, a college lecturer, and writes under the pen-name Riffat. She read one of her Urdu poems and another of her written pieces for our archive recording. She now works as a broadcaster for Asian Radio. 

Above Shamshad Khan (in red) and Habiba Shenza interview Samina.