Free art director portrait, your chance of obtaining a real Marc van Oene

Every once in a while, friends ask me for a personal portrait. So did Soeniel Balak, a very talented art director, whom I worked with for years. We did many award winning projects together. Working for clients such as Burger King and the Dutch royal army for instance and many more have delivered nice advertisments that are still a joy to look at. When he asked me to do a proper portrait for his website and social media profile pictures, I came up with the idea of “moving” portraits with abstract sound.

The result we feel is very interesting and have many options to refine. I figured wouldn’t it be nice to do more of these shots and move on experimenting? It’s not only a great way to meet each other and having coffee, but by doing such a portrait, it’s a nice remembrance of a lovely afternoon reunite and/or meeting new people. As a bonus one can use it for profile pictures too! So if you like this image and you are an art director no matter you know me or not, send me an email. It’s your chance of obtaining a real Marc van Oene. Above all your mother will love it too:)

Hurley home and away uniform

Field hockey is a very fast game that requires great technical and tactical skills to play. In the Netherlands it is very popular and probably played on one of the highest levels of the world. The Dutch “hoofdklasse” is, what the premier league is for football players, considering the amount of foreign players in the Dutch league. Also the Euro hockey league, similar to the champions league in football, has several Dutch contestants every year.  For years, because of my children, I’ve been coach and trainer of Hurley Amsterdam.

As hockey is a relatively “small” sport, lots of help is needed from volunteers to keep the club running. From my background, I work in advertising for many years, I do some communication tasks on behalf of the club. Since there is a new shirt sponsor we had to show the new Hurley home and away uniform. Although summer, the weather Gods weren’t in favour of the shoot. Setting up lights and camera a couple of hours before the talents would arrive delivered the only images without rain.

As it is with deadlines, we had to shoot our first men and women team members in pouring rain, there was no chance of redoing the shot. Luckily we shot the “dry” images before, to be used in retouching as a background. Upfront I visualised a dark sky with the pitch’s new led lights on. While the sky in the image is somewhat greyish, I replaced it with an image of clouds I shot some time ago at the coast of France. The result after a lot of retouching is shown in the animation below.

House painter

This is Luigi, a Belgian house painter, posing in front of his work. Although it seems that way. Actually he was posing in a studio close to the city of Mechelen, Belgium. I shot him against a white background and retouched him in the stock images of a modern and a traditional building. In both cases sunlight is created with a rim light in the studio. The stock images had no apparent sun or direct sunlight. This is also added by retouching in such a way that it exactly matches the rim light in the studio setup.  Shots are used for advertisments on behalf of Sigma coatings.

Studio shot of Luigi a Belgian house painter. Composite with background images from gettyimages.com

Coolbest premium Orange, 3D modelling and photography

Quite often I’ve done these type of shots for a variety of products. In this case the ad agency asked me to do a shot for Coolbest premium orange, fruit and packaging in a kitchen setting on a wooden table with a window in the background. Obviously kitchens are build for cooking and to do this shot you’ll need quite some distance to setup camera and lights. The challenge is to find a large enough kitchen with a stainless steel worktop, a wooden table and a window with enough space to do the shot.

Studio shot of packaging

3D kitchen mesh

That’s a needle in a haystack. Even with the help of location scouts and agencies you’ll have to do a lot of retouching to create the image that is asked for. My proposal to do this was to build the set in CGI where the art director had the possibility to pin point precise the wanted wood, worktop, size and position of window etcetera. The packaging, oranges and juice is a photograph and mapped into the 3D model. Because the usage is a commercial there was a same shot needed of the packaging in an ice field where both images can be animated.

Exact same shot with an ice field background

Commercial of the apple version

Biodermal, Hydraxol and PCLE commercials

Some ten years ago, who could imagine that it would possible to shoot products that physically don’t exist? Due to deadlines Biodermal wanted to have both commercials for Hydraxol and PCLE ready before the actual product was available for a shoot. Luckily technology has evolved so rapidly that nowadays it is possible to create nearly everything in CGI with great realism. A new feature that comes with the virtual creation of products is the opportunity to do an animation something that wasn’t possible with regular photography. As a result we could create a commercial very similar in terms of colour grading and texture to previously shot conventional films.

Sigma paint packaging

As many company’s do, Sigma tend to change their packaging design regularly. Sometimes it is just a new logo design that has to be incorporated but often there is a wish for a complete new design for just a single can or the entire range of products. Sigma is part of PPG, a large manufacturer of paint products for both domestic and professional usage. Their product line is very wide, because of this I advised the client to create a 3D format in which every single new product design can be changed and fit seamless into the existing range of products. That is something that cannot be reached with photography. You never have 100% same lighting or camera point of view over a longer period. In 3D or CGI as it is called, it is a guarantee for constancy even over years. The handling is made very easy too. Where you had to ship items to photographers to shoot, the client just sent a flat illustrator design by mail and receives a rendered image of the desired packaging with incredible realism, within a day.