Saad Moosajee

Saad Moosajee is a director, motion designer and visual artist whose work explores the balance between the graphic and the cinematic. He’s a creator of immersive worlds often employing a fusion of animation pipelines, emerging technologies, and traditional aspects of filmmaking. His work is ethereal and otherworldly, fantastical and intricate, always striking emotionally resonant truth. Saad is above all a world-builder and filmic storyteller.

A self-taught motion designer and director, Saad learned the technical aspects of animation through the Pixar Undergraduate Program in addition to studying Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. His work is a manifestation of this background and representative of the interplay of character development, concept, and design in the service of story. He draws on a wide array of influences from surrealist paintings, contemporary album art, title design, anime, to world cinema.

Saad’s work quickly received universal recognition and critical acclaim with features in publications including Rolling Stone, Creative Review, Dazed, shots, and Little Black Book among others. His repertoire includes award-winning music videos like “Last I Heard” for Thom Yorke. Commissioned for Yorke’s Anima, the video is a tale of contemporary urban anxiety, designed to evoke feelings of past and present as a world unravels in black and white. It was an ambitious project of world building using 3-D animation and illustration to create something organic and emotive that also pushed technical boundaries. The music video was a watershed moment for Saad garnering him the SXSW Jury Award, ADC Young Guns Gold, and earned him a spot on Forbes 30 under 30 Art & Style.

Other landmark projects include “777” for Joji, a fully animated music video narrated through dreamlike vignettes that echo living baroque paintings. Realized using breakthrough techniques in real time motion capture and digital lighting, the movement of each character was performed by a single dancer in quarantine, then sequenced amongst hundreds of digital lights in an animated chiaroscuro. This innovation blurred the lines between animation and live action performance.

Notably, Saad collaborated with artist Woodkid on “Reactor”, another award-winning statement video highlighting many of his trademarks as a director. The layered story chronicles the last kids on Earth paying homage to Akira and Ghost In The Shell voiced by Suginami Junior Chorus. He also directed a hypnotic and arresting music video for Sampha’s latest single “Can’t Go Back” that blurs the natural and the otherworldly, seamlessly blending striking visual poetry with technical artistry. Reflecting the lyricism of the song, Saad’s visual narrative delves into the human experience with haunting existential reflection and a magical realist bent.

Saad has worked as the Creative Director for Lil Nas X, providing direction and animation for Lil Nas X’s debut album, Montero, as well as the Long Live Montero Tour. Additionally, he has collaborated with a diverse list of clients from Apple and Google to the New York Times and Tate Modern. His work has been screened and exhibited at The Hammer Museum, Sharjah Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museum of Moving Image, in addition to being awarded by the likes of D&AD, Ciclope, Cannes Lions and The Art Directors Club.