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