Up Against The Wall

Derek Watson, one half of Walloper, just sent us over a timelapse video of the process that goes into making his company's neat subway station wall decals. To the fused sounds of Peter Bjorn and John's "The Chills" and TTC ambiance, the video depicts (as their YouTube description puts it) "a process known as weeding, where all the unnecessary material is painstakingly pulled from the sheet of scored vinyl, leaving just the outline of our design on wax paper backing. The final shape is then covered with transfer tape (in this case, a large roll of masking tape) which is later used by the customer to apply the decal to their wall. "

Walloper, who as of the beginning of this month have custom decals available for all of the TTC's subway stations, have had "a couple hundred unique customers" for the product, Watson told Torontoist—plenty from Toronto, but with several more decals going "to American ex-pats and...as far as Singapore and Germany." And now that the stations are finally all available, says Watson, Walloper "might start thinking about our next product." For now, he says, "it is really just rewarding to be able to put these things out there to the people who find them interesting. You can see from the video that it is a labour of love."