Every year Imaginove organizes a contest based on Ganuta www.ganuta.com, its hiring site for the images industry. Creative talents can win prizes in four categories: shorts/video, animation, video gaming, mobile/pad applications, and illustration. Sébastien Laban, winner of the 2011 Ganuta animation prize was invited to attend FILMART with Imaginove, and was able to show his short film: Meet Meline.
Sébastien Laban still can hardly believe that Meet Meline – the short he made with his companion Virginie – was shown to buyers and producers from the Asia Pacific region last March at FILMART. This director, who worked for UFG Framestore in London as Lighting TD before returning to Lyon, France for Eden Games, readily admits his film was not made “in the intent to run the festival circuit”. “When we embarked on this adventure, it felt more like an independent production, something to work on in the evenings. Virginie took care of the modelling of Meline and the environments, while I handled directing, animating, rendering, lighting and compositing”, all of this with Autodesk tools, particularly Maya. Finished in 2010, the film was nonetheless presented at Annecy, then Siggraph in Los Angeles, in Germany, and at Forum Cartoon.
Meet Meline is on the way to becoming a children’s digital book, and the couple is working on creating smartphone apps, among them “Snappy Dragons”.
sebastienlaban@hotmail.com
