Photos: valleeduhamel.com
Meet Eve Julien and Vallee Duhamel from VALLEEDUHAMEL studio. When you start watching their works, you recognize a combination of aesthetics and modern style. It seems that there are no boundaries for these creative people. And that is true. The young artists create videos and work for companies that take their visual look into a whole new level. The studio has developed a certain style which is already noticeable for those who are interested in the design world. And for those who are searching for creatives whom could show you a different perspective – Julien Vallée and Eve Duhamel are the ones.
Can you describe about the process of your work? How do you start making everything and what is the most challenging part of it?
Although the process is different from one project to another, there are some recurring steps that we have to go through along the way. We usually start with a general meeting between us to make sure we have a common understanding of the brief received. Then we will spend some time individually to develop the project. Eve would orient her session around the visual language and aesthetic while Julien would draft the storyline, actions and transitions. We would then regroup and share our results. At this point, we will be really critical of both our ideas to establish a clear direction. We would then do real-time back and forth on our development until we finalize the concept.
The most challenging part might be from the conception to execution. We have clear ideas in mind and want them to come alive as expected. But it is also one of the best part, because as things come physically alive, some unexpected input can happen. We like to be flexible and take advantage of it, enhance the concept and visuals until final delivery.
Your project which is called “Google” is catching the attention by the choice of contracting colors, movement and music. How did the concept for this video became a reality? What was the main idea?
This project has been a lot of fun from the beginning to the end. We had a lot of liberty from the agency and the client itself. Basically, they wanted to showcase some specific apps, and asked us to imagine how the functions of these apps could be transposed into the real world. In collaborations with our friend Karim Zariffa, we imagined multiple ways these function could translate into physical sets; from dozens of toasters ejecting toasts in a choreographed motion illustrating wake-up music playlist, to then thousand ping-pong balls that hurtle fifty rotating umbrellas as your app is notifying you of the weather.
We had a lot of freedom imagining all these situations, trying to illustrate what these situations would look like in our universe. We did a lot of sketches and challenged a lot of ideas between the three of us.
How many people are usually involved in the creative process? Or do you always try to do most of the work alone?
This depends on the projects. Sometimes we receive really specific briefs and we have to challenge those to appropriate our self the project and agencies are usually really open to that. Other times we have a lot of freedom from start, and we make suggestions based on our vision of the mandate. We usually like to spend some times the two of us before sharing with the rest of the team. We have developed a workflow that we like and that seem to be working for most of the project.
Some projects have a certain theme, which is eye catchy, trendy and modern. What is the style that you like to offer for your clients?
We developed an aesthetic and this is usually why that the clients we worked with came to us. This is why they want our visions, our DNA on their projects and brand. But we always try to push our self and expend our playground. Some clients are willing to experiment with us in the way that we are slightly going off our comfort zone. That was the case on the APPY FIZZ project. They came to us with some reference of our work in studio, very colourful and bright. We suggested them a completely different story-line that led to a visual universe that is quite unexpected in our portfolio. We really enjoyed the experience.
APPY FIZZ has a hidden sarcastic humour which makes the advertisement more appealing. What is the main concept for this work?
They were rebranding the product and also changed the brand attributes. They wanted something that was bold, bad and aggressive. Our idea was, that we would start with this insipid TV ad where Priyanka Chopra would basically take the role of the director and bring us into the new APPY FIZZ universe.
How did you both became interested in the video making. How do you try to be different?
Eve had made her studies into art and video installations. Julien studied graphic design and had interest into moving images, making stop-motion animation at the beginning and motion design. We focused mainly on visual representation into physical space. At some point we wanted to tell stories that would take more than one picture. It mainly started as we would shoot time-laps of the building of projects and share them on our Vimeo account. They became some sorts of animated films and found a lot of interest in doing them.
Your studio has worked with some impressive and known brands as Coca-Cola, Samsung, MTV and others. Which collaboration was the most memorable for you as designers?
All of them have good memories. But one project that have been quite a challenge during the process is one we did for Hermès. We had a lot of constraint because of the amount of product we had to feature, and also we had to be careful of the way they were presented. But the result was really satisfied for us and the client, and as received a lot of recognition and many awards. This is really rewarding when a project sucks a lot of energy to make the right combinations for you and the client in order to make sense for the purpose of the project.
Can You share with our readers about the project that you are working at the moment?
We are working on the open Titles for the Barcelona festival call Offf. We are super excited about that because it’s a totally open brief. We’ll challenge ourselves to come up with something that could be a potential evolution of our work. We want to include more human interactions and even dialog in the future and this might be a good occasion to experiment in this field.
What kind of advice would you tell for yourself and your work?
The Word for Work is Play. Sometimes we are working hard to make sure that this remains true, but this is what keeps us rolling!
