Meet Jean Baptiste Cambier of Blur Studio in Culver City

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jean Baptiste Cambier.

Jean Baptiste, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I remember going to the theater to see Toy Story when it came out, and I don t think at that time I really understood what I was looking at. A movie with fully computer made images? How was that even possible? Did they draw every pixels in the images? This experience came with a lot of questions, and also a lot of admiration. The people who contributed to the making of such a piece managed to convey a story, deep characters with their own panel of emotions. It seemed pretty magical, but also quite technically unreachable.

A few years later, I was studying in Northern France, and probably a lot of people can relate to the fact that a lot of highschools format us to become engineers, doctors or lawyers, at least in France it is often the case. I was leaning towards Physics since I found it fascinating to try to understand what s around us.

As part of the course I studied, we had to find a subject to approach some world problematics that was involving and using the physics and chemical knowledge we had and go deep into the subject, explaining the problematics, proposing some area of research and who knows, proposing some concrete applicable measures to contribute to solving those issues. It was a one year project, a bit like a thesis if you like, but simpler.

I chose to treat the environmental problematics, renewable energy, the advantages and the problem of nuclear energy, fossil energy, air pollution.

It soon became quite clear to me that explaining those chemical and physical phenomenons was quite a complicated task to achieve with static representations. Images, graphics, charts were making the presentation more complicated than it needed to be.

At that time, I found a realtime engine coded in Javascript, and started to play a bit with it.

It was quite a revelation. At that point, Toy Story seemed a bit less mysterious. In this engine, I could create points in space, create edges, from those edges I could create faces, and with a bit of work, started to get some 3D models, that I was able to visualize and possibly start to create some animations. After that, a friend of my parents handed to me an old version of 3ds max (one of the most famous CG software) and I realized that I did not have to code all those geometry, and things suddenly appeared easier.

When came the time to make a real career choice, I decided to go into CGI, an area that was by far still carrying a lot of magic, and also represented the opportunity to learn a lot of new things.

I then started studying at Supinfocom (now called Rubika) in France, which at that time was one of the best CG school in Europe and started to give meaning to the images, give them emotions, give them sense, give them a Story.

After five years of study, I went to Paris to start working. I had the chance to work from 9 to 7 in a little studio, which gave me the time to work at night on digging more into this vast world that is CGI, trying to get stronger and better at what I was doing.

And one day, a studio based in California told me that they d like to work with me. I was 23 at the time. My girlfriend and I felt it was time to discover more of the world. We decided to make the jump and moved to Santa Monica.

Our endeavor really looked like what we could hear about the American Dream. We did not save a lot of money at that time, all we had in our name was five thousand dollars but we knew we had some skills and we also knew that we had the strength to try to make the best of any situation. And worst case scenario for us, if California was not for us, we could have gone back to France.

We did not have a car, we were biking to work, that s also why we moved to Santa Monica, the rent was high, but at least we were close to work. From there everything went very fast, step by step, we were making our life in LA. Earning more allowed us to make our life here. I was supervising more and more projects, mostly commercials at first, I was also meeting a lot of people, who also had the chance of living from their passion. I also rapidly started to supervise some movie sequences, while also continuing going on set for commercials, working on project with great people of the movie industry, pop singers, actors, and very skilled people in the CGI field.

Today I work for Blur Studio, where we do game cinematics (Call of Duty, Halo, Far Cry), movies (Terminator…), tv series (Love, Death and Robots..), and I have to say, my job was never as fun as it is now.

Part of it because we never know what can come our way. One day, people come to us and say, we would like to have a giant steak behaving like a bull, another day, we blow up a gigantic spaceship in CGI, another day we have to transform an actor into a creature… It s always full of surprises and challenges.

For a long time, I considered my work as being half creative and artistic and half technical. But really the most enjoying part is the wonderful and passionate people I work with. In my field of work, people come from so many diverse backgrounds, some have a literature background, some studied political science, I also recall a person who was in the army, another who used to run a traditional animation school in Africa…

I truly think that is what makes us grow the most in life. And could not be happier to have continued my career in LA, because people come from every corner of the world and bring their culture in your life. One thing that amazed me the most when I first arrived in LA was that my neighbors were mostly artist living from their passion, some are writers, musicians, others are painters, actors.

If I had to talk about inspiration and inspiring stories, I would say that it is a vast subject, and I think that we are the makers of our own life, and every each of us have a different path, which truly is the key of everything. Simply because we are stronger together, and our differences make our force.

