Naji Music Video and Interactive Album Cover

New music video, “London Fog,” from Checkpoint 303’s new album ‘Naji,’ is out now, released on 08 Sept 2023. For this video, I used Processing, my own code, my own hand drawings, Runway ML, VDMX, Adobe After Effects, Cinema 4D, and Premiere for final editing. Music by Checkpoint 303.

Their 7-track album is a tribute to the Palestinian cartoonist and activist, Naji al-Ali (ناجي العلي ), who was born in 1938 in Al-Shajara, Palestine, and murdered in London on August 29th 1987. Naji Al-Ali became one of the most popular cartoonist in the Arab world, He openly criticized Israel as well as the PLO and all the corrupt Arab regimes. He spoke truth to power and sided with the poor and oppressed. His tragic murder in London in 1987 is widely considered to be a political assassination. The killers have never been identified.

This album creates an electronic archival portrait of the cartoonist by remixing and rearranging audio snippets from various audio-visual resources which include excerpts of an interview with Kuwaiti TV from the 80s, samples from the film “Nagi el-Ali” directed by Atef El-Tayeb (1991), and starring the Egyptian actor Nour el-Sherif in the role of Naji al-Ali, as well as digitized audio from an old cassette featuring the Palestinian musician and singer Fawzi Saadi.