Here is the portrait of Francis Theberge from This Is Not Design (TIND). The concept for this one was also developed with Sebastien Leblanc. For this one, we also wanted to illustrate the character through his art. In this case, it was all about video distortion. My original idea was to shoot him on the cyclo while projecting frames of his video explorations onto him. But to stay within the aesthetics I had chosen for this series, I opted for the clean look of the studio environment. So we decided to have him float in the air, disentegrating.

We shot him jumping on a trempoline, asking him to look more suspended in mid-air than actually jumping. Then the rest of the work was done in post-production. I retouched the image for the general style, then handed it over to Sébastien Leblanc for distortion. He used a frame for the video work of Francis to distort him. This way, you could feel the presence of Francis in his porttrait… subtle! We went through several versions before we settled for this one. Sebastien used 3 different types of distortion that were embedded to one another for the final look: distorted lines, tv waves and pixelisation.

I’m pretty happy with this one as it is an unusual portrait, one that is not too litteral but suggestive as to who he is and what he does. I think it truly expresses Francis craft though we appropriated ourselves his work to translate it to our aesthetic.