Spacetoon made 9 films with Ahmed Gonaim (2024—2025). Post-production out of Riyadh: editing, compositing, motion graphics, colour and AI workflows.
A celebration among friends turns when a photograph pulls the lead into the dark. The scare is an editorial problem before it is anything else: hold the ordinary long enough to be believed, then start shortening. Cut to withhold what the frame has already shown, and grade the corridors down to the point where the eye leans in and does half the work.
A Jeddah Season attraction, and a reception desk that looks ordinary opening onto rooms that refuse to. Optical gags live or die on the join, so the work was in matching perspective and light across takes closely enough that the seam disappears and the surprise has nowhere to hide. Each room gets one beat and one payoff, which keeps a tour of an attraction from turning into a list of its features.
A period telephone starts a chain of clues, and a mystery told in inserts depends entirely on the order they arrive in. The text on screen is timed to land just after the viewer has seen the thing it names, so it confirms rather than announces, and the grade leans into warm practical light to keep a set that is dressed as a study from reading as a stage.
One of two films here taken from direction through to delivery. A fictional outbreak escalates into pursuit, and the whole piece borrows the grammar of a horror trailer — blue against red, smoke, fire, warning-plate titles cutting in on the beat. Directing it meant knowing in advance which shots the edit would need to sell a chase, and the titles and effects were designed as part of the cut rather than laid over it afterwards.
Behind the scenes on the same campaign, which made this the easier cut to structure and the harder one to keep honest: I already knew which finished frame each set-up became. The edit pairs them deliberately — a lighting rig or a smoke machine against the shot it produced — so the piece reads as an explanation rather than a montage of people standing around a monitor.
Set footage and crew moments, arranged so the people doing the work stay in it. The difference between behind-the-scenes and offcuts is pacing: this one is cut fast enough that the studio never feels like waiting, and each preparation beat is followed by the finished scene it produced, so the viewer is repeatedly shown the point of what they just watched being set up.
A family purchase opens into a city that does not exist. Most of what is on screen is a composite: plates shot against green, environments built behind them, and a palette of pink, purple and blue applied across both so nothing announces which is which. The transitions carry the story — each one has to be an event rather than a wipe — and the cut is arranged so the viewer crosses into the invented world without being shown the door.
A making-of that shows the post stages rather than dramatising them — reference drawings, the blue and green stages, the compositing views, then the finished frame. Cutting your own process is a discipline in restraint: the temptation is to linger on the technical windows, and the film is better for moving through them at the pace of the idea. It doubles as the clearest record of how this kind of build is actually assembled.