I'm Mohammad Tavakoli. I work with universities, non-profit organizations, and researchers to turn complicated work into something a general audience can follow.
I produced, filmed, recorded audio, and edited the projects below, and built the graphics and animation on them. Each one has a short note on what it needed and how I solved it.
Education and Social Transformation, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies
UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies needed to introduce its Education and Social Transformation major to prospective students. The program was still relatively new, and the name alone does not tell a student what they would study or where it could lead.
So rather than describe the major, the series showed current students, alumni, faculty, and staff talking about their own coursework, research, and career paths. I produced, directed, shot, and edited all three pieces. Titles and text animation were built to UCLA's brand guidelines. I then worked with the department on using the pieces across their website, social channels, and internal communications.
30 Years of RAC, UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies in Education
Dr. Daniel Solórzano’s Research Apprenticeship Course has run at UCLA for over thirty years. For its June 2024 reconvening, I delivered a short documentary on the history of the program, built around an interview with Dr. Solórzano, plus individually edited video of all six conference sessions.
I also built the page these videos are published on: https://ccrse.seis.ucla.edu/rac/
This project ran from preproduction through a live conference to seven finished videos and a web presence, and it meant coordinating with scholars from universities across the country to finalize their deliverables.
Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly, Rivers and Lands Conservancy
The Delhi Sands flower-loving fly lives in San Bernardino and Riverside counties and nowhere else on earth. In 1993 it became the first fly ever listed under the Endangered Species Act. Somewhere between two and three percent of the sand dune habitat it depends on is still intact. The rest went to development and agriculture.
Two things had to be explained and neither could be filmed: off-road activity stripping the dunes, and the restoration method the conservancy uses to bring them back. Both happen across years. Animation is a teaching tool, and it can simplify a process visually without losing what makes it complicated. I designed the artwork in Adobe Illustrator, organized it into animatable layers, and animated the sequences in After Effects. I shot the whole piece vertically for Instagram instead of cropping down from a horizontal cut, and paced it for viewers who knew nothing about the fly.
The photographs above come from an ongoing documentary project on the same habitat. I have been shooting it for over a year, including the fly itself and the volunteer restoration events that rebuild the dunes.
Native Bees, California Native Bee Society
Most people hear "save the bees" and picture a honeybee, which is a domesticated species that isn't in decline in the way native bees are. This piece explains the difference to a general audience, using motion graphics to show the parts that are hard to see.
It's the first completed piece in an ongoing educational series for the organization, shot and edited specifically for Instagram as a vertical piece.