The Mill collaborated with director Jan Wentz and Open agency for Peugeot's latest campaign 'Outwit the City'. In this spot, to highlight the driving experience of this city vehicle, along with its technological assets, our team transformed the town to include chess references. The challenge was maintaining a realistic look while allowing the public to recognize all the chess game references: the buildings in the shape of pawns, the sculpture of a horse, the queen with a lion's head, and the brand's emblem, a successful visual metaphor made by our artist's thanks to the CG work combined with the flame.
For this film, we had to compose between scenes shot live in the streets of Barcelona and other scenes shot on a green screen, especially all the shots inside the car. My role in the flame was to homogenize all the shots to obtain a natural and coherent result. It was a pleasure to collaborate with director Jan Wentz, Eric Pierre, executive creative director (Quad), Florence Delforge, TV Producer (Agence OPEn) and of course, my colleagues from The Mill Paris.
Alexis Baillia, flame artist
Alongside Laurent Creusot, VFX supervisor on the project, I attended the filming in Barcelona to collect all the technical information needed for the rest of the project: camera axes, lights, HDRI, etc. Once the filming was finished, our CG team took care of making all the visual references to chess in the city. The main challenge was representing the buildings in the shape of chess pieces. They had to be designed in a way that was not too eccentric and yet easily associated with a chess piece. This mix of realism and fantasy was not easy to assess, but through research, we produced buildings that we could see on the streets of Barcelona, both modern and with a strong architectural style. For the main piece, the queen, we changed the design of the pawn to include a lion's head to echo the Peugeot logo.
Guillaume Dadaglio, CG Supervisor