Romain Laurent is a photographer and director based in New York City. From fresh, energetic portraits to high-concept ideas, Romain does it all. He was born and raised in the French Alps, where he nutured a love of extreme skiing, and studied product design at the Ensaama National School of Applied Arts and photography at Gobelins in Paris.
Romain's Gif series of One Loop a week caught my eye with the simplicity and effectiveness of each piece. I like the isolation of motion, this is something that's very common is very visual aesthetic hand drawn animation, it makes the movement the focal point, and also makes less to draw in animation. It's weird to see it in photography because you don't expect everything else to be so unnaturally still. I think there's a beauty in these Gif's, they are very cleanly made, I think the ball spins a bit too fast in the last one, and in the flying arms it's a little jerky, when the hand flicks back up. But that's me being very nit picky. I kind of like how, they haven't been made to tell a story or a narrative of any kind, but to me they come across like they were just made to show off. I quite like that a little bit though. (if you look at the full series there's quite a few of dance movements, skateboarders doing tricks etc.)
I decided to look more into his work after stumbling across his Gif's, (quite literally on stumbleupon.com) and discovered he's also a director, of shorts. Here's the first one I watched for a music video, I'm not sure I was a big fan of the song but I really like how the camera constantly spins around, and there's so much movement across the screen, again to be a bit nit picky it can be a bit shaky but it is really hypnotic. I think the shakiness is only emphasised when the sounds off (I might of just turned it off). It really reminded me of what Yoni wanted to achieve last year.
I much preferred this video. I love how simple the idea is of the man changing clothes, but then the clothes stay in position whilst he walks away, I thought it just oozed coolness. I also really like the lighting and colour palette. I think these are things that as animation students we tend to glaze past quite quickly but in film you get time to emphasise that because the actors do most of the motion for you. I think we need more coolness in animation, maybe we need to focus more on these types of things to get it.
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