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Richard Authier. Design and industry in Northern Vaud

with Calypso Mahieu Laurent Soldini, Sophie Wietlisbach

The project aims to shed light on the career of Richard Authier (Lausanne, 1925–2018), who was an industrial designer at Hermes Paillard International in Yverdon-les-Bains and a pioneer of industrial design in French-speaking Switzerland.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Picture Consequences

with Tamara Janes

The students task is to create their own story, storyline, narrative or sequences based on the existing given images. Using their personal interests, imagination and ideas they link the images together. They can continue the plot of the images, do in-depth research, write fictional stories or tell stories based on personal experiences. The students had the freedom to photograph, generate or film.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop with Lorenzo Vitturi

with Lorenzo Vitturi

The aim of this workshop is to engage students in a multidisciplinary process that combines photography with sculpture and scenography. To emphasize the importance of the creative process, students are encouraged to use primarily collected and recycled materials, which will need to be transformed and integrated into their visual narrative. The work presented at the end of the workshop will reflect this approach, combining visual results with sculptures and ephemeral installations.

FILM STUDIES

Paleo Workshop - Screening at Visions du Réel 2024

by Loris Ciaburri, Jonathan Daza Ospina, Loïs de Goumoëns, Sara Dutch, Fei Fan, Pablo Guscetti, Anna Joos, Saleh Kashefi, Theofanis Papadopoulos, Valentina Parati, Antoine Scalese

Students in the Master Film Studies ECAL/HEAD produced documentary vignettes for the Paléo Festival, which were shown for the first time at Visions du Réel in April 2024.

FILM STUDIES

Donika Gashi – La vie de Lucy (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

Lucy is a young Cro-Magnon woman, a descendant of Lucy the Australopithecus, who lives in a pre-historic, Stone Age, tribe.

FILM STUDIES

Hervé Ossent – The hole (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

Guillaume, a young pig farmer, discovers that his father is indulging in bestiality.

FILM STUDIES

Loïc Pidoux – Betelgeuse (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

Three young artists search for their place in the world, under the glow of supernova remnants.

FILM STUDIES

Arsène Fragnière – Cartilage (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

At the end of the night, Gaël will abandon his group of friends. As the evening progresses, however, they realize that something is wrong.

FILM STUDIES

Matteo Friberg – Death to the hunchbacks (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

Knight Borboron is poisoned and wants to apologize to Hildegund before dying.

FILM STUDIES

Camille Anker – Once there was a storm (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

In the passenger seat, a young woman waits for the end of the road unfolding beyond the window.

FILM STUDIES

Pol Barrelet – Leave the hive (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

Mila is tired of living in this small town and dreams of elsewhere. But leaving everything behind means even her closest friends.

FILM STUDIES

Mégane Brügger – Mom dances (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

What remains of a mother after years of domestic violence? What remains of her body, her dignity and her strength? Surely words, memory and a few dance steps that can still be passed down.

FILM STUDIES

Léa Favre – Who goes hunting... (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

Today, Lea is going in search of a subject for a documentary film. When she believes she's finally caught her prey, the roles end up being reversed. The hunter becomes the hunted.

FILM STUDIES

Maria Luiza Vaz – Where were you at night? (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

Clara is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives alone with her mother in a small isolated house in the forest. Clara is full of vitality, but her depressive mother prevents her from breaking free. An encounter with a mysterious boy in the forest leads Clara to transgress her daily life.

FILM STUDIES

Benjamin Eggenberger – The Stork's Lair (Direction)

with Valentina Novati, Héléna Klotz

An alienating love between two beings who wish to have a child but cannot.

FILM STUDIES

Sara Dutch – Mife and Miso go boating (Direction)

with Elene Naveriani

In the near future, Xzir, a woman in her thirties, finds herself faced with an unwanted pregnancy. In the ultra-digital, techno-authoritarian society in which she lives, pregnancies are automatically entered in a national register and monitored by the state, abortions are banned. Xzir is going to take the illegal path of the DarkWeb to end her pregnancy, whatever the cost.

FILM STUDIES

Pablo Guscetti – Those who are no longer here (Direction)

with Elene Naveriani

Two women who have nothing in common must hide in a mountain refuge to escape a zombie attack.

