Bienvenue à Recom Paris!

As Creative Director of Recom Paris, Pepê Alram returns to his French roots to combine Recom’s depth of post-production experience with the distinct spark of magic that always delivers beyond what’s expected. From Brazil, Pepe moved to Recom Farmhouse London, rising rapidly to be the creative lead on flagship retouching projects for clients like BMW, Mercedes, and Bentley.

With passion for any challenge and an eye for quality, he never forgets the main purpose of his career is communication, striving always for a more personal approach, searching out the unique focus of each project with each client, to know just what’s needed to make it shine.

Pepê brings his love of collaboration and challenge to work closely in French creative partnerships both long-standing and new, and to add a touch of Brazilian warmth to the industry here in the bleu blanc rouge.

Combining visual flair and an eye for detail with a personal approach and profound knowledge of the industry, Recom is fired up to build lasting in-depth artistic relationships immersed in the unique environment of the creative industries of Paris.

The aesthetic refinement that French creatives demand is a perfect match with our passion and commitment to those final touches that make all the difference.

Tomek Makolski for Renault, retouching by Recom Paris. View full project here.

Recom’s international studios give us huge, round-the-clock capacity and an incredible depth of talent, united by boundless enthusiasm for visual arts. At the same time, because each studio is small and unique, we keep the distinctive spirit of a boutique operation.

He & Me for Nissan at TBWA, with CGI by Recom Farmhouse and retouching by Recom Paris. View full project here.

We put a lot of value on strong creative relationships whether it’s photographers, art directors, editors or more unusual creative collaborations. We’re perhaps best known for high end, imaginative and aesthetic automotive work, but we love to stay fresh and creative with a huge variety of projects, for instance in fashion or fine art.

He & Me for Renault ZOE at Publicis Conseil, retouching by Recom Paris. View full project here.

 

We are proud to add our new French studio to the energy of London, New York, Stuttgart, Berlin and Sofia.

Recom Paris has now opened its doors. Bonjour, have a seat, take a glass of wine.

Let’s make some beautiful images together.


Recom Paris

4 Impasse Chausson
75010, Paris

In Situ: Star Wars, Disney & VW with Chris Noltekuhlmann

Inspired by the design features of its iconic ancestor from the 1960s, VW introduced the new fully-electric ID.Buzz during a promotion of the Disney+ Star Wars Show ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ by Lucasfilm.

Chris  shot the revamped ‘Bulli’ admired by two legendary droids at the Walt-Disney Studios in Burbank, CA. Quite a few crew members were stuck at the hotel with Covid during the time of the shoot but thanks to remote access and a strong core team on set the shots came together nicely.

In post our Stuttgart studio shifted the colours to create a glowing contrast between the purple sky and yellow sheet metal, accentuating the otherworldly atmosphere.

The campaign has been shown on enormous poster sites around Europe:

 

VIew the campaign on Behance and on recomfarmhouse.com.

Client: VW
Agency: Scholz & Friends Hamburg
Photographer: Chris Noltekuhlmann
Creative Director: André Huber
Art Producer: Kerstin Mende
Producers: René Steinvorth, Dylan Sido / Willson Project
Stylist: Madeleine Zöller
Makup: Fee Steinvorth
Photographer’s Assistants: Florian Brandl, Kip Corley, Jay Diebel
Post Artists: Christian Schemer, Fabian Stehle / Recom Farmhouse

‘Sup Jorden? 

Turbo-Dial us on our Motorola Micro-Tac and let us take you back to Miami’s South Beach in the mid 1990s. Photographer Tim Adorf was inspired by the look of the local bodybuilding culture of that time, to create this wildly inventive series that combines automotive and still life CGI with fashion photography, and a dash of graphic design resulting in an atmospheric slice of 90s Miami life. You can almost smell the CK One…

 

 

Stylist Stephanie Wüstemann sourced a state of the art (in 1997) Motorola mobile phone, which Recom then modelled in CGI. Using the same angles for the car shots and the phone, the team brought the series together.

 

Adorf found his own personal Muscle Beach in a tiled carport in Barcelona, the perfect setting for the eye-popping physique of model Uri Garcia.

 

 

The freedom of CGI meant that they could choose one of the most iconic cars of that era, the Lamborghini Diablo. It was a perfect fit for this series! The CGI team made the dream real in a very 1990s shade of metallic purple. We came up with simplified and stylish angle suggestions and rough crop tests of the larger shots, slowly adding variants to the series.

