When I'll be old, I'll build cities...

For my first assignment on perspectives, I decided to choose the one that looked the funnier: the 3 points perspective. But after drawing my lines, I realized it was probably also one of the hardest. There was suddenly so many lines, everywhere! Especially when I started to build my city: it just became wild.

But after a few minutes (or more probably a few hours), my futurist economic center finally started to look like something... watchable. Probably only by me.

However, after a long fight with a stubborn scanner, and a dressing under Photoshop, my buildings finally looked like actual building. Painted by a 4 years old, alright, but still, they looked cool.

Memo for the next time: drawing a box.

A few months later, adding texture to the city:

May the force of Photoshop be with you.

Here is a nice picture of myself during my winter break’s road trip in Grand Canyon:

A few days later, I heard a Star Wars event would take place in the Grand Canyon too, I was going to miss it… but as a huge fan, I decided to go back, and take the VERY SAME picture, but with the millennium falcon at the back.

 

This is so much better that way. Now some people may argue that I used Photoshop for having this result… that I actually used a mask for getting the Star Wars ships into my picture, and then added the effect “screen” to the Death Star and Star Destroyers layers for giving the impression that they are far away. They even say that I used a drop shadow for the Millennium Falcon, and a slightly motion blur for making it look more real. Finally, they add that I probably spent hours just trying to figure out what to add to that big ship for making it look even more real, but without finding a solution. But those kinds of accusations are just stupid, it was much easier to go back to the Canyon and take another picture… tsss…

Soon they will tell me that the Death Star never went at Paris for the Emperor’s holidays, that I just used a mask on the clouds… well, they weren’t there the day I took that picture too.  

 

Unfortunately, I lost the picture of myself with Darth Vader playing soccer, but I don’t desperate to find it again one day…

About me

A wise bearded man once said to me, “I have everything I want in my life, except a friend with a boat.”

Well, let’s make that happens.

My name is Vincent Desgrippes. Yes, a French name. “How cool is that?” you may ask. Well, literally, you can translate it by “Twenty Cents Multiple Flus”, a bit less cool. But I like it anyway, especially because my middle name is Ganesh, like the Indian God, and as every Frenchman I have a God complex, so that fits to the perfection.

Now enough about me, let’s talk about… oh, actually a bit more of me, but in the past.

After a childhood without problems, I had to ask myself what I wanted to do. Of course, I had no idea. Then, I remembered a wise and respected voice saying: “You are doing a lot of short movies with your friends, why don’t you study cinema?” So, “Vincent I-don’t-know-what-I-want-to-do” became “Vincent I-want-to-be-a-filmmaker.” But my God complex wasn’t probably big enough for making me a filmmaker, and I choose the more humble way of Video Editing.

Back in France, I graduated with a major in Cinema, and decided to come to the USA as an exchange student for my last year of schooling. That’s how the University of Texas got the privilege the honor the chore to deal with me.

Now my goal in life is to get that boat, or, at least, to make my way into video editing and special effects. That’s the purpose of this blog: showing to the whole world (or more probably a handful of people) what I can do, what I cannot do, and how I am working to get from the “I can’t” to the “hey, take a look at that, I just finished it”.

One day, I’ll have enough experience to be able to put lots of cool stuff I’ve done into my first article instead of just speaking about me, but for now, I’m just in the beginning.

However, I might have a few stuff I’m not too ashamed of to show:

One thing you should know if you want to work with me is that I have one big motivation in life: having fun in whatever I do. Life can be so boring when too serious. Of course having fun isn’t opposite to good work, otherwise I might be in trouble.

Here is a very short video that I’ve made for the “gone to texas” video contest. The first sentence was mandatory, and there was a time limit of 30 seconds. For the record, the sound of the first part was so bad because of the wind that I had to record it again behind my computer, so what was at first a quick editing became a big deal. Sound is so important…

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LZ_LQ_tfwDU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Now, using that same video and one of Andrew Kramer’s tutorials, I adapted it to make it more fun. Now let’s be clear: I didn’t create that special effect, I just recreated it click by click thanks to the amazing tutorials provided on www.videocopilot.net . This was a very good way to understand motion tracking and the After Effect extension Mocha while making something fun.

Now, just for the fun, here comes a video I have made a few years back with two friends. Written during one evening, shot in the next afternoon, edited the day after, this completely non-professional video was made only for a friend’s birthday (with whom we love to watch dumb movies) but which finally reached a much larger audience. So this is indeed a parody of some stupid movies (Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc), recreated in their most beautiful imperfections. Besides the catchy lines, there was here some real editing challenges: like how to create an exciting movie from bad footage with a lot of discontinuity (on purpose for the most part). As a result, this is the funniest thing I have ever edited.

Now I have a lot of other projects, some way more professional, some less, and some completely irrelevant, but those few are giving a good idea of the kind of thing I like to do. Of course, I’m open to much more serious work too (especially if they can get me closer to that boat), I believe possible to have fun even while working on the most boring project ever, it just depends on the people we are working with.

And I am probably going to close that first article with a French quote, because apparently this is classy here in the USA: Impossible n’est pas Français. This is also pretentious, but hey, it’s a French quote, and Napoléon Bonaparte was a true French. Maybe he was pretentious indeed, but he started from nothing, and at the end, he had lots of boats.

And one day, I’ll get my own.

Vincent