FILM STUDIES

Jonathan Daza Ospina – Silence (Direction)

with Elene Naveriani

A sound engineer records the sounds of a forgotten past in the jungles of the Colombian Pacific.

FILM STUDIES

Fei Fan – Fenni in Wonderland (Direction)

with Elene Naveriani

While wandering around Paris, Fenni, a Chinese girl, drifts between dream and reality.

FILM STUDIES

Theofanis Papadopoulos – Firelight (Direction)

with Elene Naveriani

Three siblings must keep two fires alive, to protect themselves from a monster that lives in the dark.

FILM STUDIES

Anna Joos – NIEDERURNEN, GL (Direction)

with Elene Naveriani

In a forgotten Swiss valley, an evil wind haunts the lives of former asbestos factory workers.

FILM STUDIES

Valentina Parati – Acciaio (Direction)

with Elene Naveriani

Through a metaphor with mechanical overtones, an unbroken chain of three situations, divergent and yet so connected by a single element: pulsating, living steel. A family car with a mom and her kid, a furious truck, flying cars. An endless lullaby of engines.

FILM STUDIES

Antoine Scalese – Open Countryside (Screenplay)

with Anne Brouillet

This is the first draft of a feature film script, written over the two years of the MA programme.

FILM STUDIES

Loïs de Goumoëns – Open Countryside (Screenplay)

with Anne Brouillet

This is the first draft of a feature film script, written over the two years of the MA programme.

FILM STUDIES

Loris Ciaburri – Lux Vitae (Screenplay)

with Anne Brouillet

This is the first draft of a feature film script, written over the two years of the MA programme.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Betaverse

with Alain Bellet, Mario Von Rickenbach

Using a mixed reality headset, the students used their surroundings as playground. Through creative gestures, each experiment proposes a way of interacting with the environment.

FINE ARTS

SLAP !

with Geoffrey Cottenceau, Gina Proenza

Whether it’s a parade, a particle accelerator or a dance ball, SLAP invites you to inhabit a space from a gravitational perspective. Positioned on the boundary between two and three dimensions, the works are subject to centrifugal laws and find themselves exchanging with one another to create fortuitous narratives, as if the continuous round of which they were a part of had suddenly come to a halt. The exhibition space becomes the site of a fundamentally social event - in terms of the works it hosts and the exhibition context - and reveals the social perspective that the works hold in rela- tion to each other. Like a boring chat with a friend of a friend, some pieces are overwhelmed by their conversations, while others lend themselves easily to them. You’ll have no hesitation in intercepting some of the phrases exchanged between the works, while having the opportunity to: reply/nego- tiate/argue with the social time-space that SLAP, as a real static meeting point, offers for an evening.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Workshop Jiri Oplatek

by Candice Aepli, Amélie Bertholet, Coraline Beyeler, Delphine Brantschen, Léa Corin, Matteo Cortesi, Mathilde Driebold, Eliot Dubi, Marc Facchinetti, Emilie Müller, Dorian Pangallo, Paul Paturel, Hugo Scholl, Diego Steiner, Cyprien Valenza, Alfredo Venti, Arnaud Wenger, Constance Mauler, Flora Hayoz, Lidia Molina González

An Ode to the Poster 80 Attributes 80 Fonts 80 Posters During this week, the second year students had to create 80 posters, i.e. 4 posters per person. Based on a list of defined attributes, they had to create typography and concepts around them.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Workshop Hélas Studio

with Eilean Friis-Lund, Alice Vodoz

Mise en scène An exercise centered around the poster format with a typographic approach. The goal is to convey the atmosphere of a film through lettering by graphically staging the text.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Can They Dance ?

with Cyril Diagne

CAN THEY DANCE? is the result of a week-long workshop centered around the concept of Large Action Models (LAM). By repurposing existing platforms, the students leveraged the reasoning capabilities of these artificial intelligence models (LLM).

