The early ages

I was born in the early ’80s, which means that I could have listened to Michael Jackson when it was actually hype, but instead I bought a best-of album the day he died like everybody else. The cool thing of being born in the ’80s is that I could enjoy the finest Hollywood movies from the ’90s, the ones with all time favorites Sylvester Stalone and Arnold Schwartzeneger. What I loved in being a teen was the poor judgement. Seriously, I went twice to the theater to see the Super Mario Bros. movie, and found it so “cool”. Same for Street Fighter the movie, but you gotta admit that Jean-Claude Van Damme is to European audience what Chuck Norris is to US audience: A guilty pleasure. What was cool with blockbuster movies is that I could even play the video games adaptations on my NES, shitty games by the way (Even tho I was too young to consider ranting about it on the internet). Yup, I also got internet early, in ’95 or ’96, 28.8k, and almost immediatly created my first webpage, using extensively the now deprecated <marquee> attribute. Scrolling text was so hype those days, Geocities style. I even had a pirated copy of Photoshop 4.5 to create animated gifs, and it turned my second website, “PhotoWhop”, into a comprehensive Photoshop tutorial website. Ugliness in plain sight.

Time to do something at some point

Like every geekish teenager in ’96 (Only geekish because I scored 28,6% at the Geek test last week, so lame), despite the huge success with the girls, my life was all about Duke Nukem 3D and Sim City 2000. Few years later and I was recreating my College in DN3D Level Editor. During College years, I started developing in Visual Basic only to create an interface for a custom CD full of free add-ons for the most impressive game of that time: Unreal Tournament. You should have seen this, dll files everywere, and cool hacks to mess up with the registry. Priceless. I even developed a “Memory” game clone with pictures of a girl friend schoolmates. As expected I ridiculously failed at dating her. I can’t blame her really (even if at that time, I blamed her badly): I had a military-inspired haircut and I was nerdy to the extreme, whiter than solar cream as Al says. The perfect jerk prototype. That’s why I decided to stay with my peers, and I started to consider computer science studies, so I could increase the chances to live my dream: developing video games. So predictable. At that point I totally forgot one major detail: I sucked at math (and still do). So I had to find a brillant idea. I decided to go on literature studies so I could become a journalist, and more precisely a video game journalist. Kinda workarounding life if you prefer. But, there’s always a butt, a new divine feature reached earth. At the end of my literature studies, I discovered a brand new computer science school in Paris, accepting anyone who was at least motivated, at most with programation skills. That was the time for me to shine with all my wonderfull VB knowledge.

Begining of my 2.0 life, 1.0 at a time

Yeah, I was geeky enough to have my parents drop several thousands of euros per year so I could learn C, shell scripting, grow a beard, a belly and stack a huge amount of burned CDs with all sorts of pirated stuff on them. The problem with CDs is that dust just loves them, and I hate dust. So after getting rid of these plastic thingies (half of them ingeniously labeled “Misc” followed by the burning date), I started to get tired of that school. Even worse, I couldn’t get that beard to grow ! You see, I went there to learn how to make video games, and I was learning how to run a network and shine as an admin sys. Thank you Internet 1.0 bubble collapse. Hopefully, between 2 boring admin projects, I had a chance to direct a Dreamcast game as our 3rd year project. I was the director, the level and the graphic designer. That’s where my once pirated copy of Photoshop 4.5 finaly found it’s purpose. And I managed to avoid too much coding too. Yup, in 3 years of learning how to properly code, I finaly noticed that intensive coding wasn’t what I loved most. After all, I wanted to “make” video games, not to “code” video games… So lazy I was ! This situation made me realize that above all, what I loved was telling stories, nice stuff. Anyway, if you have some good Google skills, a quick search with such keywords as “Wadagaza”, “Dreamcast”, “Iso”, will make you experience that thing. Beware of the bug, after 45 minutes of gameplay, you might experience crash or freeze. Anyway, that was a fun experiment, and I then joined Gamepark for my internship. Gamepark was (is it still alive, I don’t know) a korean console maker, and I had been developing stuff on it on my free time. I met the bosses when they came visiting France, and they took me to one of the best korean restaurant in Paris. Sadly enough, I can’t remember where this restaurant is. So bad, that would have leveraged the mess this intership was. Short story: worked for 2 months for free before the company split up in two, and I was out of the equation. Nice. The best part is they made me look like a moron to european cool developers I contacted at that time, such as Team 17. Damnit. My first days in the video game business were ruined, so I moved onto a real job, with a real paycheck. Remember a few lines ago when I wrote how uncool intensive coding was for me, and where Photoshop was usefull ? Well that’s exactly the kind of job I found: DVD authorer. I had to create cool menus for feature films. I discovered that it was a real job after designing and programing menus for a Shenmue documentary project I was prototyping. Making a DVD presentation was fun, and that fun stuff only required a bit of programing, and a lot of artistery. My brain figured out that it could be nice to be paid doing so, and after a few weeks and an interview, I jumped in. That’s when I discovered the truth about After Effects: It helped me achieve some crappy karaoke synched subtitles on crappy covers of crappy ’80 songs. The record company producing the DVDs was happy with that. No wonder they are all dying now. As if it wasn’t a joke enough, I even had to do some Super Mario Bros. TV Series menus. Not the creepy live action show with the fat fake italian guy dancing like… well that’s a good question that was never answered in any audio commentary track. What the hell was this guy dancing ?

