Louis du Mont: crafting new approaches in digital artistry

3D Animator and Visual Effects Artist Louis Du Mont has worked on amazing commercial campaigns throughout his career, helping create stunning film for The Guardian, ASDA, Sky, Intel, Kia and O2 amongst many others. Here he shares a few thoughts with Movidiam about working in a collective, his love for testing new gear, and how he approaches each project.

You’ve established an amazing portfolio of work, including animation work for the Guardian, Android, Intel, Sky, and Nokia — how did you get into digital artistry?

I started producing animation as soon as I got a computer at the age of 14. I created little cartoon shorts in Macromedia Director and later Flash. After completing a degree in animation, I was able to use my knowledge of Flash to get a job as an interaction designer in a digital agency now called ‘MRM Meteorite’. There I started to produce lots of 3D content for rich media campaigns and soon became part of a growing internal 3D/Video production department. After 5 years there I decided to team up with my long time friend and producer Jon Reidy to start something new.

You’ve worked freelance, and in a collective, Formation. What are the benefits of working as a collective team, both from an operations and new-business perspective?

Working under Formation is very handy for larger briefs. We have a healthy set of talent to contact as and when the project calls for it. I think it also projects a level of trust that it’s not always easy to get (at first) as a freelancer. More tangible benefits include a well equipped studio for production and meetings. We’ve also used it as a good opportunity to promote different types of work. So not to appear unfocused, Formation is very much an ‘animation studio’ that can hire in talent and scale up if needed; whereas my own online representation is more general, encompassing more disciplines.

As a freelance creative, how are you using Movidiam?

At the moment I’m using Movidiam to find and be found by fellow local creatives. Although I produce a lot of work by myself, I’m always on the lookout for collaborators to work on passion projects and more. Movidiam seems to have a strong set of tools to enhance these types of projects and connections.

We’d love to know about your VFX work on the Guardian and Android April Fool’s video. How did the project come about, and because of it’s nod to public gullibility, did you have a lot of creative freedom when building the sequences?

As Formation we were approached by our friends at Gramafilm, who asked us to come on board to consult and produce the VFX shots. We’ve worked with Grama a number of times and stay close throughout filming and post. The turnaround time was very tight and we had plenty of freedom to creatively layout the CG shots to later refine as a team.

When working on a particular project, what’s your pre-production process?

I work mostly with other production houses and, in most cases, a fair amount of problem solving and proof of concept work happens at the start of a project. This makes everyone, including myself, feel much more at ease with the process. For example, working on the Android/Guardian project before the shoot, I created multiple test clips to see how best to approach certain shots.

You also combine your professional work as a digital artist with your passion for camera and equipment testing. Do you find equipment testing, like on the Sony A7RII, particularly shapes your approaches to filmmaking?

I love testing new camera and lens gear! Photography in general has been massively beneficial to all my work.

“I take a camera everywhere, it’s helped me refine my understanding of composition, light and various lens properties to then implement in CG/VFX work.”

I have two ongoing projects that I use to learn new approaches to filmmaking: ‘Everyday Objects’, a collection of photo-real vignettes and ‘Visiting’, an episodic short mixing live-action and CG.

Is sharing your work to a global community of fellow professional filmmakers one of the aspects that most interests you about Movidiam?

At present, yes. I’ve always liked sharing work with a community of peers as there’s often an extra level of appreciation, particularly for VFX projects where work can often go unnoticed, if it’s done well that is :)

Find Louis online: Movidiam / Website / Collective / Twitter