FOUNDATION YEAR

Foundation year Workshop 2024

with Clemens Alexander Severin Piontek, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Vanessa Safavi, Basil Dénéréaz, Bruno Deville, Aurélie Vial

Option Cinema Bruno Deville Instructed to follow one or more people in the course of their work, the students were each asked to make a documentary with the constraint of treating it the attributes of fiction. Option Media & Interaction Design Basil Dénéréaz Introduction to 3D through a week-long workshop on the theme of CGI still lifes, designed to familiarise students with this medium. Option Photography Karla Hiraldo Voleau How do we communicate today, within our relationships? How is the online environment shaping the way we talk about love, whether through words or images? The students delved into their experiences and perceptions of relationships to create a portrait of love in the digital age. Option Graphic Design Clemens Piontek Modular Expression Exploring modular design and creating lettering and new typography. The aim is to create fonts that express a feeling, an emotion, a mood or an atmosphere. The set of components specific to each is created from the Vevey* typeface, which has two variants: Vevey Positive & Vevey Human Kind. Option Visual Arts Vanessa Safavi Working with specific objects or materials chosen by the students on the basis of their physical and symbolic properties, to reveal a gesture or intention in the conception of a defined plastic work. Option Industrial Design Aurélie Vial Exploring digital cutting and assembly techniques. Starting with sheets of honeycomb cardboard and using the workshop's digital cutting table, we created columns and structures, the only constraints being that they had to be vertical and self-supporting. How do you inhabit a space with 26 different proposals to create a collective and coherent whole? Pictures © ECAL/Marvin Merkel Poster © ECAL/Aude Meyer de Stadelhofen

Vietnamese objects: The material culture of resilience in the face of (de)colonisation

with Quang Vinh Nguyen, Cynthia Ammann, Chi-Long Trieu

Cà phê (coffee), atisô (artichoke), xi nê ma (cinema), căng tin (canteen) or xi-măng (cement): in the Vietnamese language, many words bear the imprint of a French origin. And what if the same were true of everyday objects? Somewhere between cultural anthropology, the epistemology of Vietnamese design and the sociology of objects, this research project analyses the production of objects in Vietnam in the light of French colonisation and decolonisation.

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Presque Rien

with Erwan Bouroullec

Led by the acclaimed French designer Erwan Bouroullec, the workshop 'Presque Rien' unfolded as an exploration of design possibilities within the setting of his estate and recently renovated Burgundy farm. The project envisioned an open canvas, encouraging ECAL’s Bachelor Industrial Design students, to diverge from traditional problem-solving.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

TalkCity

with Gaël Hugo

During a one week workshop led by Gaël Hugo, students developed situational conversational agents integrating artificial intelligence. These exchanges generate associated 3D environments to provide visual support.

The Cultural Turn in Swiss Graphic Design from the 1980s to 2020

with Davide Fornari, Jonas Berthod, Chiara Barbieri

The research project investigates the discourse on graphic design in Switzerland in the under-researched period from 1980 to 2020. While the 1950s and 1960s saw graphic design in Switzerland reach international recognition and commercial expansion under the label “Swiss style”, a paradigm shift emerged in the following decades. The attention of many practitioners turned away from design as a pure service for the industrial and service sector and moved towards cultural commissions on a local, national and international level. Instead of aiming for maximum return, they chose their commissions according to whether they promised them creative freedom and whether they contributed to the profiling of their portfolio in alignment with their new definition of the profession as a lifestyle. This project examines the emergence and the development of this phenomenon, which became known as “cultural graphic design”, in professional graphic design in Switzerland.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Fishtank

with YONK

Under the guidance of 3D duo YONK, Second-year students worked on creating animated water creatures with accompanying habitats for the project “Fishtank”, inspired by the wall of aquariums you find at a fish store. The students learnt the ins and outs of using Virtual Reality to Sculpt 3D assets as well as animating, lighting and texturing in the 3D software Blender.

FINE ARTS

WORKSHOP Marie-Caroline Hominal / Pierrine Poget

The BAAV is inviting two leading figures to its semestrial workshops: Pierrine Poget, author and poet, and Marie-Caroline Hominal, dancer and performer, both from Geneva. The former, described by one student as an "osteopath of the brain", invites a group of students to make a family with the voices in their heads, while the latter invites bodies into the space of the party for a performance in the ECAL film studio.