 

 

Based on the original manual, Maison CC worked on the design – their laser focus on the mood of advertisement product shots of the time made the 1990s aesthetics as tight as purple spandex! Dreamboat posters and ripped out magazine advert pages add to the vintage character.

 

 

 

Finally, the post artists of Recom Berlin pumped up the grade and buffed the series to perfection.

 

 

Enjoy the ride, with a suitably rad soundtrack for your DiscMan provided here….Yellow sport earphones mandatory.
Photographer: Tim Adorf
Styling: Stephanie Wüstemann
Graphicdesign: Maison CC
Creative Direction: recom berlin
CGI: Richard Jenkinson, Dennis Brinkmann
Retouching: Matteo Cianfarani, Patryk Hadas, Jonas Braukmann

On Location: BMW with Stefan Milev

Project: BMW Group / Stefan Milev Client: BMW Group Photographer: Stefan Milev Creative Director: Antje List Post Artist: Julia Ackermann,Lorenz Edelmann,Thomas Saalfrank

That’s how it goes when you have so many cars….over time, some go missing, and eventually one is lost completely.

This is what happened to BMW’s Garmisch concept car from 1970.  The Garmisch was designed at the legendary Italian house Bertone, and exhibited at the Geneva Motor Show –  its modern lines clearly influenced the design of the first 5 series in 1972.

The original concept car has disappeared, untraceable to this day. Maybe it will turn up as a barn find in fifty years.

But BMW didn’t want to wait that long, and rebuilt the car from the original design documents. The documents were all in black and white, so for colour, they had to consult the car’s original designer: Marcello Gandini, who created iconic sports cars such as the Lamborghini Miura and Countach, and the Lancia Stratos. The car was rebuilt by hand in Turin, in much the same way as the original 50 years ago, and the reborn Garmisch was exhibited at the Concorso d’Eleganza 2019 at Lake Como.

Read the fascinating story of its reconstruction here in Classic Driver.

On Location (Photos: Stefan Milev)

Stefan Milev photographed the Garmisch using this 8 x 10 wooden Deardorff camera from 1948 – the team travelled to locations around Italy’s Piedmont region using mostly Polaroid film on the vintage camera.

 

 


On Location (Photos: Speedball Productions)

Vlens Mueller-Feller of Speedball Productions: “During early preparations, images of the (possible) final result will start to appear before one’s eyes, when scouting I already can see the photographer or director saying “this is it, this is the perfect spot” (@put.model.here)… So this spot in the Italian Alps was one of those.” See their Instagram feed for more…

 

 


Final images

The resulting film images were scanned and graded by our artists in the Stuttgart studio to enhance the colour mood of the series.

Project: BMW Group / Stefan Milev Client: BMW Group Photographer: Stefan Milev Creative Director: Antje List Post Artist: Julia Ackermann,Lorenz Edelmann,Thomas Saalfrank

See the full series on Behance here and on our site here.

Client: BMW Group
 Photographer: Stefan Milev
Post Artists: Julia Ackermann, Lorenz Edelmann, Thomas Saalfrank / Recom Stuttgart
Creative Director: Antje List
Production: Speedball Productions and Pirate Productions
Model: Scott Temple
Photographer’s Agent: Wildfox Running

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On Location: Mercedes with Nick Meek

 

Bold primary colours meet strong abstract shapes in this campaign for Mercedes from Antoni. We travelled with photographer Nick Meek to Calvert Studios, an extraordinary and unique open air car studio in Spain. Enjoy these pictures from behind the scenes:

 

 

The dream team – Jorge, Nick, Christoph and Paul.

The final images are used in the deluxe print campaign, and billboards in place in Germany. See them in situ here.

 

See all the finished images on Behance here and try to work out which ones are CGI…

Client: Mercedes-Benz Deutschland
Photographer: Nick Meek
Assistants: Jorge Dieguez, Paul Blundell

Executive Production: Siobhan Squire
Location: Calvert Studios

Agency: Antoni
Executive Creative Director: Veit Moeller
Creative Director: Christian Kies, Christopher Hoene
Art Director: Mathias Wilke, Tim Grötzinger
Copywriter: Matti Lietsch, Luca Haeussler
Head of Product Communication Cars Germany: Christine Wolburg
Product Communication Cars Germany: Nancy Weitling
Art Buyer: Valerie Opitz

CGI Artist: Kristian Turner / Recom Farmhouse
Post Artists: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown, Maria Luisa Calosso, Nuria Segura, Aljaz Bezjak / Recom Farmhouse

On Location: Nissan Juke

We travelled to Spain with Nick Meek to shoot the new Nissan Juke in a series of elegant architectural settings. For post-production, this involved a wide spectrum of skills – from shooting duplicate cars in order to avoid complex reflections, bringing sunshine to a rainy day, and finally a dramatic day-to-night conversion.

