Editorial – The Article

The brief is about taken one of 10 given articles and creating a contemporary piece of editorial design for it. I initially skimmed through all 10 articles to find any which stood out to me and seemed interesting to read as I thought the articles which were the most interesting to read would also be the most interesting visually. After reading the majority of them, I focused in on ‘The life and death of Herve La Gallou’ and ‘The class pay gap’. Although initially the article about the class pay gap stood out to me the most due to how interesting the facts are within it, ‘The life and death of Herve La Gallou’ to me had so many more interesting metaphors and amazing imagery within it that I decided to go choose it.

After reading the article it was made clear that there already seemed to be 3/4 different ‘chapters’ within the article which I could use to separate into each double page spread. The beginning was all about his life and his base jumps and skydives, around the middle was a lot of information about how he feels when he jumps and the reasons he does it, and the end of the article was all about the day of his death and the events following on from his death. Due to this, I decided to separate the text into these 3 sections, using one of them on each double page spread.

PAGE 1-2 = HIS LIFE AND HIS BASE JUMPS

Le Gallou was an unremarkable-looking man of medium height, with a slim physique, short brown hair and wide eyes. I met him only once: in January 2009, at a restaurant in Paris. A friend had told me about an astonishing coup that took place months earlier in Dubai, in which Le Gallou and McDonnell walked into the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, then under construction, disguised as engineers. They evaded security, climbed 155 floors on foot and then flung themselves from the top at dawn — thus becoming the first people to base-jump from the tallest building in the world. I wanted Le Gallou himself to tell me about the adventure.

He also described a vivid scene at the top of the Burj. Le Gallou explained that when he was in his late 40s, he began to suffer from night blindness. As a result, he preferred to wait until dawn to jump buildings he infiltrated in the dark. At the exit point, he and McDonnell watched the desert turn from blue to pink as day broke over Dubai. At that moment, Le Gallou later recalled, “you feel everything belongs to you.”

We spoke too of his other notable coups. In 2000, he and a friend, Benoît Paquet, scaled the exterior of the 88-story Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai in the middle of the night and jumped at dawn. By 2009, Le Gallou had also jumped from the Eiffel Tower 40 times. He had, he said, become the de facto “official guide” of the Parisian landmark for novice jumpers — the one who knew how to evade the cameras and guards.

These stories granted Le Gallou near-mythic status among European base jumpers. (After Dubai, his friends jokingly nicknamed him l’Aigle d’Arabie: the Eagle of Arabia.) For McDonnell, Le Gallou’s urban adventures were “the nearest thing you could get to being a master criminal, without getting into too much trouble.” Unless you were involved in base jumping, however, it’s very unlikely you would ever have heard of Le Gallou. In recent years, several base jumpers have gained a high public profile. Men like Jeb Corliss and Felix Baumgartner — the daredevil who sky-dived from the edge of space — have become YouTube stars, backed by brands like Red Bull. But Le Gallou was not after fame. He maintained a Web site, but it was rudimentary; he preferred to share stories face to face.

The sport he loved began in earnest in the late 1970s, when a group of American parachutists led by Carl Boenish started jumping El Capitan, above the Yosemite Valley, using regular sky-diving equipment. There had been similar jumps before — for movie stunts and one-off kicks — but it was Boenish and his gang who invented the term B.A.S.E. (for Building, Antenna, Span, Earth, four types of objects from which it is possible to jump).

One of Le Gallou’s oldest jumping buddies, Joel Gerardin, said that for Le Gallou, the thrill of infiltrating a building, jumping it and escaping without notice was “indescribable.” He added: “I actually don’t know anyone else in Europe who gained such an experience in city jumps, ‘illegally,’ with no sponsorship, all around the world. Not for the image of himself, just for himself.”

PAGE 3 -4 = HIS FEAR AND HOW HE FEELS WHEN HE JUMPS

When Le Gallou made his first jump in 1994, only a few dozen people in France knew what base jumping was. He was already a proficient sky diver. Having bought a base rig and learned to pack from a video, he traveled to the Fades Viaduct near Clermont-Ferrand in southern France, steeled himself and jumped alone. The experience was a revelation.

“When you see the ground coming up very fast — it’s more like a suicide than a sport,” he told me. “I was almost sure that I was going to die, you know? Because it was so frightening. And when I jumped, I pulled. And then you have to wait for the opening of the canopy. And when you are waiting, the feeling is . . . I don’t know the word in English.Impuissant?”