All it took for me, is a lot of work, a lot of passion, and also a bit of luck.

I believe that the existence of true geniuses is not really a thing, and I believe that everyone who is driven by passion will be successful and happy in what they want to do. I am convinced that passion is what will always push us and steer us in the right direction.

In CGI, we always try to make the best images, the best-looking shots, always trying to create groundbreaking technologies to achieve this.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that when the time will come to look back at my own path, its not the nice projects, movies or images that will truly matter. Technology goes very fast and by that time, the images will probably look dated and old. What will actually remain, is the experience and the memories we had with passionate people we worked with and hopefully became our friends.

Has it been a smooth road?
I don t think there is a very a clear, defined, smooth road for anyone.

Money was a concern when I arrived. After paying the deposit for the apartment, buying a few pieces of furniture, we did not have much left to live, but it was enough at the time and we could live with simple things, we were not particularly eccentric. After that, it only got better, with a lot of work and organization.

Being an immigrant in the US also comes with some administrative challenges. Getting visas was not particularly hard, but it was laborious and time-consuming.

Also, a big part of the challenges come from my work. The technologies that we work on or the ones we use are getting better and better but are also getting more complex, and we also keep learning everyday, its a challenge, but its also the beauty of it. For every project we work on, we make a point of making it better than the one before, and that takes a lot of energy.

For all our life or work challenges, there is always ways to face them. I m sure everyone faces them on their own terms, on my end when I feel overwhelmed, I always try to take a step back. I think everything can be broken in smaller, more manageable pieces. We don t always have to face things all at once. I like making lists, bullet points and check things on paper.

Also, looking back at what I’ve gone through before, sometimes I feel like, how could I make that work? Well, I also think that if we knew before facing our challenges what I would take to win, we could easily be discouraged. Going step by step always made the journey smoother to me.

I also found that most of my challenges come from myself. I m always thinking:
“Am I good enough to do this?”
” Am I ready?”
“What are people going to think about me if I fail?”

I have the chance to have parents who always supported me in everything I decided to do, and they taught me a few things that I apply to every challenge I face.

If we wait to be ready, we will never accomplish anything. I don t think we are ever fully ready for what awaits us, and sometimes it just takes a leap of faith.

Our challenges come from ourselves, but the solutions often also come from inside us, I said earlier that with work and passion, we can go very far, but luck is also part of it. And sometimes we forget that luck does not fall on our lap, we also are actors in this process.

I feel lucky to be working in LA and make my living of my passion, but also this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t work in that direction, was ready to move to a new country and try to make it work as much as I could. If you are ready to make a move, sometimes all it takes is an email or a phone call, and sometimes you sent it at the right place at the right moment, and things change for the better. But that does not happen if you don t pick up the phone.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I work for Blur Studio, which is a post-production studio owned by Jennifer and Tim Miller who directed Deadpool and more recently Terminator Dark Fate.

I work in a team that is responsible for the look of what we produce. In other words, we work on the lighting, composition, to help the stories we are telling.

I have several specialties, I light shots in CG, determine the look of sequences, work in compositing (where the CG, the 2d effects are assembled to make the final image) But I also work in rigging to build the logical systems that allow animators to animate the characters.

I was one of the persons in charge of determining the look of some Love Death and Robot episodes, I was also in charge of the look on some game cinematics and trailers such as Call of Duty modern warfare, Halo, Star Wars the old republic, Marvel Spiderman, League of legends… before working for Blur, I was also supervising award-winning commercials. I was one of the supervisors on Beast of no Nation, was the visual effects supervisor on Away we go.

At Blur, we work on VFX shows, but also full CG shows, and one of our biggest challenges these past years is to create digital humans as photorealistic as they can be. The journey to build such character is fascinating, and it involves a lot of technical aspects, but also a lot of artistic aspects, and a lot of observation, such as micro expression, how a character should move, how it should talk.

To make a digital character look real, it comes down to how the human muscle system works, how should hair behave, how should his cloth behave.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Well, I think the need for VFX and CG will continue to be for a long time. Especially during times such as what we experience now with the COVID. It s also a field that evolves very fast, the technologies always change to help us produce even better looking images. I would say that the biggest change I’ve experienced lately, once again due to our current health context, is that such a company and such work can be done remotely for the most part.

Otherwise, as time passes, I think VFX can only get better and better, and who knows, maybe to a point, where what is real and what is made won’t be discernible.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.blur.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_blur_studio/?hl=fr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealblurstudio/

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