Celebrating the 120 year anniversary of ESME, a french engineering school.
The goal of this project was to create a visual timeline tracking the evolution of engineering from 1905 to 2025 : the changing faces of French electrical, electronic, and mechanical R&D.
By utilizing a highly structured, year-by-year generation process, the project maintains strict visual continuity while letting the technology naturally evolve on screen.
The Creative & Technical Process
1. Defining the Visual Style
To keep the timeline cohesive, we established a strict artistic direction inspired by Wes Anderson—think perfectly symmetrical, cinematic, flat-lay compositions with a muted, industrial color palette. We began with a tight 4:3 aspect ratio to evoke a vintage feel, later opening up to a wider 16:9 format as the timeline enters the modern era. Crucially, every shot keeps the dead-center of the frame completely clear, leaving a clean “negative space” where year text can be overlaid in post-production.
2. Finding the Right Focus
We quickly realized that wide shots of entire laboratories introduced too many chaotic variables. To enforce consistency, we zoomed in, shifting the focus from full rooms to tight, top-down close-ups of engineering workbenches.
3. Creating Visual Rhythm
To keep the timeline engaging, the narrative alternates year-by-year between 1980 and 1995:
-
Even Years: Dedicated to mechanical engineering workbenches.
-
Odd Years: Dedicated to electronics engineering workbenches.
This alternating structure creates a rhythmic contrast for the viewer, bouncing between the tactile, metallic world of mechanics and the intricate, wired world of electronics.
4. Anchoring in Historical Accuracy
The core magic of the project lies in the details. Every single object on the workbench is strictly accurate to its specific year in French history:
-
The 1980s feature heavy analog oscilloscopes, discrete transistors, and manual precision tools.
-
The late 80s into the 90s smoothly transition into digital displays, early microprocessors, microcontrollers, and the dawn of CNC automation.
-
The lighting shifts chronologically as well, moving from warm, vintage bulbs to the cool, stark hum of era-appropriate fluorescent shop lights.
5. Standardizing the Formula
To generate these images reliably without the style drifting, we built a master prompt blueprint. Every prompt follows the exact same logical sequence:
[Year/Context] ➔ [Symmetrical Composition] ➔
[Subject Focus] ➔ [Era-Accurate Tools] ➔
[Materials/Textures] ➔ [Era-Consistent Lighting] ➔
[Negative Space Constraint]
6. Separation of Concerns & Output
To ensure maximum control over the final look, all text and typography were stripped out of the image generation phase entirely. Instead, era-appropriate fonts were selected separately by decade to be cleanly overlaid in post-production.
The finalized, structured prompts are organized into a clean database (CSV), formatted and ready for batch-processing pipelines across image generation platforms.
