Why we make. Why we teach.

Why we started

In 1996, if you told a Pakistani parent you wanted to draw for a living, the conversation ended there. Design was something printers did. Animation was something that came from abroad. There was no degree to point to, no career path, and very few people who could show you one.

Jamshed Butt started Premier Graphics & Animation that year as a studio, making graphics and animation for clients. He kept running into the same wall: talented people with no training, and training that had nothing to do with the work. So the studio started teaching.

Everything since comes from that first decision. We make creative work, and we make the people who make it, because in Pakistan nobody else was going to do both.

What we’re up against

The enemy was never a competitor. It’s the gap between the classroom and the industry: degrees that teach software menus instead of ideas, teachers who haven’t made anything in years, and graduates who find out on their first job that nobody taught them how work actually gets done.

Behind the gap is an older belief: that creative work isn’t a real career, so it doesn’t deserve real institutions, real standards or real money. That belief sends talent abroad, keeps fees and salaries low, and makes families steer their children away from what they’re good at.

How we fight it

We put the industry inside the classroom and keep it there. Courses are taught by working practitioners we train to teach. Every final project is built in stages, then defended before a jury of professionals who hold the final marks. Students work on real briefs for real brands, visit the studios and newsrooms they want to join, and sell their own work at the Creative Arts Fest.

On the studio side, the same people make work for clients. That’s the loop: the studio keeps the curriculum honest about what the industry needs this year, and the classroom sends the studio, and the industry, people who already know how the work gets done.

And we write it all down. More than 440 course outlines, the jury procedure and the operating manual for running a creative faculty, so it can be repeated at another university, and now published in the open.

What we’re building toward

Imagine every university in Pakistan able to offer a creative-arts degree that the industry trusts. Imagine a school leaver in Quetta or Gilgit seeing a clear path from a four-month certificate to a master’s, with a scholarship to get there. Imagine studios hiring locally because the talent is here, and that talent earning in dollars without having to leave.

That is the point of publishing our curriculum, licensing it, training other people’s faculty and building tools other institutions can use. The method works; it should not live only where we are.

What’s changed

In 1996 there was no degree. In 2005 we helped launch Pakistan’s first multi-major bachelor’s in computer arts, and in 2012 the first master’s. Today there are 20 programmes, from a four-month certificate to an MS, running at Salim Habib University, KIET and Aga Khan centres.

More than 5,000 people have come through them. Graduates have worked on Hollywood productions and run their own studios; every graduate we’ve been able to reach is in paid creative work, over half have started businesses, and many earn from clients abroad. Rs 250 million in scholarships means a lot of them got there regardless of what their families could pay.

The parent who once ended the conversation now asks which programme.