Portfolio

This is yet another artwork for an event that didn’t happen due to the pandemic. Although, this was just my entry for a pitch which I didn’t win heheh. I still think I should’ve won though. It’s definitely a worthy project to show off with in my portfolio.

The assignment was to come up with a style for Kamping Kitsch Club’s new event, Spoiler Room, an event celebrating Belgium’s trashy early 2000s euro dance & hard dance culture. The early 2000s in Belgium were a time where you would see a lot of ugly pimped cars in the streets covered in tribal stickers. It was a time when it was still considered okay to heavily promote your shitty club night with loads of bikini babes with silicone tits on the posters & flyers. It was also a time when clubs were still advertising on TV, in high octane spots with shitty 3D effects & an unnecessarily low voice as if the VO had swallowed an entire canister of nitrous oxide.

I went all out on this project because it was one big meme, and memeing is what I’m best at.

Last year I created my longest animation project yet for the city of Antwerp & the European Family Justice Center Alliance. It took me almost 100 hours to make this 3,5 minute long animation, from storyboard design to the final cut. I learned some new After Effects tricks along the way like character rigging and I got a lot better at easing. I’m really happy with the end result.

Every Christmas, DCMN really wants to jump out of the crowd and deliver their clients an original Christmas gift. For 3 years I was put in the Christmas gift task force. The second year we decided to write our own DCMN Christmas story about growing. We wanted to provide our favourite clients with a cute book which they could possibly read to their children. With a lot of joy we invested many hours in drawing storyboards and writing the perfect story. We even tried to give the rhymes a certain rhythm so that you could pretty much rap them.

Concept & Story: Paula Halldin & Mathias Vanthienen
Creative Direction: Vanessa Zimmermann
Illustration: Filippo Letizi
Graphic Design: Vitan Vitanov & Renata Gajowniczek
Animation: Mark Heutink

For the Belgian Slagwerk collective I created a wonky photocollage made up out of photo material I shot myself.

In 2015 I graduated as a product developer at the University of Antwerp, which meant that I came to the chapter of my life where I had to start bothering companies with the question if they wanted to give me money for my time.

To be honest, by that time me and my quickly changing interests got a bit over product development. After graduation I put some of my product development school work in the most bland snorefest of a portfolio to start my job hunt. What sort of job it was gonna be I wasn’t really sure of at that moment.

I showed the portfolio to some friends with an advertising background, cause advertising started to feel right. They just started laughing. It was almost as embarrassing as having a prostitute laugh at the size of your dingus. That surely didn’t help my confidence (the laughter at my portfolio, not the other thing). But unlike the size of your dingus, you can do something about your portfolio.

I decided to start over. This time I would do it my own way instead of the way I was taught to do it. I was gonna put more weight on my private projects than on my school projects, cause they were visually more attractive. The target: scoring a job in advertising.

I decided to dust off my collection of SEGA games and use the cases as the container for my “own custom SEGA game”.

Well, I must have done an okay’ish job because some newspaper decided to write about it.

Each case contains a printed CV, a printed portfolio (A6 format) and a USB stick with the digital files.

My hometown in Belgium is a big snorefest when it comes to going out during the weekend. Usually, everyone above the age of 20 just goes to the nearby city on Friday & Saturday night. This kind of sucks, so me & some friends decided to do something about it with a cool rave concept on cool, not so standard locations. BRUUT was born.

My responsibilities within the team were developing the brand and taking care of all the communication. For the design of the brand identity, I created a dark, grungy, concrete style with a touch of bru(u)talism.

For our first location we managed to get our hands on the spooky Castle Hof ter Linden which is located isolated in the woods.

Location announcement:

Example of artist announcement:

Promo video – initial location was an old factory:

The aftermovie shot & edited by Avalon Media:

By now you probably figured I like me a good party, both from the dance floor side as from the organisational side. One of the Antwerp promoters I align the most with, music taste-wise invited me to join his team for the 2018 edition of PARK festival. So I did my thang as the communications guy of the festival. Because I’m lots of fun, I found it a good idea to overload the design with ROLLERCOASTERS!!! (Sadly there were no rollercoasters to be found at the event, although there was 1 rollercoaster-like vehicle driving next to the festival site on straight tracks, but someone told me that that’s called a ’train’)

The Geheimzinnig guys asked me to do the branding of their first outdoor festival in 2019. So I played around a bit to get to a nice colourful collage style with lots of halftones and used a picture I took in LA of a tree hiding behind a wall as the main visual.

at DCMN, I didn’t only do advertising for clients. To get those clients in the first place, we needed to advertise our advertising business (meta, right?). For a b2b print ad for the French market, we came up with “the growth factory” which grows brands.

Concept: Mathias Vanthienen & Paula Halldin
3D design: Tiago Castro
Graphic design: Renata Gajowniczek

Another time, DCMN was in need of a lot more employees to keep up their fast growth, and what better way to lure them in than with candy?! I mean, that’s how I used to make friends in primary school. So I took some ultra bland job-related stock photos and made them look as edible as possible through colour grading and photo manipulation. Parallel to that, my copywriter Paula Halldin provided some tasty headlines to slap on the pictures. With the headline “treat yourself”, we wanted to pull in as many hungry job seekers as possible. I must say that the average BMI of the people applying was quite high.

Art direction & graphic design: Mathias Vanthienen
Copywriting: Paula Halldin

I’m a firm believer in disco naps, 30 minutes of sleep in a comfy bed and I shart rainbows. This was exactly what me and my fellow art director Tung Nguyen thought of when we got the brief for ByHours. ByHours is a service where you can book hotel rooms for short stays (3, 6 or 12 hours). Say you’re in a strange city for business and you have to wait a long time until your meeting/transport, then ByHours provides you a comfortable private space to prepare and recharge your batteries. A 3 hour stay with shower & bed will literally transform you. That was exactly the campaign claim we came up with: 3 hours of comfort will transform you. We looked for a way to exaggerate this transformation, so we looked at one of the most extreme transformations in nature, the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Regie: Eike Schulz
Kamera: Philip Fleischer
Editor: Mario Orías
Motion Design: Tiago Castro
Grading: Mario Orías
Production: DCMN
Service Production: Wolffpack Vision
Creative Director: Lennart Frank
Art Director: Tung Nguyen
Art Director: Mathias Vanthienen
Copywriter: Philip Thys
Producer: Thomas Siudmak