Wehde By Salam

a random set of photos by Salam El Hassam from Syria :)

Tania Saleh's Wehde Album looks great in Salam's set !

Thank you Salam, ya esteiz ...

Wehde - 1

Last saturday, i was on my way from Beirut to Egypt when i saw in Virgin Megastore Tania Saleh's new album "Wehde" shining as the number one most selling album :)

It feels so good after all the hard work, to be appreciated by the audience.

Thanks everyone for suporting Lebanese artists' efforts .

Tania Saleh - Wehde Music CD

For many reasons, this is one of my favorite projects i did so far. It s the Music CD of Tania Saleh's new album "Wehde". I m a big fan of Tania's music; when i discovered her first album, i kept looping the songs specially "habibi khelsoo l dafater" that i adore. Now, here i am designing her new album.

Thanks Tania for the opportunity and for believing in me :)

The Design process of the CD was not that easy. When we started brainstorming, Tania, William Choukeir and me, we wanted to create an experience throughout the CD, a journey where you discover a hidden world. William designed this brilliant package that brings a music CD out of its borders.

This unfolding act leads to a panoramic format. It s perfect for the Wehde scene on the corniche of Beirut where all the lebanese citizens from different backgrounds are gathered.

Tania and Maria Ghazzaoui went to the corniche and took many pictures as a reference for the coming steps.

I used some of the photos, distorted them and later added some illustrations to create the characters like the yanaseeb guy.

Aalia is my favorite character in the CD and it started from this sketch and later i added some newspaper texture and some colors.

All the other illustrations in the CD started with pencil drawings and edited later digitally. i photographed as well a lot of papers as a base for the illustrations.

some parts are done separately and combined into one composition digitally.

The cover and back cover, was based on a photo for Tania Saleh by the amaziiiing photographer Tanya Traboulsi. The styling goes to Petra Abou Sleiman, a pretty lady with a great sense of "zo2". I did some color correction for the photos so they fit the CD atmosphere and added some pencil drawings and paper cuts on top.

Here is a preview of most of the album. But this is not to be compared with the feeling of the printed CD. so GO BUY IT ! :D

Tania Saleh's CD is available in all Virgin Megastores and in case you don't find it, just wait few days and you ll get it coz the CD is being sold like crazy and it s now # 2 best selling after Feiruz :)

Tania Saleh - Wehde Website

Hello jami3an,

I proudly present for you Tania Saleh's new website, designed for her new album "Wehde" :)

George Rouhana is the interactive designer behind this amazing website. Tania, George and me had long discussions about how to design the website and the mixture of George' logic, practicality and great sense of design and animation along with Tania's conceptual, artistic background and the love for details was a great platform for my illustrations to grow. I m lucky again and again to work with these people, work is not really work anymore ...

Tania Saleh live in concert at Pierre Abou Khater Thater, USJ, Damascus road, May 5 & 6 at 9 pm. you can't miss it :)

"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