Half Time
Power reserve: 35 h, 21600 vph
If Ludovic Ballouard has retained traditional knowhow enhanced by working for some of the greatest (F.P. Journe, Franck Muller, etc…), he very early on affirmed the identity of his own timepieces. Exciting, untypical, the UPSIDE DOWN already revealed a most personal creation.
The HALF TIME most certainly follows this approach, with the same will to present a most unusual way of reading the time. Ludovic Ballouard has endowed his new creation with a patented mecanism of rotating disks which move on the same plane as the dial.
The principle is simple : all the hour indexes are divided in two, therefore unreadable… all except the one showing the current hour. The rotation of two disks « reconstitutes » each index, allowing time to be read (see video). The watch therefore carries no hour hands. A retrograde hand, set on a half-circle at 6 o'clock indicates the minutes in a classical manner.
This makes for a double visual surprise :
- The disks, placed on the same plane as the dial, cannot be distinguished by the naked eye, thus giving the illusion of a unique, plane, unmoving surface… although it is really in perpetual movement.
- As with the UPSIDE DOWN, the rotation of these disks is intantaneous, rendering the magical moment when the movement reconstitutes each mysterious cipher into a most readable Roman figure quite stunning.
The HALF TIME thus has its very own, unique way of showing the time, just as the UPSIDE DOWN does. With both watches, reading the time is rendered into a magical moment, with only the current time showing itself.