A Time-lapse Experiment

There are many beautiful and inspiring Time-lapse videos on the web. Because of my interest in every visual art form, I decided to try and make one myself as an experiment. Since I don’t own a DSLR camera, the shots don’t look as professional as I liked. The intervals (30s) in between the shots was a bit too long and made the final video fast and a bit choppy. Nonetheless, the combination of the animated photography with the music by Chris Blackwell offers quite a view of by bedroom window.

 Copyright Dany Pepin 2012

School project S6 – Stop child labor

For this project I had to tackle the difficult subject of child labor. The posters below are self-explanatory. I’m especially proud of the first one.

 copyright Dany Pepin 2012

School project S6 – Sandblasting kills

For this project we has to create a poster expressing the horrors resulting of sandblasting jeans. What’s wrong with sandblasting jeans? Look it up on google. Here is the translation of the text featured on my poster.

The damned of denim. Thousands of workers are condemned by the sandblasting of jeans. Exposure to silica dust cause irreversible lung disease called silicosis. It is contracted by workers who inhale it. This desease continues to grow even if the exposure has ceased. Many companies refuse to abandon the practice of sandblasting, including: … (logo of companies).

As you can see, my approach was the horror movie poster. It is a photo-montage of around 15 images and bit of digital painting from my part.

 copyright Dany Pepin 2012

Paul Demers «Encore une fois»

Here is the final product available in stores and at pauldemers.ca. See my previous blog entry for more details about the design of this album.

 copyright 2011

The Making of «Encore une Fois»

As mentioned in a previous blog entry, I was chosen to design Paul Demers new music album «Encore une Fois». It was an interesting summer project I was looking forward to, but I didn’t expect the album to be redone from scratch. A monstrous task since I was working full time as a support web designer at La Cité collégiale at the same time. So after the meeting with Paul and his producer Jean-Michel Ouimet, we had an idea of the new direction: Paul’s return. I submitted the idea of having a logotype for Paul’s name which he could use later on for different applications including his album. With his blessing, I started to work on different word marks.

Logotype/wordmark sketches

Surface test with the word mark chosen by Paul

Paul really really REALLY liked the wordmark on the vintage wallpaper and he wanted THAT for the cover. I tried several alternate covers to keep the same look as my original cover, but since Paul and Jean-Michel were the artistic directors, I didn’t had any weight in the final decision. Even if you don’t agree all the time, the important thing is that you please the client.

Some of the alternate covers

Website that was never used.

 copyright 2011

I know what you did last summer (part 1)

Oh man, what a busy summer! The word “vacations” wasn’t part of my vocabulary during the last months. I worked full time as a support designer for the IT department La Cité collégiale revamping the website, doing updates and some designing. But in addition, I was designing the new album of French-Canadian singer/songwriter Paul Demers during evenings and weekends. I also designed my brother’s bachelor party invitation as you can see in a previous blog entry.

As my 5th semester quickly approaches, here are some of the things I designed during the summer. NOTE : I will be adding a blog entry for the new Paul Demers album when it comes out.

Graphics (organisational chart)

I redesigned an ugly organisational chart created in MS Word into something more visually attractive. It may or may not be use.

Back to school banners

One of those banners may or may not be chosen for the school homepage, but I had a lot of fun experimenting with photoshop.

HDR photography

I did some photography of the campus to refill the college’s image databank and experimented with High Dynamic Range (HDR) toning with some of them. I kept the effect subduded to enhance the image and not make it surreal.

 copyright 2011

School project S4 – Advertisement photography

In this project we applied basic photography theories for advertisement. I believe the hardest part of the project was finding an idea and a good tag line. Since I played Clue’s Colonel Mustard for a classmate website, it inspired me to make a “French’s” mustard ad based on the very popular murder/mystery boardgame. The tag line for this ad is basically the part of the gameplay when you make your accusation… the killer, the room, the weapon. The ambiance is achieved by a simple black and white photo where I kept the yellow of the mustard for contrast. The ad is very simple, but gets the attention. I made two different versions below.

 copyright 2011

School Project S4- Photographer research

For this project we had to research an internationally known photographer and create a brochure/pamphlet about him for a fictional exposition.  I chose Yann Arthus Bertrand who is mostly famous for his aerial photography. Having been a cartography specialist in my previous career, I’ve always been fascinated by aerial and satellite imagery which I was working with every day. That’s probably why his photographs caught my eyes. I had seen some of his photos at the book store without really knowing the artist behind the camera. I discovered a man who has always been passionate for adventure and nature. He wanted to immortalize amazing landscape mostly inaccessible to the general public. Living with nature has developed in him a bond which is now expressed in the environmentalist he has become.

He is mostly known for his book “Earth from above” and his free documentary “Home” (93 min).

You can see my brochure here. (drag the lower right corner to turn the page of the flash book)

 copyright 2011

School project S4 – Experimental typography

For this project we had to experiment with typography. We picked a word out of a hat, and had to think about how to develop an idea around that word. I picked the word shadow which gave me several ideas. Shadow is associated with light, dark, ghost, evil … and FEAR to name a few. Fear is the theme I decided to explore. My idea was to use a light projection to create a word in shadows and take a picture of it.  For some reason, war and prison came up to mind. A symbol that Identify both is barb wire, one to keep the enemy out, the other for keeping the prisoners in. In both cases Fear is a factor: fear of war or death, fear of being incarcerated or caught, fear of the dark. So I decided to craft the letter out of metal wires and even do my own barb wire (see below). The two word Fear and Peur (fear in french) were created perpendicular from each other with one long single wire. I hung the word to the ceiling and projected beams of light at a 90 degrees angle to reveal the words in shadows. My first impression while taking the pictures was the fear of a escaping prisoner surrounded by searchlights and barb wire. But sometimes, even if you have a great idea, the execution and  result don’t come out as you intended as is the case here. Maybe with different lighting and a professional photographer, this piece could have been good. I decided to post those pictures anyway,… not for the final result but for the ideas behind it.

My second idea (plan B) was fear of the simplest form: Fear of the Dark… fear of death. I simply crafted letter in foamcore and use a beam of light to project the word fear in shadows. I added a skeleton hand for more creepiness as if death was waiting in the shadows. My three best angles are shown below. I think my plan B came out way better than the first one.

What is cool about experimental typography is that it make you take a step back and find other way than a computer to communicate with typography.

 copyright 2011

School project S4 – Natural light portrait

For this photography project we needed to get familiar with a borrowed DSLR camera and use natural light to take portraits of our teammates. This was the first time I used this kind of camera and all its manual functions, so it was very challenging for me especially when I usually only use point-and-shoot devices. I believe the result is quite good for my first photo shoot. All photos were taken in one of the school’s staircases with large windows.

 copyright 2011