This project is our ESMA graduation film. It represents a year and a half of hard work with nine wonderful and courageous artists:
 

Vincent Bonhert, Margaux Bontron, Juliette Gilles-Payart, Veronika Nikulina, Romain Paillet, Yoann Paquet, Quentin Thisse, Maxime Verclytte, and myself.
 

"Sea of Leaves" tells a story of leadership through the theme of pirates. What makes a good leader? This was a crucial question for us, as we were all directors of this film, and making decisions was not always easy. We discussed a lot, made compromises, and in the end, teamwork prevailed. We and our captain learned a lot during this adventure.
 

From the start, this movie was a challenge, mainly due to the size of our environment, which is a huge forest. To manage that, we decided to use the USD pipeline. This was the biggest technical challenge of our film. It was completely new to us and our teachers, which made it quite complicated at times, especially since most of the team wasn't familiar with Houdini. But we learned together, and in the end, we created a movie we're proud of.
 

As for my role, I was thrilled to work on all aspects of pre-production. I contributed to the storytelling, created concept designs for the characters and props, and also worked on the storyboard (editing of it is coming soon). In production, I co-modeled the boat with Margaux, handled the surfacing of the wreck, and primarily focused on animation with Quentin. Toward the end of production, I also helped with rendering and color grading in compositing.
 

"Sea of Leaves" will be available on YouTube in about a year. Until then, I won’t reveal too much to avoid spoilers. ^^