I promess, really interesting stuff below

If you made it up to here, I guess you’ll read until the end. Thanks. Usually people don’t read about pages. I bet you’re like me: watching audio commentary tracks on director’s cut edition of every single movie possible. Along with all the bonus and Maximum Movie Modes. I knew it. Anyway, back to the remastered and digitaly enhanced story of my life. So when I was fed up with doing DVD menus, I became a freelancer and started to work on animated TV Shows as an After Effects Compositor and then Supervisor. That’s when I bought my very first but very own Adobe Production Premium Licence. I had to sell a kidney to pay for it, but I was so proud to officially own something I could get cracked for free on the Internet (Rehab not included). My skills improving, I started developing AE scripts for custom pipelines and workflows. Then I went on writing and translating books about it, but even this failed (and still fails) to attract girls. They are all interested when you say “I write books” because they think that you are the cute hobo looking guy writing the next Harry Potter, but when you explain vaguely what your books are about, they end up saying “Ok, so you’re writing user’s manual”, as if you were just yet another standard nerd. Still a huge improvement from designing custom Windows x86 Memory game clones as birthday presents. Or is it ? Enough with Memory game driven memories. Because I advertised interesting stuff here, I have to start talking about scriptwriting. I’ve been writing random and silly stuff since High School. In College I started to organize all this into a more suitable shape: screenplays. When I became a freelancer, I successfully survived scriptwriting masterclasses such as Robert McKey, Linda Seger, and some french dudes (Yves Lavandier) unknow in the US.

I wrote 3 full feature length screenplays: The Forbidden World; MJ5 and Mythomen. 3 movie shorts: Une Vie sans Crédits; No Woman, no crime and The Birthday Party. And I still have 5 other projects at various research or production stages: Dear Father, White Wolf Café, The Sun King, Politikaillera and Homicide.

Lots and lots of work on these, even a few of them in english. As you may have guessed, it’s not my native language, but still, I find it easier to write in english than in french, only because I’ve got an excuse to make spelling typos and gramatical errors. I can also fake ignorance when I do poor jokes, like the but/butt one earlier in this page. You see, I could pretend it was a typo, but between you and me, that was totally a poorly designed but totally assumed joke. It’s our dirty little secret, don’t spoil it to anyone, as usualy I hide this behind a postscriptum like “Sorry for my english, bla bla bla”. Ok, now where was I ? Ho yeah, I know, almost forgot to say that I was about to sign a movie deal for Mythomen, but something was fishy so I declined, and a week after the studio filed for bankrupcy. Oops.

La France, pays du cinéma

After trying to sell some scripts to other production companies, with the same succes as with my dating girls attempts, I remembered that I was living in France, also known as the “homeland of cinéma” (and homeland of directors unable to color grad their movies because they don’t know shit about modern movie making, but that’s another story). A pretty big deal isn’t it ? But that’s not all, because we honestly deserve this title. See, scriptwriting is not even considered a real job by the french movie industry itself. Vive la Nouvelle Vague. This may sound as a rant, and probably is, but when only a handfull of scriptwriter can make a living of their job, and couple hundred with a side job to pay their bills, there’s a problem Huston. And of course, you’re not allowed to do adult themed stuff, to dangerous, PG-13 at best. I’m sure we can get some sort of international award for this. So I figured out that my R-Rated projects were a no go for my french pals (as of today), even if they cost almost nothing, thanks to clever pre-production preparation, with After Effects involved of course. Have I told you I was in a relationship with this software ? No ? I’ll probably have to update my Facebook Status then. Oh wait, I shot it down couple of weeks ago after a once again brand new cluttered redesign.

To infinite and beyond…

Ok, we’re almost there. I’m now working full time in a french sweet startup called Stupeflix, and I’m doing a lot of After Effects scripting and compositing for them. So what is the point of all of this, knowing that I’m really happy doing what I’m doing ? To be honest, very few things could make me leave our cool team deep set in Fatboys. Check the list below. If you want to get in touch with me anyway, ‘coz you know I’m cool, feel free to have a quick read at this page, beautifully portraying my daily lense flare enhanced life.

• If you are Rockstar, apologies for totally illegaly using GTA IV Soviet Connection track as my demoreel music since it’s release, but I still want to write super-cool plots, arcs and everything you need for your next big Game. GTA Next maybe ?
• You are Trey Parker and/or Matt Stone. You are geniuses guys, and I’m not talking about the blue smurf look-a-like guys in Apple stores. You don’t know it yet, but you want to produce my movie !
• You wanna produce one of my project ? Sure, let’s talk about this. I’d love to see one come to life on the big screen in Stereo3D (or not). And honestly, they won’t cost you that much !
• You’re a beautiful girl in search for a french lover, or a talented geeky boyfriend ? Oh behave ! But still, drop me a line, I’m single.
• You wanna buy one of my book even tho you don’t read french, be my guests. Beers on me next time we meet.
• You’re a Rockstar employee, beautifull single girl, BFF with Trey & Matt, want to produce one of my project while adapting it into a successfull videogame, tell me when and where, I’ll be there. On time. I Promess.
• Sorry my contact is in another castle page !

PS: I’m on a horse.
PS2: Sorry for my english, it’s not my native language.
PS3: Overhyped piece of hardware, 360 still my favorite. Gotcha catch’em all anyway.