‘An object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.’ Sir Isaac Newton quite possibly was foreshadowing the fate of Lea Sabban, aka, LeaMotion on Instagram. In just 7 years, Lea has become one of the most sought after, and influential digital content creators in VFX – and on Instagram, amassing over 124,00 followers and attracting celebrity global corporate clients from every corner of the world.

But just 7 years ago, Lea was working an ordinary job, living the 9-to-5. Until one day at work, Lea was in the break room getting some water, and got an idea.

“Our company always stocked the fridge with this brand of water called ‘Hint.’ And it gave me an idea. So I brought some home and made a stop motion video with them. On a whim, I decided to send it to the brand just to see what might happen. Well they responded! Coincidentally they were going to be in NYC doing an event and asked if I would like to come.”

And that’s how it started. The force that set Lea in motion.

“I went to the event and met the brand manager from Hint and he told me there was someone there I should meet – none other than Sam Sheffer of YouTube and social media fame! He introduced me to Sam telling him, ‘you’re going to love what Lea’s doing!’ So we decided then and there to do some kind of collab where I would create some VFX for him. It was that fateful meeting that got things started! Sam and I did four videos together and he posted them to his account, which gave me instant visibility to all of his followers. But then I couldn’t believe what happened next.”

Born in France and currently living in New York City with her family, Lea considers herself a video technique addict, and for as long as she can remember, she’s had a strong passion for anything video-related: stop motion, cinemagraph, green screen, object levitation, you name it. So here she was, on the threshold of what felt like the beginning of something new, when something ‘strange happened.’

“Two weeks after Sam posted my video, I got an email from Will Smith’s manager! He was launching his own water brand, he had seen my work and loved the levitating effects I had done and wanted that same effect for his brand launch! I thought the email was fake, but it was very real!”

“But it gets better. When I completed the video, I thought the brand was just going to post it to their channel. But Will Smith posted it to his personal feed and tagged me! I immediately racked up five thousand new followers overnight, and suddenly, job requests were coming in from everywhere! It got so busy so quickly, I decided to start my own production company on the side. I was doing work for Broadway shows, Foot Locker promotions, and videos for Reese Witherspoon! It was surreal!”

“Fast forward to last year; I decided to change formats. I realized that one thing that drove my creative passion was the desire to learn new things. If you tell me I can do an effect with a single click, I’m not interested. I want to dive deep and explore. I had been working primarily in Adobe Premiere and After Effects, but I decided I wanted to learn Blender and 3D modeling. With Blender, I’m just a beginner so I’m still learning. But one thing I learned very quickly was, using a MacBook Pro, even the smallest renders took forever, and my system was constantly freezing up. I started to learn the limitations of my MacBook. And that’s where Puget Systems came in. I have a lot of friends who are working with Blender, and they immediately recommended Puget Systems.”

Puget Systems: Guiding the Way

“I don’t want to have to think about the hardware. And the great thing for me about Puget Systems is that I don’t have to be a hardware expert. They took care of everything. And installation was fast and easy – which I was nervous about because I’ve been a Mac person all my life, I’d never used a PC before!

DJ Bailey from Puget Systems took the call from Lea. As a Subject Matter Expert at Puget System, DJ brings deep experience and perspective to these types of situations, so when Lea reached out, he knew what to do! DJ recalls the conversation:

“Lea came to us as a long-time MacOS user, and for her work in Post Production and VFX using Premiere Pro and After Effects, this was fine. However, Lea was at a point in her career where she wanted to start exploring 3D design, as well as all the AI tools being made available in a whole bunch of different contexts.”

Unfortunately for Lea’s situation, both of these use cases were poorly suited to her Mac. Taking her current use case into consideration, along with the new workflows she wanted to start immersing herself in, an idea of what sort of system would be best suited to her needs was already starting to formulate in DJ’s head.

“She would need a strong graphics card both for good rendering performance in 3D design, but also for the unknown variety of AI applications she wanted to test. Due to the complexity of some of her After Effects compositions, as well as the reality that Lea would likely need to multitask on her system at times and have multiple applications operating simultaneously, I also wanted to make sure she had plenty of system memory, so we opted for 128GB.”

Lastly, the platform choice itself (the motherboard and CPU) needed to be made. This was a tough decision, with merits from several platforms shining, depending on the workflow being considered. At the end of the day, the Intel Core i9 14900K and a Z790 motherboard won out.”

“The standout considerations for selecting this platform were twofold. First, with Lea’s work in Premiere and After Effects still being a primary consideration, Intel’s Quick Sync feature, and the improvements it affords to encoding and decoding performance, could not be ignored. And second, the 14900K offers a great balance of uncompromising clock speed, while still touting 8 full performance cores, and 16 additional efficiency cores to assist with multi-threaded tasks that are more effectively parallelized.”

And with that, Lea’s new Puget Systems workstation was finalized!

The New Configuration Powering LeaMotion

Realizing the Dream!

“In January of this year, I quit my full-time job so I could put 100% of my focus on creating! And now I’m teaching – my goal is to create a full video course designed to teach people like me: people who may have kids, or a full-time job, but want to pursue their creative passions! Many people tell themselves they can’t do it, but I want to be the inspiration that tells them they absolutely can!”

“I learned so much on my creative journey, like how to do an entire project from A to Z, how to choose the proper gear and software.”

“I never did this for the money. Creating makes me happy! The passion is what drove me. And I learned that when you have this kind of passion, you never run out of ideas. And I want to pass that along through my experiences and sharing my knowledge through teaching.”

In fact, Lea is soon launching an online filmmaking course where she will share her experience on how to transform a passion for filmmaking into a thriving career.

To learn more about Lea and her work, please visit her website or follow her on Instagram to see her creativity in motion!

For more information on Puget Systems and our Recommended Systems for 3D Animation, Adobe Premiere, and After Effects, check out our workflow-based solutions.

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