Brief
Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia asked TheMill/MPC to solve a creative challenge: to ‘clone’ artist Eliza Douglas so she was wearing every look for Balenciaga’s SP22 launch. Rather than adopting a one size fits all solution for the film, we utilized multiple techniques divided amongst our global team of artists.
Approach
To create the clones – the methods used ranged from – ‘deep fake’ – AI/machine learning, a real-time games engine, and traditional brute force VFX. During the shoot, our teams captured photogrammetry of Eliza’s face and oversaw a variety of in-situ plates to extract her face and transpose it onto the body doubles shot on the catwalk. We also used a CG scan of Eliza’s head and on set photo reference to build a proxy Eliza head to help visualize the face replacements. This allowed our compositing team to study and analyze each shot, each face to define the best process to achieve the highest-quality clone.
Impact
This project marked our third collaboration with Balenciaga following the Summer 21 Pre-collection video directed by Walter Stern, and the Winter 20 collection video which saw The Mill/MPC create colossal cinematic visuals for the brand’s Paris Fashion Week show.