Yoann Lemoine

‘Busy’ is a relative term. ‘Don’t talk to me now, I’m busy writing a director profile,’ for example. Or, ‘Actually, I’ll write it later, I’m currently busy watching Charlie Sheen having what looks suspiciously like a mental breakdown on national TV’. However, when what ‘busy’ actually means to someone is preparing to move to a new country to shoot commercials, music videos and also to work on a feature film, plus dealing with the launch of a new music EP and a worldwide tour of their musical alter-ego, well, that is properly busy. And that is exactly the schedule French director Yoann Lemoine is currently facing. If the devil makes work for idle hands then the 27-year-old Lemoine is as saintly as they come. Lemoine is relatively new to the world of directing commercials, having only wielded the megaphone in the industry for just over three years, but he is already making a name for himself. At last year’s Cannes festival he picked up no less than four Lions for his brilliant and effective AIDES spot, Graffiti, and his crop of music videos for artists as diverse as Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Moby have been garnering plaudits from all corners. What is also interesting is that as a director he’s as comfortable – and as talented – working with animation as he is with live-action or, as with the AIDES spot, both at the same time. Beautiful animated work for brands such as the French broadcaster TiJi competes on his reel with more mainstream but equally stylish work like the Taylor Swift promo, Back to December.

The man behind the music

And then there’s the music. Lemoine has been playing music for many years and his electroacoustic/folk/pop project, Woodkid, saw the release of his first extended play record on 20 March this year and an accompanying tour is imminent. He’s also just shot a video, starring model Agyness Deyn, for the current single. So what exactly is Lemoine? How would he describe himself? “It’s hard to say exactly,” he says. “Mainly I’m a director as that’s where I make my living but I have been playing music for many years too, and I got to sign this deal with a cool record company in France so I’m alternating my time between directing and doing music. But it’s sort of the same thing for me really; it’s about having an idea and translating an emotion into something that can be received. In the end,” he says when pushed, “I suppose I would say I’m an artist.” It can come as no surprise that Lemoine eventually made his way into the advertising arena, seeing as both his parents worked as creatives in France when he was young. They didn’t work on TV executions, though, but instead were firmly rooted in the print tradition – and this too influenced Lemoine Jnr. “I spent my youth in advertising companies in Lyon,” he reminisces. “They had no computers in there when I was a kid so everyone was working on paper with markers and pencils. So my father just got me drawing and I loved it. I studied illustration and printing at school and also a little bit of animation; not that much but it turned out that I loved it.” Lemoine’s love of animation and design led his father to buy him a Mac when he was only 12-years-old and from there he basically taught himself how to use applications like Photoshop. “While the other kids at school were just playing games on PCs I was doing, basically, advertising stuff,” he laughs. By the time he went on to study animation and illustration, when it came to the digital side of things, he was already well ahead of the other students and so decided to do his own thing. His own thing then led to him being taken on by a production company in France which commissioned him to do short animated films for children.

From animator to director

Asked whether he always wanted to be a director, whether that was his ultimate goal, Lemoine thinks for a few seconds before answering; “I never really asked myself that question to be honest,” he replies. “I just enjoyed what I was doing and wanted to keep doing it. It was very fluid,” he says of his move from animator to director. “I kind of dreamed that it would be great to make music videos but I don’t know, I don’t think I expected really for the dream to happen.” After a period of making animated short videos for children, Lemoine started to get bored and, as much as anything, craved social interaction. Being cooped up in the same room, staring at a screen day after day was, says Lemoine, “hard for me”. So in 2003 he bought a camera and started filming. “I really liked it and was interested in other ways of making an image, and other tools to use to express something.” Soon enough Lemoine had shot a music video for a friend and France’s Wanda Productions, with whom he had worked before, liked it and asked him to shoot videos for some smaller artists in France. “And that’s how I started directing,” he says. Though confident enough in his abilities as a director, Lemoine recognises that, as someone who hasn’t attended film school, and who has no real grounding in the world of cinema and television commercials, he is in a continual state of education. His parents worked in the realm of print advertising and his youthful passions revolved more around illustrators and painters than they did directors. “I didn’t have a huge cinematic education,” he says, almost apologetically. “I was maybe a bit naive; obsessed by Hollywood movies, you know? I can’t say I was watching Francis Ford Coppola films when I was a kid. Sometimes I can get a complex when I have conversations with people who have this huge knowledge of cinema but my childhood is imprinted with films like ET. Now I have the maturity and the experience to enjoy a lot of different, indie-style films, but I think you also go back to what you grew up with.”

The craft behind the camera

While Lemoine may not always have confidence in his own bank of cinematic knowledge, those who have worked with him have the utmost belief in his ability to deliver an interesting and beautifully crafted film. He has worked with DDB Paris on a number of occasions and Matthieu Elkaim, copywriter on the aforementioned TiJi animated film, and creative director on a recent Lipton spot, is quick to heap praise on his dedication and vision. “Working with Yoann is always a pleasure because you don’t work with a director but with a creative,” says Elkaim. “He is very inspired, having an idea every second. When you work with him on a project, even if he has a strong vision regarding how he would like to make it, he always listens to you, trying to understand what you have in mind, what your aim is. Thus, it becomes a real collaboration where the goal is to get the best result at the end.” What is clear to see is that Lemoine has an appreciation of craft; the craft of an illustrator or designer when he was younger, then the craft of a digital animator, and now directorial and filmic craft. His work is technically excellent, his films – be they for musicians, clients or personal projects – are stylishly and skilfully put together and if there’s one thing that rankles him, it’s shoddy workmanship. He believes that people calling themselves directors, who have no background in making films but who simply upload things to YouTube are killing the industry. “I think having access to good, cheap cameras and things like Final Cut is a good thing,” he explains, “but the problem is that many of the people using them just don’t have the necessary talent. You know, they’ll end up making a student film but pretend that it’s more than that. Of course, there are many people who are very talented and who make good decisions and good films but too many are not confident enough in themselves to do something really good, and end up doing something really bad. I don’t want to sound like one of those directors who spits on everyone else’s work because I love so many other people’s films but I just don’t like to see stuff that is poor. I have an appreciation for the craft of film and for production values. That doesn’t mean I’m always working with a lot of money but I still think you can make something that looks very nice and has good production values that doesn’t cost a huge amount of money if you have the right technical qualities.” Currently planning his move to LA to work on promo projects for his production company there, HSI, as well as to work on his planned feature film, Lemoine is geared up for a busy year ahead. His plans for the feature film and his EP and upcoming tour, which will take him around the world, are front of mind but he also admits that to “get to work with some really creative people and create some great commercials” would be fantastic. He wants to work on scripts that really speak to him, that cater for what he calls his obsession with “adolescence, sexuality, love and emotion. Things that are interesting and cinematographic to me”. But what about relaxation? With all the creative plans that are coming into focus over 2011, where does Lemoine find time to breath out and unwind? “I don’t need to relax!” he exclaims. “I’m very lucky that I have a job that is cool and interesting and which I love so I don’t feel tired yet or feel like I need to relax, I’m only 27. I know things are moving very fast right now, which is great, but I’d love them to move even faster. I’m a very impatient person.”