كلاكيش

Animate 11 - Lecture

Wamda will be hosting an energy-filled gathering in Dubai that Inspires, Empowers and Connects the region's best animation talent. "CoE Animate 11" will bring together animators and illustrators and connect the investor community to the top Arab creative talent.

Ashley Choukeir and I will be giving a lecture on September 22nd at 2 pm so hope you can attend :) See you .....

Egg - Brecht

Freez - Refresh, Restart.

and here is the first AD i direct that includes real footage, actors, studios, and animation; it is the new corporate TVC for Freez drink.

Credits:
Client: Kassatly Chtaura
Creative Director: Nathalie Masri
Director: David Habchy
Animation Director: David Habchy
Strategic Planner: Khalil Khatib
Executive Producer: Nathalie Masri
Production Manager: Sofia Moussa
Art Director & Layout Designer: David Habchy
DOP: Nadim Sawma
Animation & Modeling: Emile Jalkh, Avak Avakian, Ashley Choukeir
Colorist: Roy Loutfallah
Editing: Wajdi Elian, David Habchy
Music: Karim Khneisser

This was indeed a big challenge for me. I knew before all aspects of real footage and compositing using chroma but i never tried it all together. working with a group of professional talented people made everything easier than i expected; and again gave me the energy and the will to handle bigger projects with lots of risks.

Thanks for all the lovely people who worked on this project; all the technicians, actors, animators, and all the rest of the crew...

I hope you ll enjoy it and i m ready to hear your feedback.

This s my first project of its kind and i want to learn more :)

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 ...

Collage Workshop

During a collage workshop in Cairo with Darb 1718

BangBang Effect - Jordan

The BangBang Effect in Amman with Nour Bishouty

Haltabees on IPad

On the 25th of July, Haltabees will be on IPAD application :)

I can't wait to see the book animated with its own music !

Thanks to Rania and Riad for spreading fun and creativity for kids in new forms.

The application was developed by BIPOL, Canada.

BPG Campaign - Silver Lion in Cannes

Leo Burnett Beirut won the Silver Lion in Cannes for BPG integrated campaign. The campaign included 3 outdoors, 1 film, 2 TV stunts, 3 radio stunts, mall stunt, mall installation, facebook fake profiles, newsaper stunt and much more ...

I did the outdoor visuals and I feel proud to be part of this amazing creative team.

Mabrook for everyone :)

Freez Black

Here is Kassatly Chtaura's new AD to introduce the new flavor Freez Black. Working on the sexy concepts of Nathalie Masri is always fun and daring in the advertising world. Our projects are turning into pleasure specially with Fouad Mezher, Ashley Choukeir and Karim Kneisser. I think we are building an ideal team, at least for me :)

much love for all the effort and trust.

Client: Kassatly Chtaura - Freez

Creative: Nathalie Masri
Illustration: David Habchy & Fouad Mezher
Character Animation: Ashley Choukeir
Layout Design & Animation: David Habchy

Music : Karim Kneisser

Puppet Making for Stop Motion

Last month, I lived one of the most intensive and charming weeks of my life. I had the chance to give a workshop in Puppet making for animation where i met nine of the most inspiring artists from Lebanon and the arab world. It all happened within Beirut Animated Festival, in its second edition, organized by Cinema Metropolis and Samandal Magazine.

The participants had different backgrounds; printmaking, illustration, 2D and 3D animation, music, cinema ... and this mixture gave a great potential to start the workshop with.

The schedule of the workshop was so challenging; we had to finish 9 puppets with all their accessories, decide on a story, do the storyboard and move to the animation part, editing and music.

How to do all these tasks in one week with participants who are not all familiar with puppet making and stop motion animation ?

Above these limitations, something unexpected happened; a great group energy multiplied our efforts. We used to work till 5 am in the morning, take shifts sometimes, reschedule everything for one reason; we love what we do. We kept enjoying our time till the last minute of the workshop and we finished the movie just before the screening schedule of the festival.

The movie was short but with great potential and a lot of love.

I learned a lot from this workshop. Now i really believe that everything is possible when you meet the right people.

Thanks everyone for believing in this project and i hope we ll have the chance one more time to rock ...

Please watch the Short movie we did and the workshop process.

Workshop Moderator: David Habchy
Assistants : Ashley Choukeir, Nadim Saoma.
Participants:
Lama Sawaya
Nour Bishouty
Ahmad Beiruty
Avak Avakian
Elie Maatouk
Salam Al Hassan
Nadia Rais
Ghalia Al Barghouthi
Mohamed Fathi

The workshop took place in two amazing animation studios in Lebanon; La Palma & Kurio motion studios.

Thanks to Sarah Maali and Joelle Kiame for their great help :)

Thanks to AFAC for funding this workshop.

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

"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: