Behind The Moving Image

Behind The Moving Image | How our Mill Paris artists animated the two iconic characters of the Louis Vuitton Holiday campaign.

Explore an enchanted world that comes alive with a behind-the-scenes look at our Louis Vuitton Holiday campaign! In close collaboration with Director Gary Freedman (La Pac), our artists in Mill Paris created a Christmas fairytale. In this charming and positive story, we are all immersed in a romantic comedy between two iconic characters of the brand.

The Louis Vuitton Christmas film was a challenging project both for its story and for the CG work. From the beginning, we knew that the organisation would have to be impeccable so that all departments had a clear understanding of our objectives and could work in parallel on the 60+ we had to create.

During the shoot, Supervisors Alain Boutillier and David Roubah scanned all the models and sets that had been made in order to be able to create our various 3D scenes as quickly as possible (CG sets, camera tracking, conformation of character scales by environment and the animation of these), all in parallel with editing. With the timing being tight, we had to work on everything simultaneously, which was the biggest challenge.

The characters were recreated following the classic steps of construction, but with a solid base from our scans made during the shooting: modelers recreated the characters in a clean way, thinking about the constraints of animation, the rigging artists made the skeleton and the manipulation tools which are then used by the animators who add all the acting and give life to the characters, while we worked on the materials, hairs and textures.

The goal was to stay as close as possible to the models of the characters of the brand, with adding a few details to make them even more credible and endearing in their new environments. This was done by playing with materials of Vivienne – the shades of the Bear’s fur or even their poses and eye contact.