For this shot, the reflections of the structure were too much to be removed in post, so Nick photographed duplicate cars inside and outside the building, Christoph captured additional backplate elements. We had to deal with very mixed weather conditions! The team went out on a boat to shoot the skyline – the cityscape that you see in the shot was puzzled together from many separate shots to get the perfect backplate, evocative of an attractive city without detracting the viewer from the car as the hero of the shot. Join us on location:

Nights are drawing in! After the shoot was completed, Nissan wanted a night-time version of one of the shots. This was a very interesting challenge – moving a very high key image to be ultra low key

The car is a new, special edition model, so the alterations were complex – far beyond just changing the colour. We re-rendered the paint and the interior of the car – only tyres and lights remain from the original model. Using the HDR spheres that we’d produced at the time, we re-rendered the building and environment. The floor was taken from the original (pre-retouching) imagery, so retained its texture and was accurate at night. We replaced the city at skyline at the back with sourced material to make a new nightscape.

The new shot retains the elegant simplicity of composition that is a key part of the original, whilst adding the distinct ambience of a moonlit night.

Nissan

See the process here:

And the whole campaign on Behance here.

Client: Nissan Europe

Agency: TBWA/Paris

Art Director: Elisabeth Ribeiro

Assistant Art Director: Maude Muller

Art Buyer: Marie Moulin

Photographer: Nick Meek

Production: New Moon Productions

CGI Artist: Kristian Turner (daytime shot), Carlos Pecino (night time shot)

Post Artists: Pepê Alram, Ulf Cantignon, Christoph Bolten

Mercedes with Tomek Olszowski and Bartek Hlawka – Behind the Scenes

Client: Mercedes Benz Photographer: Tomek Olszowski Post Artists: Aljaž Bezjak  , Maria Luisa Calosso, Ulf Cantignon

We loved working with Tomek Olszowski and Bartek Hlawka on this project in set in Croatia, for Mercedes-Benz’s #MBvideocar campaign – the raw power of the car as it roars through the otherworldly setting of a remote island makes for a dynamite short film.Thanks to Tomek for this detailed look behind the scenes of an extraordinary piece of work!

“The idea.
The idea was simple – to create the feel of another world. No trees, no natural green landscapes…we wanted volcanic black sand or rocks, some raw, unearthly and hostile place to be a setting for an insanely extravagant car.

We found the perfect location in a high mountain pass between France and Italy, and sent our concepts to Mercedes, who loved the idea and gave us the green light to use one of their their monster-engined new models – the AMG GT S

However, by this time, our Alpine location was under several unexpected metres of snow….We needed plan B! So we fired up Google Earth and began to explore…

That’s how we found Pag and Rab – two islands in Croatia with spectacular roads to their ferry harbours. They made the perfect choice for our vision: the harbour has lots of free asphalt space, there’s sea water to keep the ground wet, and the traffic is limited because of the ferry schedule.

Travelling.
So I jumped on a plane from Cracow to Stuttgart, picked up the Mercedes AMG GT S model and drove it to Croatia. By the way, the car is awesome – not only a great powerful toy to play with, but also enough comfortable to travel. Very nice experience.

As the November weather was very unpredictable we were worried if we would get any sun in Croatia. The forecast looked strange – on Pag we had a window with great weather – sunny and  18°, but 20 km away on continental Croatia it was snowing and 5°C .

And actually, that was it exactly how it was! I was driving on a Croatian highway at 3 C degrees, in heavy snow, feeling pretty depressed. And right after emerging from the 6 km long Sveti Rok tunnel…the winter was gone. I had full sun and temperature jumped from 3°C to 16°C! How is that even possible? The answer is simple: very strong wind blowing from the sea – and that wind was to cause us problems.

Stills shoot.

Studio Tecza Production drove from Warsaw to Pag Island in our tech car with all the necessary equipment including cameras, tripods, rigs, lights and grip.

We had a Nikon D800 camera to shoot handheld surrounding shots, plus a PhaseOne XF 100mpx tethered to a computer station. We wanted to shot many rigshots, as I just received my custom built carbon fibre 8m long pole back in Poland. The first day, we were tech scouting the harbour on Pag, preparing the car and planning our schedule according to the sun position.

Next morning in the harbour, we started the shoot early, pumping sea water to make the ground wet. The light was so beautiful that when I saw first shots in CaptureOne I just instantly felt in love. I had wanted to keep a natural feel, and there was literally nothing I could improve. We had lights, flags and other equipment but none of it was needed in these conditions.

