Le roman de la science

In the fall of 1955, Fernand Séguin asked me to create the sets for a series called Le roman de la science. I jumped at the chance, and ended up staying with the show nearly three years, doing sets for 80 very demanding weekly episodes. The subjects could be extremely different from week to week. They were fascinating but required the kind of detailed documentation that didn’t exist at the time. We had to build scientific instruments, labs, machines, ships and airplanes, all in record time—and they had to work! I also tried to reconstruct the furniture and architecture for each era from Archimedes to Einstein as best I could. Jean Martinet was the producer and he had a good sense of how to put things together. Every actor in Montreal wanted to be in that series. Jean-Louis Roux, Jean Gascon and Guy Hoffman were regulars. But in 1959, suspecting that the production company that produced the program, Niagara Films, was about to go under, I took pre-emptive action and resigned. At the same time, Gilles Carle left the Graphic Arts department at Radio-Canada to work at the NFB and I was hired to replace him. I was soon put in charge of three shows—the religious program Les récits du Père Ambroise, the nature program La vie qui bat/This Living World and Le trio lyrique. I was also doing illustrations for many of the performances on Le téléthéatre and L’heure du concert/The Concert Hour.

Le Roman de la science (Illustrator section)
Gutenberg and the Printing Press (Illustrator section)
Les récits du Père Ambroise (Illustrator section)
This Living World (Illustrator section)