Naming your firm

Finding a name for your own company is not as easy as it seems. Most good names (Apple, Universal, Sony, Coca Cola, BBC, etc) are no longer available... But you are bright and witty, and a poet at times. So you keep looking for a good name. You find a few excellent words that do not seem to be already used. But once you start looking up business directories, you realize that there are poets just as bright and witty as you in every field. Iris, Oryx, Quidam, etc : just every word is busy yet ! So what about using your last name ? Maybe you are too modest for that, or maybe your last name is nothing like Porsche, Hilton, Dior, Stradivarius... So you want to try your first and last names. Then you realize taht there are Yves Saint-Laurents and Diane von Furstenbergs standing in the way with much better sounding names than yours... So you consider creating a word from scratch, just like George Eastman did with Kodak. But then, your friends keep asking you where does "Grutap" come from and what it means. Plus, your wife says it sounds ugly. So you are left with only one more solution : adding up two names to try and make a big one. Like Rolls & Royce, Häagen-Dazs, This is how I endend up, in 1999, naming my production company You & Eye. "That's not a proper name for a French company, is it ?" All right. There's always something wrong with the name you chose. So just chose one and love it.

Sneak preview

Hopefully coming soon enough to a theater near you, CARLEEN McFARLANE is a period thriller about the struggle of the first convicts who sailed from Portsmouth (England) to New South Wales (Australia) in 1787. From draft to draft, the title changed, from FAUX PAS to TERRA AUSTRALIS, then LIVES LIKE KNIVES, and currently CARLEEN McFARLANE... In the process of rewriting Carleen's story, the release of Roman Polanski's THE PIANIST came as a shock to me. Not only was it a haunting biography. But the key scene in Polanski's film was exactly similar to a minor scene in this Australian epic of mine that I wrote as early as 1983, while staying at Diane Von Furstenberg's in Connecticut. So, I had written that scene no less than 14 years before the book behind Polanski's film was even published ! It feels strange, believe me, when what you created with your own imagination, and regard as a minor part of your work, eventually proves so true to life, and turns out to be actually so effective that a major director can build a major success upon it !
PS : What does Julie Christie (above) have to do with all this ? Unfortunately nothing. Except that she would have been the perfect Carleen McFarlane when she was too busy playing Lara in David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago". Anyway, timing was wrong in every way, since I was only six or eight years old, back then, and not yet in a mood for writing screenplays...

Milky day

Today, I felt like treating you to a serving of two of the finest French cheese : camembert and livarot. I designed this 4x3 m poster in 2001 for Démarches Marketing, a Normandy based agency.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a brand new word created last year (2006), after "outsourcing". It has not been translated in French yet, but soon will be - we are working on it. Who are "we" ? We are all the available brains on the Internet who are interested in creating new words to describe new ideas, new rites, new objects. And this is exactly what "crowdsourcing" is about. Forums and wikis are good examples of e-places in the e-world where crowds put their intelligence together to achieve a certain intellectual goal.
Anyone with a good idea for a new French word for that is most welcome to send a comment.

A quartet of faces

Ten years ago, I was graduating at Montpellier University in Film Production. A couple of seasons later, Jacques Chancel recruited me - or should I say enlisted me ? - in a platoon of pioneers sent out on the cable TV network to fight a tough battle : make classical music a prime time hit.
I turned out to be a lost battle. French national network France Télévision eventually sold this classy and classical Mezzo channel to a private competitor, Muzzik, which was having better results with more jazz on air. Mezzo now belongs to Lagardère Group and its chairman is Christophe Sabot. (photos and graphic design by X.)

Biodiesel goes a long way

This Diester graphic design is probably the most widely spread creation I ever completed, although one of the most humble and plain.
When asked to design a logo for this new brand of fuel made out of colza oil, I figured it would be a good thing if the logo could be used as a pictogramm as well. I went for a very simple symbol that conveyed both the idea of a flower and that of a turbine.
It is now displayed on race cars, as well as huge oil tanks throughout Europe... and on the bills of a billion euros business.
The diester logo has been used for 17 years. Diester Industries and Sofiproteol slightly forgot to pay the royalties they owe me since 1990, though. But this contrefaçon is being taken care of just now, and should be solved in a matter of days.