We had planned to set up some rigshots on the road as the sun rose higher. Unfortunately, the  aforementioned strong wind complicated things. We managed to get only one proper rigshot as the wind was so variable, and when it was blowing we had to wait.

Stills Shoot 2 

Next day, we started by shooting the rocky parts.

We had scouted some nice spots where the car would look unexpected and strange, but were still accessible. The wind was so strong we couldn’t even hold the lighting flags, but I was OK with that – the surroundings were beautiful and the natural shots looked still amazing.

We did some panning, and wide landscape shots with the car small in frame as well.Fortunately the wind started to weaken in the afternoon, so we had some time to mount the rig and take another shot. The raw material felt really great. I was proud of my rig gear, it was the first serious test for this equipment. I loved the images produced by the new PhaseOne model, and I wanted the colour to be still more unorthodox and unique. I knew the only guys that would understand were Recom Farmhouse!

 

Video shoot.
Director of Photography Bartek Hlawka and his team had arrived on the first day of shooting stills in their oldie but goodie, Subaru Impreza GT 🙂 This car had a real mission, not only to bring the guys and equipment from Warsaw, but also to take a part of the shoot as a pursuit vehicle.  We collaborated closely, discussing everything before each lap up and down the hill.

Photo production showed that the road was almost like a movie set from a zombie apocalypse movie. We saw maybe 3 cars every two hours and it became clear that it would be a lot of fun having a road for ourselves.

We started recce from a drone to get to know all the bends and their surroundings. The weather was windy, so it wasn’t an easy task. After doing almost 100km over a 5km section of the road, we knew every centimeter of it.

Finally we chose the harbour as our starting point for all the shots and also as a location for the final shot.

Our trusted Subaru was very brave on the preproduction day, but the real stuff was to come.

We planned two shooting days for images, and one for audio recording. Next day we arrived at the first location at 5 am and the view was breathtaking. We already knew that we have something special in our hands. After only a few kilometres it became clear that if we wanted to show speed on the screen the only was it to drive… fast.

We drove 700km in total on the spectacular 5km course during  two days of pure pleasure!  Combined with hard work and a lot of a high-speed driving, it was a filmmaker’s dream come true. The weather was capricious but it gave us an opportunity to shoot in different conditions.

Most of the shots were made on a gimbal attached to a Ditogear Vibrafreek stabilizing arm. We chose a Sony camera to have low light capabilities and combined it with vintage Japanese lenses from the 70s. It gave us a nice analogue feel with a lot of information in the image to do the grading.

After intense two days, we were ready for audio recording. Sound design was always meant to be a huge part of the finished video. We mounted microphones on the exhaust and in the interior, and recorded flybys to have as many options as possible.

With the shooting complete, we moved onto the editing, sound design and colour grading.

Bartek Hlawka edited a first cut and composer Michal “Lieke” wrote a powerful and atmospheric piece of music for it,  which inspired the further editing that would tell the story in an interesting way.

 

 

Starting with abstract shots of an almost unrecognizable silhouette of the car before dawn, and gradually transitioning to a bright day, we combined all the shots from different weather conditions into a coherent sequence.  Then the plan was to overwhelm the viewer with dynamic and dense editing of images and sounds to the point where we felt we had to stop and breathe a little bit…and finally reveal the car and all its magnificently curvilinear design for a few final seconds on the screen.

Lieke completed the atmospheric music and sound design, with the sound of the engine as an integral part of the story. 

The colour grading by Christoph at Recom Farmhouse was the final touch, enhancing the feeling of being out of this world and bringing the shots together as a coherent whole. The challenge was to harmonise footage shot in with different lenses, lighting situations, and wildly varying weather conditions. Fine-tuned and polished with painstaking care, the united piece flows flawlessly as a story of a perfect day’s driving from dawn till dusk.”

 

Client: Mercedes Benz Photographer: Tomek Olszowski Post Artists: Aljaž Bezjak  , Maria Luisa Calosso, Ulf Cantignon

See the full series on our site here.

