Gilded Serpent presents... Inside Peek at Making Music Videos: Hakim, Khalid Selim, Walid Toufic, Ali el Hagar, Elam, & Samira Said by Leila I am in the USA on vacation for Ramadan and I was chatting with a friend about the Hakim video I shot before leaving Cairo. I hadn't seen it and I'd looked on the internet for it with no luck. I'm not a very savy internet person but she had sent me the address for it on Youtube within minutes. So I started looking for other projects on Youtube I'd been involved in since moving to Egypt and I found a few. Here is the Hakim link and insider information that Gilded Serpent asked for plus a few others I found. Some of them are dance related and others are with singers most dancers will recognize.

Leila in Dubai

Hakim "When they initally called me for a video clip with Hakim I thought they wanted me to dance in it. I was surprised that they wanted to do a dark and emotional piece (not typical for Hakim) and they needed someone who could act. It was a very tough shoot, two 28 hours days. I was either crying or yelling at Hakim for most of the shoot and went home each day with a headache from it. I really wasn't sure by the playback how it would look in the end but Hakim called after he saw the final edit and was extremely happy with it." Khalid Selim "This was one of the first clips I did in Cairo. It was a crazy shoot with many locations. At one point I was shooting a scene on the top of a tower in Maadi and the day had run very late. You can see the boat I am supposed to be performing on sailing on the Nile in front of us. I was an hour late to my show! There was also a reporter for a music magazine that interveiwed us on the set and insinuated in his article that we were a couple in real life. It became a wild rumour and when he did his album release party on a live TV show, I was a guest and that was the first thing the interviewer asked us. There were a lot of happy women calling into the show when they found out Khalid was still single. " Walid Toufic "The shoot was in Fayoom and they sent a production van to take me to the location. It was in an accident on the way to get me so they sent another van and the new driver didn't know his way. I arrived to the set 10 hours late. That is why I am only in a few scenes, they ran out of time. Walid Toufic is such a lovely person, so easy going, I have a hard time understanding his Lebanese accent but I love any project with him." Ali el Hagar "This clip won many awards. It looks spectacular. It had the best people working on it from the stylist to the set designer to the director to the choreographer. We had all worked together many times before so it was like a nice group of friends on the set, and they filmed it at a studio next door to my house so I could go home for lunch." Elam (Morocco/France) "I had rehearsed this live stage show with the singer the night before. It was supposed to have an intimate feeling between me and the singer but he must have forgotten all we had rehearsed because he was running all over the stage. The choreographer was going nuts but people loved it anyway. Eman Zaki made that costume (everyone always asks)."   Samira Said "I was orignally supposed to dance with Samira without the other backup dancers but she took one look at me at the rehearsal (I am very tall and she is petite) and said she wasn't sharing the stage with me. She said it with a sence of humour but the backup dancers were still added. She is a lovely, smart, funny person. When I dance in these stage shows they always want "something like bellydance but NOT bellydance." Egypt! And I have to be covered as you can tell by the costumes."

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