Balenciaga & Quantic Dream
Balenciaga’s Fall 21 campaign
Overview.
Quantic Dream, the French video game developer, commissioned MPC to create a fully CG short film to showcase Balenciaga’s Fall 2021 collection. Following the success of the house’s ‘Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow’ video game, Balenciaga had approached Quantic Dream as they wanted a particular genre and game stylisation to this “Dream Factory film”. Balenciaga referenced the “twenty-tens” gaming era (The last of us, Tomb Raider, and particularly the Quantic Dream 2013 hit title Beyond Two Souls). They wanted to recreate a film that evoked the same feelings and tonality of past classic interactive gaming.
MPC used full VFX and CG to bring this epic feature to life. 2D lead Jake Nelson said: “MPC is used to creating photorealism, so it was a creative challenge to develop this twenty-tens game-quality render and stylisation. We all learned a lot in the process.”
The team also relied on motion capture to create animated versions of real-life people.
Separately, as part of the brands global marketing drive, MPC worked closely with Balenciaga to create a series of dynamic and vibrant marketing stills that were used as the prelude to the main film. Motion Design Creative Director Ryan Hays said: “Utilizing the strength of real-time rendering we were able to quickly compose the stills and render out high resolution assets ready to be rolled out on all of the Balenciaga social platforms. These visuals helped drive the exposure of both the upcoming Fall 21 collection but also give a glimpse into the virtual world that is ‘Afterworld’.
The film and marketing stills debuted on the Balenciaga website and social media channels in June 2021 as part of an integrated campaign. In the first week of launch the film racked up over 60k views on Youtube, and garnered widespread acclaim across the fashion press.
3D Supervisors: Dominic Alderson, Andy Steele & David Bryan
2D Creative Director: Marcus Dryden
2D Supervisor: Jake Nelson
Design Creative Director: Ryan Jefferson Hays
Executive Producer: James Niklasson
VFX Producer of FA21 film: Jaz Rongokea
VFX Coordinators: Henrietta Frost and Jamie Hughes
Modeller: Silvia Bartoli
Riggers: Amar Chundavadra, Maximilian Mallmann
FX Artists: Arnau Gilabert, Justin Braun, Alessandro Granella
Colourist: Matthieu Toullet
Compositors: Emma Tyler, Pavel Vicik and Mithun Jacob Alex
Motion Designer: Kerim Camdzic
Stills Producers: Saskia Delius and Jaz Rongokea
Stills Retoucher: Daniel Brady
Animation Team: Clementine Supiot, Chris Welsby, Andy Reid, Mack Knights
Generalist Team: Kristian Bonne Jensen, Nick Slade, Matias Heker, Fernando Tortosa, Jessie Amadio, William Laban, Kiril Mirkov
MPC Bangalore
Line Producer: Neela Kumuda Parankusham
Production Coordinator: Taruna Sehgal
3D Supervisor: Kunal Sarkar
Head of 2D: Siju Murugan
Supervisor: Silambarasan R P
Comp Lead: Pratyush Paruchuri
Asset lead: Bibin Balan
Asset Team: Jaspreet Kaur Dua, Palash Ramnaresh Soni, S Shashi Kumar, Sandeep B K, Sandeep Grover, Selva Kumar K, Shreyas Joshi, Ullas Thunga k, Vivek Mayanglambam
Generalist Team: ArtistsAbhinandan Madhu, Gangadhar Durga Molleti, Sairam Vaddamanu
Animators: Srinivas Rao Rella, Shiny Rajan
Rigger: Kuntal Kanti Bera
