"WEHDE" video clip - Making of

for the last five months, i've been collaborating with other Lebanese artists. This collective work refreshed all my working process and brought a lot of excitement. One of these projects involved the great director Amin Dora that i really appreciate his work, Nadim Sawma who s full of energy, knowledge and talent, Ashley Choukeir that i've been enjoying the work with her for the past seven years and the amazing Tania Saleh whom i m lucky to have her in my life.
The project was a video clip for the song "Wehde", from the new music album for Tania Saleh.


We mixed stop-motion animation with 2D animation and it was not that easy.
First, Amin and Nadim filmed the stop-motion part frame by frame for many weeks and they created many mechanisms for each scene. They took footage for Tania singing "Wehde", that was displayed later in the old tv of the stop-motion set. Later, we moved into creating the character design and animation and later integrate it into the scenes.
here are the steps leading to the final male character. we did the shirt with papier-mache, took a photo and edited it digitally.

Testing the male character on the already shot background.

old fashion drawing cutouts, printed and later photographed and edited into one composition to create the female character.

testing both characters on the video visuals.

integrate the characters into the scenes and decide where to position each with the choice of the motion.

we did all the character related sets with papers and crafts. we added all the visuals later to the main book shot in stop motion.

again, more cutouts to include in the visuals and sometimes we took additional photos for the papers in perspective like the skirt at the end following the perspective of the shots.

time for fun, or else we explode !

more compositing on the original book. the photos are later animated with after effects with a lot of masking. this was the hardest part maybe because we have to animated the masks sometimes frame by frame, knowing that the scenes are in stop-motion and the movement is never linear.

adding more papier mache objects to the set.

the house was done with old lebanese money, printed and later folded and some parts were animated in stop motion like the window.

the opening of the paper is also shot in stop-motion technique and later, we added the character to the scene.

the ending closing paper was printed, edited with some brush strokes. later we added water so we can animate it easily and in a very accurate way but we had to do it really fast before it dries.

after all these shots and composition, comes the character animation. ideally, the best thing to do is to do everything in stop motion but it will take us ages. so we moved into 2D character animation using a software called Anim Studio. with this software, you can add a bone structure to your characters, so later you can control the animation and the time effectively.
At the end, we edit all the scenes on After Effects and since the files are really huge and complicated, we experienced a looot of crashes. but we survived al hamdou lellah ...

Finally, the artist Tania Saleh checking the video with a bunch of excited friends ...


Thanks for everyone who worked on this clip and for Tania who believed in the group.
You can check always the video clip in here.
Hope this post adds more excitement to your day :)
kissezzzz

"Wehde" video clip

I m glad to share with you "Wehde", the new video clip for Tania Saleh. "Wehde" is the second video from Tania Saleh's new music album freshly released. I will post soon the making of the clip. Check it and tell me your feedback.


Video Clip created by Amin Dora, Ashley Choukeir, Nadim Saouma, and me.
Enjoy it :)

Abu Dhabi International Book Fair - 2011

Last month, I was invited by Kitab to participate in Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2011, Illustrators' Corner. It was my first visit to the UAE where i was overwhelmed with the respect they showed me. It was an amazing experience that i will definitely repeat any other time.

The following are some photos from the opening of the illustrators' corner the first day of the fair.

Other illustrators checking the work i exhibited in the fair. Oliver and his students from Cartoon Network Academy watching some of my animation work.

Meeting the lovely Bea and Rosine from L'agenda Gulf that chose Haltabees as a cover for their march issue. Sulaf wrote an amazing article in L'agenda after reading Haltabees with her kids. Check it in here. Tx Sulaf and the boys :)

We filled the table in the Illustrators' corner with loads of illustrations and i had my portrait drawn by Omar Jaramillo :)

My lecture "The Making of Visual Art" that covers new forms of media in the visual art scene and talks about the relationship between the different types and how they are implemented.
Later, i had an amazing time with the kids reading the books and showing them some animations.

I shared as well some of the puppet making techniques i learned in different workshops with the illustrators and we did a spontaneous workshop for 2 days.

The festival organized a cruise tour in Abu Dhabi full of chats, food and trallala moments :)



In addition to the great lectures i attended and all the connections i made, i met some beautiful amazing friends that i will try to keep forever ...

Thanks for Kitab, Alexandra, Julia all the staff (except Erin Cox), for the amazing opportunity, and please meet the amazing illustrators and check their work:



Samir Minimarket


أعطوني سمانة سمير وخذوا سوبرماركات العالم

BPG Awareness Campaign

Hello everyone :)
This is a project i did for the Brand Protection Group with Leo Burnett, Beirut.
The purpose of the campaign is to raise awareness concerning counterfeit products in Lebanon.
for more information, please check this link.




a couple of photos from the shooting day with the amazing Joanna, Adrea and Vanessa :)


Thanks a lot to Tania and Nayla ...