Sébastien Dumesnil
Founder

Sébastien Dumesnil is an award-nominated film director, writer and producer. His work focuses on the difficulties and intricacies for mankind to find ways, both old and new, to communicate cultural concepts and human feelings to others. It is a recurrent theme that Dumesnil started to investigate while still a student in a short 16-mm film called Bystander, director by Robert Nichols.

In Bystander, the story follows a nervous father who is the witness of a murder in the Southern Californian mountains. As the story unfolds, one has to wonder if the father could not be the person who ordered the execution we've witnessed. In this short, Dumesnil observes the nervous attitude of a man who has become so unable to communicate with his environments that he was able to bring his family to a hiking trip, just to be able to witness a murder.

In his first feature-length documentary film, Adventures Into Digital Comics (2006), Dumesnil continued to explore the theme. The film discusses the failure of the comic book industry to communicate with an audience in the US in the mid-90s to mid-2000s and how some artists who had nowhere to go because of ashrinking market, chose to go on the Internet to showcase unique works in the hope to discover a brand new way to distribute original artistic content. The film featured many comic book and webcomic writers and artists and showcased the work of artists from around the world. The film was nominated in the Best Documentary Film category at the Tel Aviv Icon Film Festival. Dumesnil wrote, co-produced, directed and co-edited the film. Dumesnil sees the film as a vast discussion not just on the topics of comics on the net, but the change that the new Internet economics brought to the way art is now created and distributed.

The same year, Dumesnil co-produced and edited the music video Every Thought for Phil N' Fresco. The R 'n B song tells the story of a struggling artists who tries to persuade his girlfriend he can make it as a singer.

In 2007, Dumesnil edited a short companion piece to Adventures Into Digital Comics, Vault of Comics. The film, put together from cut scenes, focuses on the various steps necessary to create a comic book, from writing to editing. The film was distributed directly online via Dumesnil's previous site, www.toptwothreefilms.com.

As a result of the thought process behind the creation of Adventures Into Digital Comics, Dumesnil creates Futureal Studio, a brand new production company in late 2007. A firm believer in digital distribution and digital cinema, Dumesnil launches www.futurealstudio.com, the portal of Futureal Online. The goal of Futureal Online is to distribute Adventures Into Digital Comicsas an interactive feature on the site. Visitors will get access to a large amount of original content surrounding and film and the making of the film. Dumesnil is also developping new franchises he wants to bring directly to the Internet.

Dumesnil is currently writing his second feature. He lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, Marie, and son, Alex.