David Liebard aka Number41

Born in 1975, France
Lives and works in Paris, France

I live in Paris since I was born, and I'm 47 years old. I have a mechanics engineer degree from "Arts Et Métiers", but I have been creating art since my early childhood. After my graduation in 1998 I found out about computer graphics after seing the "Bug's Life" Pixar movie and immediately knew it would be a perfect match for me to work in that field ! I bought a new PC, started to learn by myself, and only a few months later I have been introduced to a small CG company in Paris. They made me do a test and hired me. I never stopped working in that field since then.

Between 1998 and 2002 I worked for a dozen of companies, doing commercials, short features, company branding, music clips, etc. In 2002 I moved to the best CG place that could be found in France, "Mac Guff Ligne", and worked there until November 2020. In 2008 Mac Guff has been bought by "Illumination", a US company created by Chris Meledendri, the same producer that created "Bluesky" ("Ice age" movies), and we became "Illumination Mac Guff". Our first project was called "Despicable Me", we were quite excited to do this long feature but never expected the success it had and all that followed. Between 2005 and 2020 I worked on 18 long features, and most of them had a planetary success, this was truly a child dream coming true !

During this career as a CG artist I did everything that could be done, but the main shift has been learning to code, which lead me to create a high level expert team in 2008, called the "Core team". Our goal was to anticipate the main technical challenges for upcoming features and build tools to automate the processes for the character workflow from modeling to animation. In 2019 I started to make some personal projects again on Instagram, I didn't want to do characters or figurative creations anymore so I decided to explore animated abstract visuals. I discovered about NFTs shortly after, applied for SuperRare and got accepted almost immediately. My NFT journey have since been extremely satisfying on so many levels, even now it's hard for me to believe how lucky I am to be part of this revolution. I feel like I can improve a lot more, there are so many things I want to experiment. I made a few generative collections on Opensea but I really want to make more of them. For my 1/1 art I really want to focus on doing powerful abstract visuals and try to fade away the 3D aspect as much as possible.

I am very grateful for all my career and so excited about the incredible perspectives that NFTs give me for the future in terms of creativity, collaborations with audio/visual artists, and connections with the collectors and audience.

More Info: Website, Twitter, Instagram, SuperRare