Sébastien Périer Automates Animation

Sébastien Périer has always had a keen interest in animation. Raised in part on _The Simpsons _and South Park, he successfully translated his childhood passion into his livelihood. As the co-founder and producer of The Visual Clutters, an animation production company, Paris-based Sébastien is currently working on his first animated feature film and television series, Mythomen, which will make use of the Adobe After Effects Motion Graphics templates he automated for the most recent releases of After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro.

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A completed shot of the movie using Mogrt to change the text of the coffee bean bags (default text shown).

But the road to becoming an independent producer-director hasn’t been a straight one. Sébastien began studying computer sciences in the hopes of developing video games. Instead, he realized he liked scripting better, and took a job as a DVD author, where he got his first introduction to After Effects.

“I worked in the same building as a production company, and became involved in a film,” explains Sébastien. “When shooting was over, they needed post-production help, and that’s where my love affair with After Effects began.”

What follows is a dizzying portfolio of accomplishments: he authored two books on After Effects Expressions and Stereoscopic 3D in After Effects, translated After Effects books by other authors from English to French, and got his first job at an animation company. All the while, he nurtured his current brainchild, Mythomen, with co-author Elise Couturier. Although they lived at the opposite ends of Paris, they used Adobe Story to collaborate on the writing.
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Testing advanced text layouts in a Motion Graphics template for work in progress background. Complexity comes from proper scaling and style consistency with various text size.

Sébastien then joined Stupeflix, a video production company. There, he integrated After Effects into the company’s API, developing scripts and tools to help motion designers use After Effects via Stupeflix technology until the company was acquired by GoPro.

“I turned my side project into a full-time endeavor when GoPro restructured,” he says. “Since then, I’ve been spending most of my time on the movie and looking for Premiere Pro editing gigs.”

A self-described compositing artist, Sébastien also used After Effects to create a board game, which was released in France. He’s used his scripting abilities to take the complexity out of historically difficult tasks, such as creating crowds in animation. He has now automated this process, making it quick and easy to generate a crowd—something he says will come in handy for Mythomen.

“The movie takes place in France, and we are known for our endless strikes,” laughs Sébastien. “We have joked about having a strike take place in the background of any external shots.”

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Sneak peek of the movie timeline with the first few Motion Graphics templates highlighted. Tracks #4 to #7 are dedicated to Motion Graphics templates. There are more than 60 Motion Graphics templates instances in the animatic as of today.

In Mythomen, Sébastien uses the new Motion Graphics templates in After Effects to solve some frequently encountered issues, such as making sure that jokes are not lost in translation when cutting trailers in different languages. Using a Motion Graphics template, he can now adjust jokes in real-time in Premiere Pro with the simple checking—or unchecking—of a box in the UI.

“This gives us a lot of scalability as well as the ability to tweak the animation right up to the last minute, and provide extremely localized content to every country,” says Sébastien. “This is just magical.”

Adobe Effects Motion Graphics templates also bridge the gap between design and technology, letting creatives, editors, and other non-creative staff create powerful motion graphics from scratch. In short, they can do more with less—and they can do it without ever leaving Premiere Pro.

“With just a bit of knowledge, users can change colors, adjust branding, and add other options to make things more fluid,” says Sébastien. “This will have a huge impact on post-production timelines.”

Now that Sébastien has completed pre-production work on Mythomen, he is looking ahead to his next project. While he’s staying mum on the details, it’s safe to assume that After Effects Motion Graphics templates will—once again—feature prominently in his work.

Learn more about Motion Graphics templates in Adobe Premiere Pro CC