Interview with Laurent M. Abecassis
Please tell something about yourself and family?
 I’m 29 years old, I’ve been with my girlfriend for a bit more than 7 years now, we have one dog and two cats. I was born in Montreal, Canada, raised in Brussels, Belgium, and I’ve been back in Montreal for the past 10 years now. I love Montreal, it is an amazing city, where you can truly enjoy each season to its fullest.
In terms of CG, How did it all begin for you?
I’ve become addicted to computers in my early years, when I was 7 years old or so, it was with a Commodore 64 that it all started for me. Around 12 years ago, when I was a teenager I’ve painted a wall in room in bright blue and I started to learn how to create visual effects by creating simple chroma key effects. At that time, there was no internet resource like CGArena, and no school were offering any training in the CG field, so I had to self-learn everything myself in the CG Field.
As I’ve always been a big fan of character animation, I’ve took a one year class in traditional animation at ICARI in Montreal to learn how to make things moves. Although I have to say that I’ve always been more interested on the technical side of things when it comes to CG, it has helped me tremendously to have this traditional animation background in my career.
How are you feeling after winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Visual Effects for the TV series: LOST?
Being recognized by the American Academy of Television Arts and Science is quite an honor. It is also a very nice reward for all the years I’ve dedicated to researches in CG field.
I know there are many difficult shots in this series but which isthe most difficult shot you think in this series and please explain why andhow you overcome that?
Digital Dimension Montreal was the visual effectshouse creating the effects and I was Visual Effects Supervisor. Definitely the most difficult shot was the plane crash shot itself. That shot alone is key to the all series; it is the reason why the show exists: they’re LOST on the island because of the plane crash. So the bar was set very high as J.J. Abrams, the Director and Kevin Blank, the Visual Effects Supervisor of LOST wanted these shots to be of cinematic quality, even if there were for a TV show and they had to be created in matters of weeks, since these shots will be featured in many LOST commercials, TV spots, and also many flashback sequences in future episodes.
Your Company Di-O-Matic is an active plug-in developer for 3ds max, and also recently released “Character Pack”, please tell us something about your company and these plug-in.
 I’ve founded Di-O-Matic in October 2000, I wanted to offer character animation tools that were simple to use yet powerful. Our first plug-ins were released for 3ds max 3. The Character Pack is a suite of all of Di-O-Matic 3ds max plug-ins developped over the years, packed with VIP access to beta software, and also more than 3 hours of in-depth video tutorials.
Di-O-Matic plug-ins provides an easy to use solution for many character animation needs including lip synchronization, muscles deformations, facial animation, facial modelling, as well as morphing and morph targets creation tools. Today, many well known CG characters uses our technologies, here are some amongst many others: Batman, Spider-Man, SpongeBob SquarePants, Hulk, Crash Bandicoot and Mario Bros.
Is Di-O-Matic also thinking of releasing any plug-in for other 3d applications like Maya, Softimage XSI, or Houdini?
Instead of releasing plugins for other 3D applications, we have decided to create simple yet effective windows application that is compatible with any 3D software supporting the popular FBX file format. This way, our popular 3ds max plugins Facial Studio is now available for user of Alias, XSI, Lightwave, Cinema4D, MotionBuilder and others.
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