He's living the dream!

The photographer’s GIFs provided a break from his commercial work, but caught the eye of clients ranging from Starbucks to L’Oreal. His first big GIF gig was shooting for Hermès. Though doing commercial work, everyone embraced his signature quirkiness. “There was a great deal of respect of my artistic point of view,” he says.

That POV comes through loud and clear. His Starbucks campaign features levitating Frappuccinos spinning circles around the subject. An image from the L’Oréal fashion show features a model forever being doused with hairspray.

His process hasn’t changed much. Laurent films the scene with a Canon 5D Mark III. Later, he picks a still image from the video and carefully layers animated elements over it in After Effects. After making sure everything lines up and moves seamlessly, Laurent brings the piece into Photoshop for a bit of color correction. He’s refined his technique over the years and is a lot faster. “I don’t have a general guideline for how I do things, but know I know my style,” he says.

With 40,000 followers on Tumblr and 4,600 on Instagram, he finds the feedback nice but not entirely necessary.