When did you start working for Eurosport?
In 2000. I produced several animations for them before the Euro 2004 one.

What were you doing before working for them?
I was a student at Beaux Arts in Orleans, working on a DNSEP in Communications. After that I was employed by a company as a designer/director and then I went freelance.

Is it easy working for a huge company like Eurosport using a program like LightWave?
Yes, in the sense they just wanted results and I went straight into production work with LightWave. The learning curve was pretty shallow and I could count on the community.
In addition to that, the work was ambitious and varied and deadlines weren’t often longer than a month. Because I worked on my own and in an empiric and experimental fashion, things kept building and building until I reached a final result. I was forced to test and explore other ways of doing things and sometimes backpedal a little, so I needed a program that allowed a certain leeway, a margin of error and LightWave was pretty flexible in that regard.

How did you create such a stylized render with a limited palette like that?
With a Japanese plug-in called Unreal.

Why not use one of the built-in cel shaders?
It’s better than the two options for cel shading provided with LightWave because while BESM shows the colours that are going to be used in OpenGL (which SuperCelShader does not) it doesn’t allow texture mapping. On the other hand SuperCelShader does allow texture mapping, but doesn’t preview how things are going to look in OpenGL. Unreal offers the best of both worlds doing both!

What other sorts of plug-ins were used for the spot?
Very few. I’m not the sort of guy who encumbers himself with loads of plug-ins, I’m very much an "out of the box" type. I’ve got an automatic Mirror script called UnMirror-DoMirror, Bevel++, Unreal and not much more…

Have you seen the work Passion Pictures did for the World Cup this year, broadcast on the BBC  (also created with LightWave, also with a manga feel)?
No, I only saw an image on the internet, I hadn’t seen the clip until you showed me, but it’s very cool.

What would be your dream project?
A clip, an ad, a little film — something like that…

Can people contact you on this email address?
olivier.jeannel@noos.fr

Of course, with pleasure!

Thanks very much for participating!