Simon Legrand

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Sign the anti-acta petition and write to your country's reps.

I urge you to vote no on ACTA and to communicate its severe problems to your colleagues. ACTA's vague language locks us into obsolete copyright and patent laws, preventing democracies from updating their laws to unlock new economic and social opportunities.It criminalizes harmless remixes by ordinary users if they achieve 'a commercial scale' (art 2.14.1) which many amateur videos do on sites like Youtube. And it criminalizes legitimate websites by making them responsible for user behavior ('aiding and abetting' art 2.14.4).Worse, it permanently bypasses the democratic process by empowering the 'ACTA Committee' to 'propose amendments to [ACTA]' without your approval. (art 6.4) In other words, it's impossible to know what you're voting for.The global movement against the US law SOPA showed that internet freedom is a crucial issue which belongs in the legislative process of each country. You should view ACTA as an attempt by a handful of companies to circumvent the democratic process, and you should vote against it.Thank you. Please reply if you have any questions.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Megaupload owner arrested.

THIS IS WHAT'S WRONG WITH BILLS LIKE ACTA, SOPA, PIPA and all the other wannabe IP protecting bills.
Megaupload was a cloud service like any other cloud service. If they're able to seize the domain name and send the owners to jail only because users hosted copyrighted material on their servers, then, by that logic, googleDocs is guilty of the same, ubuntuOne, dropBox and all the other cloud services around. This is a very big attack on our future and the future of data storage, management and an even bigger attack on our rights to privacy. Back in the days where you would tape your favourite show on a VHS would you have the FBI breaking your bedroom door down and seize the closet in which you stored your tapes? Would the FBI shutdown your entire school for photocopies your teacher made of book pages so the students could write on them? The powers behind legal terrorist attacks like these are afraid of the internet, they're afraid of the medium because they're afraid they will not know how to adapt, so, they do everything they can to halt its growth and/or shut it down.
If the content of the internet was as censored, as bland and pointless as the absolute crap they put on our TVs, would you stand for it?

Sunday, January 22, 2012

STOP ACTA!

I work in the film industry. I love my craft and I am very grateful to the Hollywood machine for allowing me to do what I love and get paid for it. But let it be clear that I in no way support ACTA, SOPA, PIPA and all proposed bill which will infringe on the people's right to learn, share and create beautiful things via the infinite power of the Internet. There are other ways to keep our industry healthy other than lobbying for bills that will push our society one step closer to an Orwellian dystopia.

Simon LeGrand

Some Tintin making-of videos.

Also available from Catsuka

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Friday, September 23, 2011

The Happy Feet 2 trailers are online.

In the new one, we can see some krill characters which I was tasked to design and do preliminary modelling on back at dr D. I'm amazed to see that in two years, it hasn't changed too much from some of my original sketches and Zbrush models. However I'm sure they've gone through a laborious development cycle via all the talented modellers at dr D and have only come back to this look by chance.
PS. the shader work on these is AMAZING guys!