Egyptian director/CD Maged Nassar, whose signature brand of commercial chaos is on full display in his motion work Stash covered here and here, is back with a dynamic black-and-white flow for the Sharjah Book Authority.

The film was produced by Nassar’s Good People Films thru agency NNC with Cairo studio ZANAD handling the animation.

Maged Nassar: “The brief that came from the client was they wanted to speak to authors, which is very different from working on our usual soft drink or telecom brief. We had to speak to a very narrow category of viewers and so we asked ourselves, ‘what is a writer’s biggest dream?’, which we concluded was to have a best seller.
 

“Creatively, the biggest challenge was making the film feel as imaginative as books are — usually films limit how far imagination can go versus a book. So, here we had to ‘flip the script’ on this paradigm.”

 
“Our first stylistic decision was to imitate the aesthetic of black ink on a piece of paper. But we wanted to create another dimension to it. When we were brainstorming with Tareq Ali (CD at ZANAD the animation studio), we brought in a sculpture that someone made of a Picasso painting. It somehow felt right to be the source of inspiration.

“To sell an animation film to any client is always a challenge on its own, as clients’ perceptions of animations are usually jaded or skewed compared to what we want to achieve. Clients also don’t tend to invest a lot in animation as opposed to live-action, especially in the Middle East/North Africa region.

“Creatively, the biggest challenge was making the film feel as imaginative as books are — usually films limit how far imagination can go versus a book. So, here we had to ‘flip the script’ on this paradigm.”

Watch the animatic:
 

 

 
Client: Sharjah Book Authority

Agency: NNC

Production: Good People Films
Director: Maged Nassar

Animation: ZANAD
Creative Director: Tariq Ali