FOUAD HAFIZ

Booty Bandit, the game i worked on last semester at MDM, has been nominated for a 2009 ELAN award in the “Best Student Video Game” category. Congratulations Luke, Ken, Dave, Liam, May, Christine and Brian! Deguiyu, an ARG created by another team in my cohort, is also nominated. Way to go, Bryant, Su Yon and Liam!

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.

I was informed (Thanks, Dave) that Googling my name continues to bring up links to my old website. Links which do not exist anymore. So instead of waiting around for the spiders (or wallowing in my sudden existential dread), i installed a dummy home.html page with some redirect code. Awesome

(I can see my posts becoming less substantial and more frequent, but this does not trouble me).

The site’s done. I will tweak no more. The header image took some time to get right.. but i think i’m happy with it. The Projects section is also almost complete.. with new content (including video) added to the NEWTONIAN DROP and BOOTY BANDIT pages. The highly anticipated LAST RITES trailer is up too. The documentary is still to come.. but with school starting up again (and with that, the Industry Project i’m working on) that might be a while..


UPDATE (Mar 16 ’09): LAST RITES docu added.

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…

Holy Crap We’re Live!!!!

For my new and revamped portfolio site, i wanted something a little more exciting and extensible than a series of static web pages. I fiddled with blogger for a while.. tried to find a template i liked, and changed it around a bit, but having limited coding ability, adding content to anything other than a blog-post structure was going to be difficult. I needed a bit more freedom.

Thankfully, a good pal , Seth Marinello reminded me that my esteemed webhost has a set of awesome one-click application installs, one of which is wordpress!

So, i spent the better part of two days tweaking the hell out of the simpleX template until it was something i was reasonably satisfied with. Two other buddies, Jason Chang and David Marhal, helped me with navigating the css code. Firebug FTW!