Sometimes, looking outside of your personal sphere of activity for inspiration is one of the best things you can do. Under the Hassan Mohammed Khalil Enany Productions brand, I have had the honour of taking part in a small stop motion animation project and the experience gained from it has been invaluable in terms of how to visualise and manage sets more accurately. The bird’s eye view you must necessarily employ in stop motion and the calculated, highly structured nature of each shot taught me the value of careful analysis before launching into filming anything. Using this experience as a springboard, I have decided to discuss another one of the films that have been a constant source of inspiration for the work carried out under the Hassan Mohammed Khalil Enany umbrella, the unmistakeable Disney classic The Lion King.

One of the things that are incredibly interesting to me, as a filmmaking professional, is the way the images sometimes mimic genuine camerawork. It is especially noticeable in the stampede scene, when the angle changes dramatically according to the emotional needs of the scene and the camera pans across the rampage in order to suggest the extent of the chaos to the viewers. While it is unlikely that Hassan Mohammed Khalil Enany Productions would ever go the way of animation, there is a lot to be learned from this with regards to the use of camera positions to amplify dramatic tension.

In fact, reading up on various interviews and articles written about the production crew, they talk about studying nature documentaries and choosing to consciously steer away from some of the filming techniques used in those productions in order to impart The Lion King with its characteristic look and feel. In short, the production team was specifically aiming for a movie about animals that felt like an actual movie with dramatic narrative stakes and not a naturalistic depiction of lions. This kind of planning that looks at existing sources and seeks to unpack the meaning behind them is something that I aim to replicate in the Hassan Mohammed Khalil Enany body of work.

The other element used to this effect that is of particular interest to my work, as I have explained in a different post, is the lighting. It remains relatively neutral through the majority of the scenes but when the animation veers into hyper-stylistics the light becomes noticeably distorted. Perhaps the most relevant example of this is Scar’s villain song, Be Prepared, in which the colours, angular animation, diagonal perspectives and low key lighting convey a threatening, suffocating atmosphere. Combine this with dynamic movement across the scene and it is easy to understand why this moment has become emblematic of Disney villains. The lesson I seek to incorporate from this in Hassan Mohammed Hassan Khalil Enany is that it can be useful to tone back the fanciful camera work and only bring it out in key moments as a way to heavily emphasise the significance of a scene.