Sylvain Nouveau

ESMA: What is your current position?

Sylvain Nouveau: I’m currently Supervisor of the FX department at RodeoFX in Montreal.

E: What are your duties and responsibilities?

S.N: My mission is to manage the FX department as a whole.
This starts with recruitment, through to the final delivery of the shots (with the help of my show leads and the FX artists, of course), including the bidding of the shots (estimating the time and resources needed to do an effect), as well as helping to develop the pipeline and our FX tools in order to define common working methods for the department.

E: What major projects have you worked on?

S.N:

• Paddington 2
• Game of Thrones season 7
• Fantastic Beast
• Jumanji
• IT
• King Arthur
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

E: Can you tell us about the website you’ve set up?

S.N: I’ve set up a site that brings together references for FX, live and CG artists, selected by myself, on vimeo.com.

E: Why did you set up this site?

S.N: I started a few years ago to create albums on Vimeo to sort my references and find live or CG examples easily.

These references allow me to quickly exchange ideas with the supervisors or fx artists with whom I have to prepare shots. They also allow me to have references that I can easily find when I have an effect to do. So I can react quickly!

I was using them more and more and my reference selections were growing by the day. I thought it might be of interest to other people.

So I quickly set up a site, something simple, and above all easy to update (because of a lack of time).

In general, I spend a few minutes each day on vimeo. I put videos on my site that I think are interesting (technically and artistically) and that have something to do with Special Effects.

E: What kind of feedback have you had?

S.N: I haven’t done too much communication around it, so the site spreads more by word of mouth. The feedback has generally been very good.

E: How do you see the site developing?

S.N: This site is currently at the concept stage, to meet a need I had in terms of grouping together references. We need to improve the concept by tagging each video and redefining the sub-categories. We also need to add a search menu by tag.