SHARAN
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THE PORTFOLIO

A point of view.
In every frame.

Films, collaborations, and stories from a multidisciplinary creative practice.

One practice, two halves

This portfolio covers work that usually sits in two separate careers. One half is camera work — short films, documentary, photography, creative direction, brand campaigns, editorial series and CSR films. The other half is desktop software: two native applications for macOS and Windows, designed and built end to end.

Keeping them together is not a presentation choice. The same instincts run through both. A film is an argument about what to leave out; so is an interface. Pacing decides whether a cut works and whether an app feels fast. And the willingness to spend a disproportionate amount of time on something nobody will consciously notice — the exact weight of a pendulum swing, the exact length of a beat before a cut — is the only thing that separates work that is competent from work that is felt.

3 of the 9 pieces listed here are published and linked. The remaining 6 are named without a link because they are unreleased or were made under an arrangement that does not permit publishing. They are listed rather than hidden, because a portfolio that only shows what is convenient is not a portfolio.

Film and videography

Lapse is a Malayalam short film and the most complete piece of narrative work here. Shaivi Chavann is trailer work. Stone Portraits is documentary. Three Heart School is a CSR film, and Design District is creative direction for film.

The work spans the roles that usually get divided between several people on a larger production — direction, cinematography, edit and colour — which is what an independent practice looks like in reality. That breadth is the reason the software exists at all: someone used to owning a whole piece end to end finds it natural to own an application the same way.

Photography

The photography portfolio is published on Behance as a selected gallery rather than an archive. Portrait work is the centre of it. Photography also feeds directly into the product work — every screenshot, social card and piece of artwork on this site was made rather than licensed, which is why the site looks like one thing rather than a template with stock imagery in it.

Creative direction and brand work

Brand campaign and creative direction work includes a Wallpaper* collaboration and Design District. Mastery S2 is an editorial series. The common requirement across this category is holding a consistent point of view across a set of pieces made at different times under different constraints, which is a different skill from making one good thing.

Product and app development

Two desktop applications ship from this practice, both free, both self-updating, and both built without a team.

Hangly hangs a decorative charm from the top of the screen on a cord with real pendulum physics. The hard parts were not the ones anyone sees: making the charm click-through so it can never intercept a click or take keyboard focus, shipping a native Windows ARM64 build when a Windows-on-ARM machine reports itself as x64, getting the artwork from a 89 MB compiled catalogue down to a 33 MB download by shipping the vectors the app actually draws from, and building a release pipeline where the website, the download button and the in-app updater can never disagree about what the current version is.

Vision is face recognition for the Mac with a native notch experience, running entirely on the local machine. The design constraint there was privacy as architecture rather than as policy: if no face data is ever transmitted, there is no promise to break.

Both are free. Neither has a paid tier, a trial or an account. That is a choice about what these are for rather than a pricing strategy waiting to be revised.

Two things worth reading as case studies

Most of the work above is best judged by watching it. Two pieces of the software work are better read about, because what makes them interesting is invisible in a screenshot.

Shipping for Windows on ARM. Almost nothing in Hangly's category publishes a native ARM64 build, and the reason is a trap rather than laziness: a Windows-on-ARM laptop reports Win64; x64 in its user agent, because the browser itself is running under emulation. Detect the platform by reading the user agent and every ARM machine is sent the wrong download, silently, forever. The fix is client hints — asking the browser for the actual architecture — with x64 as the fallback, because an x64 build runs on ARM under emulation and no amount of emulation runs it the other way. The download page explains the whole decision.

A changelog that cannot lie. The release notes on this site are not written by hand. They are generated at build time from the same Sparkle feeds the applications read to update themselves, which means a release that is not in a feed cannot appear on the page, and a release on the page is one the updater will offer. Retyping release notes into a website is how a changelog ends up quietly disagreeing with what users are actually being given.

Working together

Commissions, collaborations and product builds are all open. Email is the reliable route, and the contact page sets out the four kinds of conversation that tend to be productive along with what to include so the first reply is useful rather than a question.

06 / THE NEXT CHAPTER

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