Hum, well let's try.
I thought a long time about what I could be writing here. This is kind of weird to speak about myself. However you might want to know a little bit about my interests, where I come from, what books I like etc...
Projects
On the professional side, I'd say everything is going very well :) . After 4 years working for Blur Studio ( 3 years as Supervisor), I got hired by Dreamworks for a Lighting position. I started working on Bee Movie, and then Kung Fu Panda.
So ... on the personal side ?? Well since I moved to California, I spent a lot of my energy at work. I did take care of my wife as well :). But still I'm feeling the need to express myself again. So I'm working on improving my skills with pencils ( I'm almost beginner :) ) , starting back to create concepts that I want to realize in CG.
It's gonna be a good way to update my knowledge around tools that I'm not using enough such as Zbrush, Modo...etc .
I'm really excited to push in this direction and to feed the personal part of the 3D page with more recent stuff.
Inspiration
Movies :
Chunk King Express, Ratatouille, Fallen Angels, Breaking the waves, Amelie, Baraka, Requiem for a dream, Alien, Sonatine, Santa Sangre, Lost Highway, Fight Club, Butterfly Effect, Lords of the ring trilogy, 2001, Donnie Darko, The Emperor's Journey, Snatch, The castle in the sky, Finding Nemo, Hedwig and the angry inch, I stand alone, Punishment Park, Dr Strangelove, American Beauty, Fast Food Nation, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Tommy, Man bites dog.
Writers :
Kafka, Brett Easton Ellis, Amelie Nothomb, Paulo Coehlo, Bernard Werber, Joe Hadelman (The eternal war), Philippe Delerm (La premiere gorgee de biere)... I should read more, so if you have some suggestion for good readings and you want to share it, tell me :)
Comic books / Graphic Novels:
All the work of Jiro Taniguchi (huge respect !! ), Lupus, Ibicus, Maus, Isaac le pirate, le grand pouvoir du Chninkel, Skydoll, Face de lune, L'incal, Peter Pan, La quete de l'oiseau du temps, Les gardiens du Maser, Blacksad. Sorry I don't know if any of these are easy to find in English.
Music:
Pepe Deluxe, Muse, Led Zeppelin, M, Too many Dj's, Noir Desir, Goran Bregovic, Java, Daft Punk, Marylin Manson, Kid Loco, RATM, Pink Floyd, Gotan Project, FFF, Tryo, Mano Solo, Georges Brassens, Serge Gainsbourg and many others...
Bio
So...
I was born in the deep countryside of France, a middle-sized town called Limoges. My parents were living 60 kms away from this town in a small village of 3500 people called Confolens. Thinking about that make me a little bit sad, I spent 17 years of my life over there, and it's been 10 years I'd like to find the time to go back there and look back to my old playground with my so-called adult eyes. I really need to do that. Anyway, that place was a great environment to grow up, I'm so thanksfull to my parents for that. But time passed, we moved south, next to Bordeaux exactly. I went to university there for a year, studying Mathematics.
I was playing with computers for few years then, first with an Amstrad, later with an Amiga. I was discovering CG with Sculpt 4D and Real 3D, that was such a blast :). But University was boring to me, and I remember one day going to the university restaurant with some friends, one of them told me his brother tried to enter a CG school. What ??? CG schools, is it real (it was in early 93), I was so excited, I never really thought it was possible at this time to study CG at school. This friend gave me more information about that school : Supinfocom and I started to do more research about other eventual CG schools in France. It was not really developped yet and Supinfocom seemed to be the most serious one. So I decided to try entering this school. I spent the last 6 months of my university doing nothing else than drawing, learning 3ds4 (dos) and doing my first cg pictures, even an animation, in order to create a portfolio and pass the test. I never thought I had a chance : 150 candidates for only 30 seats, but well, chance was with me :)
The school was in the north of France, 800 kms away from my family in Valenciennes. This region is quite depressing, but well this is a good place to give more energy to your work :). That was 4 great years, really I met some of my best friends over there. I learnt a lot, from students, from teachers and also from myself. I started to turn my interest more around Art and movies. I reopened a cineclub there to show the twisted movies I liked (I remember showing Salo, that was a really crazy session...people were shocked and passionated about it:) ). That was a school about creation, and it was absolutely enjoyable. Having the opportunity to create a CG short movie was such a great experience, I will never forget it.
At the end of the third year, I had to do an internship with a Company. I found a small company in Paris called Films 9, well that was certainly a particular place to work, nothing really professional on the CG side. But that gave me a lot of free time to discover Paris. But more than that, I fell in love :). This month of August 99 will always be in my mind. Since my love became my wife.
Looking back to what we did for our student short (with my team mates : Florence Pernet and Paul Guerillon), I think we were quite naive about the importance of the technical demonstration, but I don't regret that. Maybe we pushed too much in the artistic direction, forgetting about the public, but still we got a really good human experience. That was the last breath before starting in the professional world.
I think this jump was frightening me unconciously, I tried to find a job too quickly and I was not comfortable enough to try big studios. So I went to a small place doing prints who wanted to develop website using CG graphics. That was a mistake, and I realized it quite fast, I resigned after 1 month and a half. Then started a period of freelance employement research. I haven't worked a lot for the next 4 months, my first real experience was on Tomb Raider 5 at ExMachina. Really short contract of 3 weeks and then I was back home. I did another small project for Katarsys, a realtime CG videogame for internet.
It was quite depressing, until Partizan Midi Minuit asked me to work freelance. Indeed 2 friends (Loic and Aurelien) from Supinfocom were starting as directors in this company and they contacted me to help out on a TV commercial project. I was really happy and quite worried about my ability to do the job. But well, everything runned smoothly. The contract was for a month, and at the end, they proposed me a staff position. I really need to thank both of them for this opportunity, a lot of the work on this website has been done during this time. It was a great time, we had a lot of fun and that's were I became a professional. Or at least I started to feel this way :)
But one day everything changed...again ... I had been working for 2 years at Partizan. And that saturday night I opened my email and my life changed. As simple as that. Mista' Tim Miller was offering me a staff position at Blur Studio. His email was 2 lines and was quite straight forward. I couldn't believe it : he checked my website and was gently asking if I was looking for a job and if It was possible for me to relocate to Los Angeles. Damn I can tell you that it takes a long time to realize how such an email can affect your life. My wife (girlfriend at this time) wasn't really excited about that. But she was quitting her job as well, so we decided to try the adventure. I went there for an interview 2 weeks after and that's it. It took 3 months to get the Visa ready and I was in California.
Since, I worked on a lot of great projects and I'm now supervising some projects. Blur is a really good place to work, I met a lot of great people. After 4 years at Blur I got hired at Dreamworks in may 2007 working as a lighter for the first time on feature films ( Bee Movie, Kung Fu Panda, and hopefully more)
It is a great adventure, but I warn you : if you're planning to move from your country to another this is a real big deal. For exa.mple, I wish my wife could work in US ( she's not allowed as a spouse to work unless she also find a work visa, which is quite tough), I wish also I could see my family more often, I wish we had French supermarkets carrying proper food :) ... it's getting better than 4 years ago tho
Now I'm feeling that I need to create personnal art again. I've been neglecting this aspect for the past four years. I'm trying to draw more, and to start new personnal projects. I;m trying I said...
I will end up my story here. I hope it has been really boring so you will forget it quickly :)
Zeb