FOUAD HAFIZ

We just wrapped production on the fourth video in our summer ’09 internship at school. It was a monumental amount of work spread across a little over three months. Against all odds, and barring a few minor hiccups, we got through it. The sun seems brighter and the sky bluer.

I’ve uploaded another of my concordia projects to the student films section. This one’s using hand-drawn animation and dates back to 2004.

This was my first animation assignment at Interdec College in 2000. At this point all we knew how to do was manipulate objects using basic transforms. The assignment was to make the six faces of a cube close to form a box. I think we had just begun using XSI 1.0 or 1.5. Remarkably, i think it still holds up. Volumic light always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

The following is one of the products of a Production-Tools elective at school. I probably worked on this on and off for about a week – 5-6 hrs total.  As an exercise, each student was assigned the task of making a short (<1min) documentary about a particular part of our solar system. The images are all pulled off the web from one place or another.

L O S S     T O    B O D Y

We shot this short film entirely in Second Life. The less said about Second Life, the better. You can find out more about our production process at the Loss to Body website. It was a fun collaboration… and even though I contributed to the conceptualization, the final product was completely different (in a good way) than anything I might have expected (this was due primarily to Bryant Davey’s quirky yet cohesive and completely original script). A pleasant surprise!

If there is a single reason to visit Second Life (there isn’t really), then it is the Hangars Liquides, which is the marvelous location in which we filmed most of our short. The decidedly Bladerunner-esque world is breathtaking both in its breadth and attention to detail.

One of the more exciting projects in my first semester at MDM was pitching a game based on the DC Comics graphic novel Kingdom Come. This fictional trailer was assembled start-to-finish in no more than three days. I had help from Natalia Mitrofanova with extracting the 2D art from the comic, and Matt Schroeter laid down the music and sfx once i was done animating and editing. Dialogue was recorded by various other students including Ryan Nadel, Ken Pratt and Mark Freeman. It’s quick and dirty, but it’s decent enough to put up here without causing too much embarassment.

Unfortunately, flashy visuals are not enough to make for a successful pitch.. but that is another story…