media · Picked by us

His mother’s life, rebuilt from memory and 1,880 generated frames

HANAA

Seif Abdalla turns his mother’s journey — 1970s Alexandria, motherhood, immigration, reinvention in New York — into a hybrid short film: old photographs, handwritten beats, Sony FX9 footage and 1,880 generated frames sharing one remembered visual grammar.

By Seif Abdalla @SeifAbdalla_

Watch the film

Read the Runway process interview

Abdalla on the 1,880-frame build and the FX9 workflow

The maker’s Vimeo upload (opens on Vimeo)

Made With Models illustration of a sunlit 1970s apartment corridor opening onto a hazy sea, a night train window with a half-drawn curtain, framed photographs turned away from view; this is not a frame from the film. — A look at the result

What it does

Watch memory built as a fragmentary whole: photographs, family conversation and generated frames held in one warm visual grammar.

Who it helps

People interested in personal documentary and hybrid filmmaking.

How it was made

Models: Runway Gen-4 · creator-reported
Tools: Sony FX9 live action · Photographed material
Cyclic generate/animate/shoot/edit workflow · The 1,880-frame build, woven with the footage

Abdalla started from a notebook: scenes built around emotional beats drawn from family conversations, not from spectacle.
He worked in a repeating generate/animate/shoot/edit cycle — 1,880 generated frames built with Gen-4, photographed FX9 material, and a disciplined nonlinear edit.
Recurring motifs — the sea, a train, a corridor, a window, sunlight — and warm grain make the generated and photographed material feel like one remembered world.

What the person did

Abdalla wrote and directed the film from old photographs, family conversations and handwritten beats, then cut the generated frames and live-action footage together by hand.

What we know

Creator-reported: The maker’s Vimeo upload, the Runway first-person interview and the live Behance profile; the 1,880-frame figure is creator-reported.

Access checked — 2026-09-28 · Opened the Runway interview and the maker’s profile pages on 2026-09-28; the Vimeo page title resolves from this network but playback is not verifiable here, so the entry stays link-only.

Can you use it?

The film stays on the maker’s Vimeo page; we link only and host no copy. Runway Studios funded and hosted the process feature, so the making-of is also producer marketing. The cover is an original Made With Models illustration, not a frame from the film.

About this project

Picked by Made With Models. Added 2026-09-28. Updated 2026-09-28.

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