كلاكيش: stop motion

Showing posts with label stop motion. Show all posts

Tabadol - Mar2it Tari2

During the month of November, I met 10 amazing artists from France and Lebanon.

At the beginning of the project, I knew only one of them but i ended up having 10 friends: Angela, Raghda, Maryam, Dana, Azza, Brice, Clemence, Jeanne, Dianne and Ronan.

The project is called "Mar2it Tari2" and the association behing it is Tabadol. This is their second project between Lebanon and France, and this year the theme was "street".

In this workshop, there s no leader; everyone is here to exchange their knowledge and each idea is a potential project. So we spent the first two weeks doing workshops, each one in his domain, and we did a lot of applications as well based on what we learned. I suggested to the group the stop motion technique, and working with artists from different disciplines made me explore a lot this technique. We used to shoot every day for an hour or two, a short stop motion with no story line; we explore the streets, we find a spot and we do it !

I don't mid now spending an hour a day doing this because it s just like a therapy :)

here is the result of all the scenes we shot during the month of November.

The movie was part of a show we did for 2 days in Beirut. "Mar2it Tari2" was not a play, nor a dance show; it was a parade in the streets of Hamra, Beirut where the audience walks and explore the city from a different perspective and spirit. This was seriously dreamy, surreal specially with the great audience we had. This video edited by Jeanne Robert, document what happened during two days in Beirut !

I took some photos of the show so u can enjoy few moments that i will never forget !

Dianne, Jeanne, 2 books and a sofa surrounded by cars, police and the audience.

"memory" was the key of this moment that happened in the middle of a construction area.

Les Bouffons, a married couple, lead the audience around the different locations where the show happens, and we blocked the streets so the audience can cross, and we painted some additional pedestrians passage. I hope we can keep them and make cars respect them one day !

Songs and music in a garage :)

shows around "Consommation" in a parking ...

the beautiful audience with whom we shared some videos at the end of the parade. Thanks everyone for being here and i hope this post will transmit a bit of what happened for all of you,

learning about Tabadol for the first time :) You can check other photos from "Tabadol" on this link: http://www.behance.net/gallery/TABADOL-2011/2649645

Now we will continue this project in Lyon, France in February 2012. I m so excited to discover this city and to work again with the great team and will keep you posted what will happen in Lyon :)

A Place To Go

A place to go is a short movie directed by Wajdi Elian.

The genre of this short is psychodrama mixed with animation, and i was lucky to work on the animated part of this movie that was full of challenging tasks. The main 2 characters of the movie are Ziad & the cat. Ziad was shot in real footage and the cat in stop motion in a real environment, different from the usual Stop motion set; we had no wooden board elevated from the ground to fix the cat, so we had to research another technique to control the contact of the cat with the ground of the set.

Nadim Saoma, a great DOP and friend was working with me to find a solution to fix the legs to the ground and we finally decided to work with magnets and metals, so we had magnet legs for the cat and a metal ground for the set covered with a very thin moquette. The technique worked very well but we had few issues with finding the right magnets, and later having sticky hands and legs in some positions of the cat.

All this came after creating the actual puppet which was not an easy task. I had to create a puppet that will appear in most of the movie, so it has to be flexible in order to perform all the requested acts. therefore, we had to design a strong armature to handle all these tasks and movements. We had the choice of ordering a cat armature from abroad since we don't have armature here in Lebanon, but i wanted a customized armature to fit the design of the cat.

So we decided to do everything in Lebanon and we designed the armature, prepared the technical drawings and asked people working with metal to execute the designed pieces and the result was super satisfying. We were extremely happy to achieve this quality of armature here in Lebanon with the help of many people. We tested the armature after connecting all the parts into one armature, and we shot a very short video of the armature moving.

Later, I covered the armature with a fabric that suits the cat fur and i had to paint it in light grey to avoid overexposed parts of the final image as requested from the DOP Bassem Fayyad.

Here are some photos from the shooting and a video of the armature test.

We had as well outdoor shoots and this was a crazy process, as we stayed till 4 am in the morning shooting and animating and avoiding the cars' light reflection.

This was indeed an amazingly beautiful experience that i m ready to repeat specially with the amazing crew that surrounded me with all the beautiful energy to be able to finish the animation in 10 intensive days.

Thanks everyone and all the best Wajdi with the movie :)

Here are some shots of the film and hope you will have the chance to watch it in the film festivals.

"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

Puppet Animation - Prague / the Movie

"Captured" is a stop motion movie done during the puppet animation workshop in Prague, May 2010. Enjoy :)