Powerless. Le Gallou spent the rest of his life trying to take control of those heart-stopping milliseconds. In order to survive an intermittently illegal sport in which one mistake can be fatal, a jumper needs to be alert to myriad dangers. For a start, you carry only one parachute, rather than the two used in traditional sky diving. Not only must your chute be packed exactly right, it must also be pulled at the correct time, with enough distance between you, the object and the ground. Even when the canopy is released properly, a menu of potential problems awaits. If, for instance, you open “off-heading,” or less than straight, you can find yourself speeding back toward the cliff or building from which you just jumped. This outcome is known, in the macabre argot of the sport, as an “object strike.”

For these reasons, the sport has traditionally appealed as much to control freaks as to adrenaline junkies. Many European base jumpers of Le Gallou’s generation are middle-aged men and women (but mostly men) with solid professions: dentistry, engineering, I.T. and so on. Few seem to lead particularly risky lives. They view the sport as a private obsession, and publicity, especially for those in high-profile jobs, is to be avoided.

PAGE 5-6 = THE DAY OF HIS DEATH

A minute before he died, Hervé le Gallou stood at the edge of a cliff at Obiou, in the French Alps, with acres of thin air before him. The view that morning, June 23, 2012, was breathtaking: moonscape cliff faces, pocked with snow, that gave way to plateaus of pale grass and ashen rock, then to bottle-green pine forests in the valley below and to mountains beyond.

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” he said. “I just go for pleasure. There is still some stress, some fear, because there is some danger. But I know exactly what I can do. I know where is my limit.”

At 51, Le Gallou was a veteran of thousands of base jumps. But he had never flown from the exit point at Obiou before. In order to execute his intended flight, he needed to guide himself away from the cliff face, and then sharply to the right, over a rocky outcrop. For an experienced pilot, this maneuver was relatively straightforward. The next period of the flight, however, was tricky. Le Gallou would need to glide over a long, moderately inclined plateau. In order to do so, it was imperative that he pay attention to what French wingsuit pilots call la finesse: the ratio of forward to downward movement. (To maximize lift and finesse, a pilot needs to find the perfect “angle of attack” — the best position of the wings in relation to the wind.)

If he couldn’t maintain an adequate glide in this part of the flight, he had an escape: he could pull his parachute and land on the plateau. This plan would work as long as he made the decision early enough. But if he bailed too late, he would crash before his chute could fill with air. The best case would be the simplest: to fly with “une bonne finesse,” continue over the inclined plateau and the pine trees and eventually pull his chute above the valley floor.

On the morning of June 23, the chances of a long, birdlike flight in perfect conditions seemed good. Nonetheless, dark thoughts may have assailed Le Gallou. He was fatigued, short on practice and unhappy with his equipment. The previous day, moreover, he received news that his mother was involved in a car accident in Paris, the latest in a string of misfortunes that had bedeviled his family in recent months.

On that June morning, four other jumpers were with Le Gallou at Obiou. Two were Americans who moved to France, partly to spend more time flying wingsuits in the Alps: Ellen Brennan, a 25-year-old nurse, and her partner, Laurent Frat, a 35-year-old news producer. The others were Raoul, a 38-year-old engineer and a friend of Le Gallou’s (who asked to be identified by only his nickname because it is not publicly known that he base-jumps); and Ludovic Woerth, a 32-year-old professional wingsuit pilot and a former employee at Adrenalin Base, a French base-equipment supplier. Le Gallou was wearing a wingsuit provided by Adrenalin Base and manufactured by a Croatian company, Phoenix-Fly.

Raoul jumped first, and then Woerth. Having completed their flights, they waited in the valley for the others. Le Gallou jumped third. His flight started well, according to Brennan and Frat. He banked high over the rocky outcrop and then dropped out of sight. The two Americans jumped fourth and fifth. When they landed in the valley, after flights of more than a minute, they asked about Le Gallou. Neither Raoul nor Woerth had seen him.

Le Gallou’s four fellow jumpers hoped their friend had pulled his parachute safely above the plateau. The whole flight path is not visible from either the valley or the exit point, and it was possible, they believed, that he could have landed unseen. After hiking for a while to get better phone reception, they tried to call Le Gallou. Nothing. Brennan remembers the group opening beers to celebrate their successful jumps while they waited for news.

“Just after like the first sip of beer maybe, we heard a helicopter coming over,” Brennan recalled. “And the helicopters never fly over there unless they’re doing a rescue or something. . . . The worst sound I’ve ever heard in my life was the sound of that helicopter coming.”

A passing hiker saw the fallen Le Gallou and called mountain rescue. Le Gallou had hit the plateau and died on impact, his canopy stretched out behind him. In the days that followed, three of the jumpers posted accounts on base Web sites, detailing what they thought went wrong with Le Gallou’s last flight. Frat wrote that “for reasons we can only speculate, he was unable to outfly the plateau.”