Combine graphics, 3D models, voxels and titles in stunning motion designs
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Combine graphics, 3D models, voxels and titles in stunning motion designs
Hallucinating Through a Decade: Jean-Christophe Villain on the VivaTech 2026 Opening Film
Today we catch up with Jean-Christophe Villain, the Paris-based motion designer and art director behind Geronimo, who created the opening film for the 10th-anniversary main-stage ceremony of VivaTech 2026, Europe's largest tech and innovation event.
Working solo across a 25-day production, he leaned on Yanobox Nodes, Mosaic and other FxFactory tools to turn a decade of tech history into a dense, broadcast-inspired visual journey. He was kind enough to walk us through the project, his workflow, and how FxFactory plugins fit into it.
The VivaTech Project
What was the goal of the film, and how did the project come your way?
I was brought onto VivaTech 2026 through Publicis Live, who commissioned the opening film for the conference's 10th-anniversary main-stage ceremony. VivaTech is Europe's largest tech and innovation event, held at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, with a huge in-room audience and a global livestream. The brief was to open the ceremony with a retrospective spanning a decade of tech culture, from 2016 to 2026, but not a dry corporate timeline. We built the concept around an AI narrator, "Molly," who hallucinates through the archives of the last ten years, pairing major tech milestones with pop-culture counterpoints. That gave us license to build a dense broadcast/CRT aesthetic of violet and black tones, glitch and scan lines, rather than a clean corporate look.
What was the timeline, and how much time did you have?
The full production was 25 days. About ten of those went into art direction, developing and proposing the visual concept before anything was locked. Once that direction was validated, we moved into production, starting from one fully finished minute that became the template for building out the other five. I work alone on these projects, and I'm usually given a lot of creative freedom, almost like a big playground to express myself in. That makes it essential to have the right tools on hand to adjust my art direction on the fly, and FxFactory makes it easy to jump between effects and keep iterating without friction.
What did your overall toolset and workflow look like?
Everything ran through After Effects and Premiere Pro on a Dynamic Link pipeline, on an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro (M5 Pro). On top of the core Adobe stack, I leaned heavily on FxFactory plugins for structure and texture. I also brought in generative AI tools, Kling and Runway, for a few specific shots where archival footage didn't exist or needed augmenting. On most briefs I'm given, the real challenge is breathing life into source visuals that are often flat, like photos, archives and static product shots, and finding an original way to bring them to life. In the luxury world especially, I'll often be handed a single photo of a piece of jewelry or a perfume bottle, and it's on me to make that object actually come alive on screen, in the edit and in After Effects.
FxFactory In The Pipeline
Which shots or looks did you use FxFactory plugins for?
A recurring challenge on this kind of project is that I'm handed source material, archive photos and stock footage, of pretty uneven quality. FxFactory's screen and print-simulation tools were essential for elevating it: Synthesizer, the halftone and screen-door effects, the various print/scan simulations. They let me take a flat or mediocre still and give it a futuristic, slightly unexpected texture. I use them a lot to break images apart, turning them into something closer to a 3D particle effect, then adding a glow on top, and that combination is what gives the footage a more polished, more cinematic feel.
Yanobox Nodes was central to the film's connective visual language: the sequences where data points, archive fragments and timeline markers needed to feel linked, almost like a living network rather than static graphics. It's a genuinely brilliant tool because it's so easy to use while still producing extremely delicate, fine graphic connections, all tunable to match exactly what you're picturing.
Mosaic was new to me; I'd never really worked with it before this project. I used it specifically as an overlay, with small patterns layered on top of visuals that tended to feel a bit corporate, to give them some texture and life without overworking them.
What makes these plugins useful, and how do they shape your creative approach and your workflow with clients?
What I value most is speed without sacrificing a distinct visual signature. With only 15 days of actual production once the direction was locked, I don't have time to hand-build every system from scratch in native After Effects. Nodes gives me a generative, parametric base I can push in a specific direction fast, and it still ends up looking like nothing else on the market. That matters a lot with clients like Publicis Live, where the creative direction has to feel custom, never templated, even under serious time pressure.
Have you used FxFactory plugins on other projects? Which ones?
A bit on every project, honestly. Here is a Showreel I made with my use of Yanobox Nodes:
The most iconic example is probably Louis Vuitton jewelry:
...and Watches & Wonders Geneva:
...with heavy use of Nodes on both, to magnify footage and drawings and give them a more graphic, more elevated feel. You can see more of this work on my site: geronimo-paris.fr
What kind of relationship do you have with the plugin developers, and why does that matter to you?
It's quite direct. When I reached out about VivaTech, I heard back from Jean Marc Noel at Yanobox personally within about an hour and a half, and he'd already forwarded the note to the team at FxFactory the same evening. That kind of access matters to me. These aren't anonymous corporate tools. There are people behind them who clearly care about how their plugins get used, and that closeness gives me confidence the tools will keep evolving in directions that make sense for working artists, not just feature checklists.
About The Artist
Jean-Christophe Villain
How long have you been doing this, and how did you get started?
I come from a very traditional graphic-design background, heavily focused on typography, posters, print and visual identity, and I only moved into animation two or three years after finishing my master's. That background means I'm still deeply attached to the look of a still image, a single style frame, even within a moving piece. It's one of the things I love about tools like Nodes or Synthesizer: I've used them for posters and print work with no animation at all, because the look they produce is often enough on its own to carry a really strong piece of art direction as a static image. And there's a particular joy in starting from a still built in Nodes and then bringing it to life in After Effects. I've been working in motion design and art direction for about 20 years, building visual systems for luxury, cultural and institutional clients. My practice has always centered on translating existing material, whether a brand, a script or an archive, in this case a decade of tech history, into a coherent visual language. That's really the throughline of everything I do: putting images on words and ideas that aren't originally mine, and finding the right aesthetic system to carry them.
What are some of the projects you're most proud of?
Two come to mind that lean on exactly these tools. One was a film built around sneakers, where I'd only pulled product images off the internet: flat references, nothing shot for purpose. I used AI to bring those sneakers to life, then layered Mosaic and a number of other effects on top to build a very contemporary, very modern edit. The other is a film I'm genuinely proud of for Louis Vuitton, on a new jewelry collection of necklaces, where the only source material was watercolor illustrations of the pieces. Nodes did a lot of the heavy lifting: the challenge was turning static watercolor renderings into something that felt alive and graphic on screen, and that's exactly the kind of problem the plugin is built for. Both projects are on my site: geronimo-paris.fr