 

Client: Mercedes Benz

Stills:
Photographer: Tomek Olszowski
Production: Piotr Stefanski – Studio Tecza
Post Artist: Aljaž Bezjak, Maria Luisa Calosso, Ulf Cantignon / Recom Farmhouse
Assistant: Adam Gocel

Film:
Direction: Tomek Olszowski
Director of Photography: Bartek Hlawka
Colour Grading: Christoph Bolten / Recom Farmhouse
Music: Michal Przybylski “Lieke”
Chase Car: Karol Szymanski
Production: Piotr Stefanski – Studio Tecza
Assistants: Adam Bonarski, Adam Gocel

 

 

Making Of “Jaguar” – painting sunshine with Marc Trautmann

How to bring the sunshine when the weather just will not co-operate?  This is how we do it:

Marc Trautmann took the new compact crossover E-Pace on a week long shoot to the streets of London for its latest campaign. The brief called for a sunny, late afternoon atmosphere, but the weather refused to cooperate. This didn’t stop our post artist Pepê Alram from using his mad sunshine painting skills, and together the team transformed a gloomy day into a pleasant, bustling afternoon in the city.

See the series on our site here.

Client: Jaguar Land Rover
Agency: Spark 44
Photographer: Marc Trautmann
Creative Director: Nick Hearne
Art Director: Samuel Hennessy
Post Artists: Pepê Alram, Aljaž Bezjak / Recom Farmhouse
Photographer’s Agent: Patrick Casey

On Location: Bentley with Graham Thorp

Bentley Continental GT

We spent a week shooting in locations around Italy for Bentley, with photographer Graham Thorp and agency Keko London, updating classic Italian landscape photography to fit with the modern luxury of the new Bentley Continental GTI.

As we started work to create the perfect image above, it was clear that there would be some challenges along the road…photographer Graham Thorp waits for the briefest moment of sunshine. “Let’s shoot in the mountains, they said. The light and views are amazing, they said…”

In the rain

Creative Director Iain Ross searches for a break in the clouds:

Recom Farmhouse on location with Bentley

…but after extensive scouting (and a wait for the weather!) we’re up early and waiting for the light:

Awkward positions make for the perfect angle on those twisting mountain roads… 

As workspaces go, you can’t complain:

That perfect low light for shooting needs some work for the post-production environment…

 

Talk to the monitor!

 

Beautiful sunset light on a perfectly curving stretch of road…

Recom Farmhouse on location with Bentley
Recom Farmhouse on location with Bentley

Setting up in the early morning – classic Tuscany landscapes:

Recom Farmhouse on location with Bentley

Burning the midnight oil by the pool:

Recom Farmhouse on location with Bentley

 

Some of the final results in print, in Harper’s Bazaar:

See the campaign on our site here

Credits:

Client: Bentley
Agency: Keko London
Photographer: Graham Thorp
Creative Director: Iain Ross
Production: Martin Bennett, “a href=”http://www.mustard-berlin.com/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Mustard Berlin
Producer: Maja McIntosh
Post-Production: Recom Farmhouse

Making “Of Rainbows And Other Monuments” with Clemens Ascher

Photographer: Clemens Ascher CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Anna Toropova Post Artists: Pepe Alram, Aljaz Bezjak Stylist: Alice Whiting Make-up: Amy Conley Hair: Brooke Neilson

Clemens Ascher dreamt up “this surrealistic and graphic world featuring mysterious monuments, the legendary Ferrari Rainbow and its furious drivers” – a minimalistic and metaphysical series in three subtly muted primary colours.

The ultra-distinctive stylings of Bertone cars are epitomised by the angular Ferrari Rainbow. This astonishing wedge-shaped concept car from 1976 never went into production and the prototype remains concealed in Bertone’s private collection.

Photos by Rainer Schlegelmilch and story on this largely forgotten legend here:
https://www.classicdriver.com/en/article/cars/classic-concepts-1976-ferrari-rainbow

Through CGI we set out to bring it into a uniquely imagined world. Clemens began by sketching  a deceptively simple series of shapes, exploring balance, colour and volume.

In the Recom Farmhouse London studio, we took Clemens’ initial sketches and began to work with them in CGI, turning the blocked volumes into architectural elements and experimenting with the placement of the car.

Gathering references for the concrete and asphalt. We spent time observing how the materials age, plants, water, sand and other natural forces work on the angular forms of buildings.

.Collaboratively, we created the monuments, making the abstract shapes work intriguingly but believably together. And we incorporated some pre-shot elements from Clemens – for instance, skies and figures.

Working closely at every stage with the photographer, we created the perfect setting and mood for this mysterious supercar. See how the yellow image was built up in this video:

View the rest of the series here

Photographer: Clemens Ascher
Stylist: Alice Whiting
Model: Jacopo Ugolini
Make-up Artist: Amy Conley
Hair Stylist: Brooke Neilson and Craig McAtear

CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Anna Toporova / Recom Farmhouse
Retouching: Aljaz Bezyak, Pêpe Alram / Recom Farmhouse