www.bluelimonade.com

Director, Designer | Marseille, France

Brief Resume
I have always wanted to be a filmmaker. I made all my studies in that direction. I think I started developing my “designship” when I first made some graphics for TV and for my experimental videos. Then in 1996, I discovered Internet. I immediately thought about a crossing media between what I did in video and the Internet. Flash was a revelation for me, and I started very early to make little (bad) Flash animations. It was the age when a vectorial 3d cube rotating on a screen made everyone call you a genius (who said “web golden age”?). Then, I created some websites which, in these golden times, had succeeded in touching a certain public. I got some “awards” for these sites (I had the honor to appear in the French Macromedia gallery).It was a great thing for me (who was something like an “amateur” that I’m still despite the years).Then, as nobody wanted to give me money to make my insane movies, I decided to “direct” a small interactive movie for the Web. With this “thing” I won the FIFI 1999 innovation award given by the French TV channel Canal+. I think that if I’d watch again that splendid “work” today, I’d certainly vomit… but at this time, people found that rather cool (1999 is very far from now for a Web life). Then, unoubtedly thanks to this “award”, I was employed as “Artistic Director” (wow, that’s a f**** word!) in one big society called TV-UP. I had the opportunity to try out another face of the footbridge between Internet and Broadcast: create cartoons, initially for the Web, and later for the TV broadcast. I gave some basic “ideas” to my designers team and some “how can you make a cartoon for the web” techniques (for example: how to save some draws and time with flash techniques). During more than one year, everyone could try out and experiment many things (3D integration, working with vectors techniques, colorisation techniques, etc.). In another way, it should be said that I had a computer very early (you know the Alice 32? it was a Tandy Mc-10 clone. This one made very large pixels) and that on my Atari ST with the “Degas Elite” software, I had fun drawing things. And thanks to CorelDraw on my PC486, I discovered the magic of the vectors and cliparts.


Projects
At this moment, I’m precisely on a cartoon series project for the French television. I do not know yet if it will succeed. Otherwise, I’m finishing an approx. 60 min movie, “fiction+33″, filmed in Super16 more than one year ago . I’m currently working on the music and the mixing (I don’t know what this film will become). I am also working on the website of the film but it’s a so colossal project that I don’t know if I will have the ability and time to finish it all alone (and as design on Internet gets old very quickly, well…). And I continue limonade with my loving wife xlo, for the love of the vector images ;-).


Inspiration
Hard to say. Inspiration is only one series of chances and opportunities. I’m inspired as everyone by “what I’d have liked to do but did not”, by all these things I didn’t think but in which I could have thought. The kind of things you see and you say: WOW! and GRRRR! and SNIF! at the same time. I don’t believe in the “plain originality” as your name is not God. Everything moves more and more faster and in a very fragmented way (the Web is a world creation and inspiration accelerator). I think that when you have an idea, someone in the world has/had the same idea. In fact, I am very pessimistic about “creation”. All we can finally hope as “creator” is to slightly improve what was already done. And if you succeed in doing that, you can say that you are a pure genius (and thinking that is a little bit pretentious). Anyway, my inspiration isn’t always related with the domain I approach. For example, for the directing of my movie, I took the web as a starting point of my inspiration (some design stuffs but also blogs, depressed teenagers diaries, etc). And for design, Nine Inch Nails or Thursday will inspire me more than anything else. But I forgot another thing: sometimes, right before I fall asleep, I visualize splendid graphic designs (something like personal colored mixed porridge). In fact, these graphics are really beautiful… but when I awake, I’ve already forgotten them (or at the farthest, I remember less than 10% of the colors, forms…). Are the dreams can be considered as sources of inspiration? And no, I don’t smoke.
Well, may I undo (ctrl+Z) all I said below? It’s finally more complex. There are too many parameters to know where inspiration come from.


Favourite url’s for inspirations
The World Wide Web!
Uailab (I swear it’s true!)
linkdup (and some other design portals)
hi-res (how can these guys read in my mind?go away!!!)
Some vector illustration websites as popwhore, arthurmount, juniatwork…
imdb (the internet movie database)

My Toolbox
Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Premiere, CorelDraw, After Effects, Audition, 3DSmax