Meet Jean-Luc Gason


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Jean-Luc Gason
http://www.10bitlog.com
France

Jean-Luc Gason was born in Belgium. He graduated from INRACI, a Belgian cinema school, in 2000. Jean-Luc said: "I wished to be a director but the Belgian market reality is that you can't make a living directing. I knew Combustion from toying around with the beta during my internship, so I tried to find some work in SFX. By that time, Main Frame Facilities opened in Brussels and they were looking for talent to complete their team. I presented myself and got hired to work on their Avid Media Illusion, as nobody there understood the 'tree compositing' architecture of the software. Since they had just bought a Flame and a Smoke, everybody else was fighting to work on those systems and so it left an Octane free for me and I spent my nights learning Illusion and spent days working on it with clients."

Of the work, Jean-Luc says: "Our first clients were mostly advertising and sometimes corporate clients but in 2001 someone came to ask us to work on a movie. We knew nothing about 35mm, Log, LUT and so on, but as I was the only one who had some experience shooting in film from school and had some chemical and sensitometry notions, I was bombed 'Technical head of film department' -- the film department in question, being me." :o)

The story continues: "Thankfully, I got some very nice people in the labs to guide me in my learning of DI, color management and the return trip to 35mm. In the end, our first film went quite well, so we got some more, and more. As time went on, we hired more people in the film department and I spent time making sure everybody's screen was calibrated and that no-one switched it to 9600°K, than actually doing compositing. I also begun to spend time on set to make sure they didn't shoot blue screens with people wearing 'but it's not the same' blue clothes, placing trackers, measuring distance and taking notes of the lens used. During that time, I continued to work on making our workflow as transparent as possible with the labs. So when the company decided they wanted to launch a grading suite, I was immediately the one considered to be the colorist, even if I only had grading experience on some low-budget advertising spots graded in compositing software. So I'm now doing mostly grading, and going on set as DFX Supervisor."

Jean-Luc directed a short film in 2003, La Séquence Silverstein, which you can see on his website at http://www.10bitlog.com.

What's in the future? "I'm finishing the writing of a second film, while trying to find some funds to produce it."