For once, I will exceptionally use this blog for self-advertisement. As you might have realised, it is a sobdaimain of the www.emotion-designer.com website, which I own, and which is my online portfolio / show-reel. Why emotion designer ? Because I’m a freelance motion designer, but the domain name was not available. However the « e » stands for new technologies, and also for creating emotions through animated images. What is a motion designer? (more…)

OK so, a few years ago I created this blog, searching for editorial guidelines which wouldn’t be the classical ones that graphic designers like to use: a blog which is nothing else than their portfolio, or about some designs they like. My editorial guidelines were not to write about graphic design itself, but about the technologies that are in orbit around it, and thus without any advertisement for Apple, as it is a cliché that a graphic designer should use a Mac for his work. Not only it isn’t true but Adobe software is in fact better optimized for the hardware using the Windows 7 Operating System. That’s the reason why, in the traditional area of graphic design, still images, nearly everybody uses a Mac, even though that’s the one that needs the less processing power. But for motion design, where processing power is much more important, only half of the people do, even though I must admit the Prores video codec which comes with Final Cut Pro is a serious advantage. And then in the 3D area, most people use PCs. (more…)

I had been thinking about it for a long time and I finally decided to do it : a brand new blog (or rather which looks like it). As soon as I had made the former version I thought it looked outdated, simplistic, and I was fed up of orange. Now everything’s good, and I hope you will like it too.

As I’m a bit pissed off not to have any of my most recent work on my online book, for confidentiality reasons, I decided to create a Happy New Year animation for this website, similar to one I recently made for my work. And to stay in this blog’s “guidelines” I explain how it’s made. You have certainly seen that on the internet, on the biggest portals, advertisement has changed. You now find transparent flash animations which push boundaries, jumping out of the frame which is normally dedicated to them and covering the whole page, which you can still see behind them, for a few seconds. Some people will be annoyed by them, as they already are pissed off against advertisement which they would like to get rid of. But graphically speaking, I find it very interesting to be able to jump out of the frame in such a way.
Since Flash 8, it is possible to add videos with an alpha (transparent) layer on a website. It is not used much and doubles the weight of these videos, it requires you to have a recent flash version, and it takes a lot of computing power from your computer. But you can that way get some nice effects with software such as After Effects, which you cannot create in Flash, even though since its eighth version it has brought up a lot of new features (blur, blending modes, halo, shadow…). The banner you see on this website (if you have Flash 8) is made that way. Hover over it with your mouse pointer in order to see more…
I hope you will like it. Happy New Year 2008 !
Briac Pollier

Note: considering the time of year I have deleted this banner