I have been making motion design since my Arts School days, since I graduated from EESI, which is specialized in new technologies, the Angoulême branch, famous for comics, being oriented towards still images and the Poitiers one, in which I was a student, towards motion : video, motion design, animation. I had therefore created numerous animations as end of studies projects, with the use of After Effects, and 3DSMax, which I have never used professionally since I consider that 3D software to be excessively complicated.
At the end of my studies, in 2003, I decided to advertise on versatility, since I wasn't able to find motion design positions, because I didn't have any professional experience in that area, and work created during my studies were not a solid enough proof for employers. I therefore decided to learn about web design, especially Flash, and I did a little bit of everything. During my year working for GE Healthcare, I didn't do any motion design, but afterwards I regularly did some amongst other types of graphic design. As a graphic designer for the Mobibase agency, I created Marvel handset screensavers an videos with After Effects, then for Olfo, part of the AchatVIP website team, part of my job was to create video teasers for punctual sales, in the same way as their competitor Vente-Privée was doing.
In 2008, I could finally specialize myself in graphic design aimed at the video media, as a freelancer for Kino agency, working on corporate movies, company presentation videos, videos for use in business conventions, videos about product launches, for large accounts. Even a TV advertisement. I enjoyed that and I decided to remain in that field, working on this kind of marketing, communication, working for other agencies, and sometimes end customers, most of the time for large accounts.
A big amount of these videos being used for internal communication, and containing confindential informations, only a small part of my work is publicly available on my website. My showreel gives a more global vision of what I can do, but of course it's also more superficial.
Given the kind of studies I graduated from, my legal status which makes it mandatory for me to only sell “Original graphic design creations”, I am and have always been a creative person, I create visual worlds specifically dedicated to video. I am not forbidden to using graphical elements designed by other people, as long as these were not created specifically for the video I am working on, such as images prepared for POS, since my work, the decision of how to integrate them into a video is still a creative process, in the same way as an artist working on a patchwork image is still the creator of the artwork, no matter who designed the imprints on the fabric used. Basing my work on a story board which has already been drawn is also something I'm allowed to do, since creativity in graphic design is not in creating the story, a movie director's job, even though I am able to do that, but in deciding on the looks of the images. On the other hand my legal status strictly forbids me to create a video based on strictly defined still images created in Photoshop representing the different sections, because then all I would have to is adding motion to existing elements, and that's not considered as graphical creation by the people in charge of checking that I don't break the rules of my legal status, since the visual aspect of the video would already have been defined. My legal status enables me to charge the amount of money I charge, which is not very high in French standards thanks to lower tax rates than other freelancing options. And since I am just as used to working with Photoshop and Illustrator as I am to working with After Effects, creating the still images I am going to animate afterwards is part of my job. For the same reason I not allowed to sell linear video editing services, since that's considered as technical work, also incompatible with my legal status. But nothing forbids me from using linear video editing software, such as Premiere or Final Cup Pro, in order to finalize a graphical project I created, in that case the invoice would be for the final design, which is globally a creative project.
