I just got my four years freelancing chip in December. During those years, I worked on more than 200 projects, ranging from two to hundreds of hours. I realized a couple of things along the way.

Freelancing is tricky. It requires much more than knowing your craft, and becoming a one-person operation can be counterintuitive at times.

So, having often talked about it with friends and relatives, I decided to write some things down. Some tips I would share with my younger self. Mind you, I am 28 with no kids. I feel like my mind might change at some point in the future, but this is where I’m at. This is written from my personal experience of working remotely in direct contact with clients, not agencies.

TLDR: This is an experiment of sound editing with binaural beats, alongside Winamp’s Milkdrop WebGL visualizations. I recommend watching it in full screen with good headphones.

During the summer, my work slows down a bit. People take vacations, and that’s cool. The winter is pretty harsh in Quebec. So enjoying the summer while it lasts is very important. This slow-down allows me to take some vacations, but I often end up working on a side project. This year, I thought I should take this time to get better at sound editing and basic music creation. I have been gradually learning the ins and outs of sound editing in the past years. Also, I had an Arturia Keylab Keyboard collecting dust in my closet since I purchased it two years ago. I would take this free time to learn to get something out of it.

It has been an awfully long time while since I last wrote here. I am still alive and well.

In the recent years, I’ve been doing a couple of things :

• Mainly working as freelance motion designer (see portfolio to learn more).
• Developing for a few years and ultimately abandoning the development of Hyle.
• And, for the last two years, building a product called Dovi.
• Also, I still write some quick tips on keyframed.tv from time to time.

Last summer I had the chance to work on a series of video projections for the Festival d’Été de Québec, also known as FEQ. It’s an awesome music festival taking place in my hometown of Québec city. I have seen the festival evolve since I am a child and this project was a great honour for me. The project was a good challenge since 30 different looks had to be created in about a month.

I have recently started panicking as I received a warning telling me that my startup disk was about to be completely filled up. Having only used ~1Tb of my 3Tb disk last time I checked, I couldn’t figure out where all of it was.

In October of 2014 I started working freelance for Blackout Design, a visual environment design company. I’ve had the chance to work, along with many other talented designers and animators on two very interesting projects, which both had their share of compelling challenges. The first project was the design and animation of a visual environment for the final episode of Stars Of Science, a popular show in Qatar. The other was then opening show for the Dubai International Parachuting Championship. A month of work in, I was told I would have the chance to go onsite to help set up the projects.

I recently had to prepare a couple of Illustrator files for animation (in After Effects) and found myself stumbling upon a couple of bottlenecks.

The main concern is, when importing an Illustrator file, After Effects will regard layers, but will not care about sublayers. On the other side, illustrators most likely won’t separate every part of their illustrations into separate top-level layers. This just wouldn’t make sense as it wouldn’t allow to use Illustrator’s grouping features.

The animator will usually just have to manually take all those sublayers and move each of them onto their own separate layer. That is what I mean by preparing. Of course, this kind of repetitive work can make you reconsider every career choice you have ever made.

So, I’ve been working on a couple of very small scripts to alleviate the pain coming from this tedious process and felt like it could surely benefit someone else.

The people at visual.ly asked if we (motion designers) could do a 6 seconds animation of their logo. The idea was basically the same as the animation sequence project. Start with the logo, end with the logo and animate what’s in between.

My version:

I often got the impression that writing After Effects tips or techniques on my personal blog and portfolio would be misleading about the primarily intent of this site, which is being a portfolio and a personal blog. So I thought it would be simpler to just separate concerns and move the serious(ish) video business onto a more blogesque site.

Here’s Keyframed.tv, a website about motion. See the introduction article for more information about what exactly you will find on this site.

While writing After Effects scripts, I often find myself having to convert hexadecimal color to float numbers array, eg.: #f8a908 → [0.97, 0.66, 0.03]

Since it was really painful to convert it manually and I did not happen to find a converter that would do it easily, I decided to build my own. You can see the code or just get the demo.

Welcome to you Internet traveler that somehow landed on this post! This is my new blog’s official first post.

So what’ll you find on this blog? Motion, code, thoughts, some designs and whatever I feel is pertinent to share. Now, you might want to check out my little-less-meaningless other articles.