Charles, Diana and Milos

Just 20 years ago, all dressed up yet standing in the shadow (far left), my job as a "Dircom" included such missions as talking Prince Charles and the Princess of Wales into coming to this remote French town where they would say a prayer for William the Conqueror.
In this very Building, Milos Forman shot the opening of his VALMONT. I was honoured to lend him my office for a few days. (And too shy or too respectfull to hand him a copy of my slick Australian screenplay, which any American would have done with great ease !) Can you guess the name of that Norman city ? (No, it is NOT Rouen).

Thunder and fur - and the key of F

The key of F is the key of such glorious instruments as the cello, the trombone, the bassoon, the bass, and most male voices and choirs. It also happens to be the key in which is written the lef hand of the harp and every keyboard instrument. It is the hand that you don't notice much, although it carries the whole music on its shoulders, if I may say. Both harmony and rythm rely on the left hand. The man who invented rock'n'roll piano, Jerry Lee Lewis - also known as The Killer - portrays himself as having "music in his soul, rythm in his blood and a lotta thunder in his left hand".
Changing a lotta furry into a lot of fur, in 1999, I designed this key of F (below) as part of an eery and hairy typeface called "fur".




The furry effect was achieved with the help af a professional art software called Painter 6 (MetaCreations corp), which I also helped develop. One of its functions imitates grass. Or fur, if you choose a brownish tone.
Another function has the funniest name : "automatic Van Gogh" ! And it works ! When you apply this digital filter, the picture instantly gets covered in small, thick, color saturated strokes that makes it strikingly resemble a Van Gogh painting. And you don't even have to cut off your ear.

Filming contemporary ballet (part 1)

A French girl raped to death in a train, while coward onlookers just sit and watch. A "fait divers" turned into one of the most beautifull pas de deux ever by Ballet Actuel soloists (1999). This still was taken from the 72' documentary "Les Inventeurs de gestes" that I directed and produced for France 3 and Mezzo.

Hungry ?

"Atours du monde" is a TV programm that I developped for a French operated International TV network. The project cannot be fully unveiled yet. But it mingles food culture, fashion anthropology, citadism (a new word for cities-oriented tourism), and geography. One of the cinematographers of this forthcoming TV travel magazine will be the eagle-eyed cuisine photographer Patrick Rougereau. As for me, I like to work things through. So I decided to go back to college for sixth months, and graduate in Culture and Tourism Marketing and Information Sciences, at the famous CELSA department of La Sorbonne. Now the project can get off to a good start : the workout is almost complete.

Study

3D model of a roof structure for the new Court House in Paris. What makes this design sophisticated is the fact that it deals with fractal geometry, not euclidian - or not much. This huge glass and copper structure, which I designed for Ameller Dubois & Associates Architects, has little chance to ever appear in the Paris skyline : dozens, maybe hundreds of other architects from all over the world, are currently working on the same project. Against each other, that is. We call it a competition. In the end, the best project doesn't win. And dozens, possibly hundreds, of architects from all over the world get frustrated and somewhat bitter. That's architecture, folks !... Still want to be an architect ?

A very sane man's tour de force

Can a sane man switch from architecture to urban design ? From building houses and schools and hospitals, one by one, to building cities as a whole ? The answer is Yes, a sane man can.
By the way, can you tell, you sane reader, which city plan is this (see picture on top of this column), and who is the lucky guy who switched from building little houses in the desert to making a nation's history with a pair of compasses and a few sheets of tracing paper ? And when did that non-computerized magic trick take place ?...

Day in day out

My elder daughter Camille Allinne was born the morning after Mitterrand was elected President (05/11/1981). She'd be 26 by now. She died in her parents arms. There is no sadder experience, as parents. Those who reject their children, or curse them for whichever reason, or merely scorn to cheer them up day in day out, they just don't know what they are doing.

I designed this abstract tapestry ("blue thorny lace", 182 x 250 cm) in 2001, to celebrate Camille's posthumous 20th birthday, as she was swept away by mucoviscidosis in a matter of days. Nobel Prize Elias Canetti wrote : "Sa douleur la plus profonde, chacun doit la garder secrète" (one must keep one's deepest pain secret). He is right. But when I was commissionned this tapestry, I just couldn't. Anyway, the chromatic symbols are no secret at all, here : red is for love and physical pain ; blue is for the serene skies and the bluesy moods as well ; black is for the mourning, with its the sudden lack of any light. Square shapes could be a symbol of reason fighting emotions. But emotions always win in the end. And I'm glad they do.