Can a Geek be Cool?

By Pamela Young

Once a kid with zero interest in sports and an insatiable appetite for doodling, Sylvain Dumais has gone from geek to much-in-demand photographer and stop-motion animator

Split Run is a new portfolio section that uses the power of both print and the Internet. Featuring an original image-maker who does both stills and motion work, the portfolio appears in Applied Arts Magazine and on www.appliedartsmag.com. Pick up the July/August 2012 issue of Applied Arts to see the print portfolio of Sylvain Dumais.

For someone who is only 33 years old, Sylvain Dumais has had his fair share of successful careers. Formerly part of Montreal’s indie music scene, he is now an award-winning photographer, director and animator whose clients include Report on Business Magazine, General Mills and Subway.

Raised in Chicoutimi, 200 kilometres north of Quebec City, he was, by his own admission, “quite a geek” as a kid, with zero interest in sports and an insatiable appetite for doodling on a pad and building stuff out of Lego. Dumais studied engineering technology in CEGEP—mostly because his parents wanted him to pursue something practical—but his growing interest in photography led him to study art, first locally and then in Montreal, after moving to the city in 1999. After one CEGEP semester of art studies in Montreal and a brief enrolment at Concordia University, he quit school and built himself a darkroom.

Around the same time, he ended up playing bass in Plywood ¾, a “small, weird band” that specialized in its own blend of country, folk and rock. Dumais wangled his way into photographing his own group for a magazine profile and soon began getting a lot of assignments to shoot other musicians. In 2006 he moved to Toronto, where he continued working as a photographer and began branching out into stop motion animation as a director of photography. The short film “The Long Haul,” a personal project that marked his first foray into directing, earned a Young Guns Award from the U.S. Art Directors Club and has received more than 200,000 Internet viewings so far. 

In 2009, shortly before the birth of their first child, Dumais and his wife moved back to Montreal. Dumais now shares a 5,000-sq.-ft. studio in the city with another photographer, a film editor and a motion designer.

Largely self-taught in video, Dumais worked in Toronto for several years as a director of photography, known in particular for his expertise in stop motion. In 2009, Dumais wanted to demonstrate that he could direct a video himself, as opposed to remaining forever in the DP’s supporting role as technical consultant. He took the $7,000 that he cleared from a large corporate photography assignment and invested it with Toronto's Full Service Productions, renting a studio and, using friends as cast and crew, so he could make “The Long Haul.”

Using stop motion, combined with setting, makeup and wardrobe changes, the short film takes a couple from youth to old age in less than three minutes, illustrating the point that Dumais’ studio is “not just a one-night stand.” At first, he feared that his ambitious project would turn out to be “un coup d’epée dans l’eau” —a sword-thrust in water, or an effort with no result: He sent it out to all the big Canadian ad agencies and received no response. But then it earned him an Art Directors Club Young Guns Award in the United States and became a hit on the Internet, and his phone started to ring.

One of his favourite jobs to date, on which he was both director and animator, was a 15-second spot for Campbell’s V8 juice, commissioned by the New York office of Y&R. The message is “you can count on us,” and the stars in this rapid-fire tour de force are celery, beets, carrots and other V8 vegetables. At Dumais’ bidding they form numbers that swivel and spin, and may or may not get eaten.

If variety is the spice of life, Dumais’ existence is not short on flavour. Last year he directed his first live-action commercial, a multi-location shoot for General Mills’ Nature Valley Bars. He followed up that big-budget project with a virtually no-budget job that he has now done for three consecutive years and always enjoys: creating a TV spot to promote Regard sur le court-métrage au Saguenay, a short film festival held in the Quebec region where he grew up.

A lot of the work he admires most is being done in France and the U.K., where the approach to selling products is often more conceptual than it is in North America. “In the European ads, they do something cool and it makes the brand cool,” Dumais says, citing a BMW commercial that captures the sensation of speed without showing actual footage of a car. Here, he says, the pitch is more likely to be something along the lines of “it’s 400 horsepower and you can fit a hockey team in it.”

When Dumais was interviewed for this profile, he and his wife were awaiting the birth of their second child. “When I chose a job now, it’s either because I think it’s going to be great for my portfolio and my career skills, or it’s a good money maker, or because it’s both of those things,” he says. “I think I’m able to be a pretty decent dad and do a pretty decent amount of work.

“What I do is pretty niche,” he says. “I’m really aiming to do stuff that is playful, graphic and ‘craft-y.’ There’s not much call for it, but not a lot of people are doing it. When I pitch, often I’m one of a very small group of people who can really do the job. What I hope,” he adds, with a laugh, “is that when people need one of those ‘craft-y’ weirdos, they’ll think of me.”

 —Pamela Young is an Applied Arts senior writer based in Toronto.