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Saturday, September 28, 2013

Art Direction: Before & After

It's been almost 2 years since we finished shooting in January 2012. We've been focusing so long on post-production and all the effort everybody is doing right now that we forget sometimes the effort everybody did in production or pre-production. 

One of the most interesting things we never talked about in details is the art direction. Since we shot the film in real locations, we needed to work with the art directors on colors, backgrounds, .. etc. Since back then the film was divided into segments, each segment or we can say now each story had its own art director. 

As I was going through some old pictures of locations, they seemed so different than how they appear in the movie. One of these locations is the apartment where Rawya was shot. The old apartment belonged to the grandmother of one of our friends "Nourhan Ehab" and it was so beautiful but Nehal Ghanem had to add some touches :)
Mohamed Zedan is checking the location                    Nehal Ghanem is adding her touch to the location               

The kitchen before and after art direction

Nehal redesigned all the apartment's rooms and added all the elements she wanted to samples she made with photoshop, to give Mohamed Zedan an idea of what she was thinking of before buying anything or getting started.

Nehal Ghanem's sample of the kitchen after decoration 

Another angle of the kitchen before and after art direction

The other two stories where art direction was significant are Dahlia and Moussa. Emad Maher had to cover the empty white walls in Moussa while Nermeen Salem and Sara Hany tried to stick to Mayye's red-white-black color palette in Dahlia with the almost zero budget they had. They even had to paint some stuff in the hair salon and Sherifa the owner who played the hairdresser in the film as well was kind enough to let them do so :)

The street before and after art direction

The hair salon before and after art direction

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Well , I have been following your amazing job since the days of pre production before the revolution , since you were choosing the camera and you had a prob. getting the sound recorder - as I remember - from outside and actually I always find myself wondering How in the hell did the film took so long to be made ?! , This makes me feel really sad imagining how hard it takes to do something indepently in our country ... However , on the other side I find my self really amazed by seeing how consistent and persistent you are on your work despite the long time , the lack of funding and recognition and all the other really hard obstacles that met you during your long journey .... really guys I respect you , your passion and "seeking perfection" with what you do - finding you compose your own music while many of the main stream films just uses foreign soundtracks !! - and that made me comment on your blog , to tell that there are people following you and wishing you best of luck anonymously without even knowing you or meeting you anytime before ...

So good luck guys , Go ON .

And BTW I love the way you write and share your filmmaking experience (Y)

May Z said...

Thank you so much. Your comment left the 6 of us speechless.. REALLY thank you. We never really imagined that someone is reading our blabbing or let me say mine :) Well we couldn't have made it without people like you supporting and believing in us and ALWAYS giving us hope. Thank you million times.

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