MIKROS MPC COLLABORATES WITH PERRIER® TO CREATE THE NEW CHAPTER IN ITS FAMOUS ADVERTISING SAGA

PERRIER® is a perpetual global brand leader with a history over 150 years old. Creativity is core to the brand’s essence and PERRIER® is used to collaborating with international artists on its ads. Reinventing the brand’s historic signature “Water, Air, Life”, ‘Heat’ marks a dramatic comeback in the epic new campaign from Ogilvy Paris and Mikros MPC.

Directed by world-renowned director Cary Joji Fukunaga (Gang Films), ‘Heat’ by PERRIER® is an allegory that illustrates the brand’s thirst for life and its historic view on the strength of females. In ‘The Heat’, the protagonist represents strength and intelligence as an all-conquering icon within an overheating world. The epic story includes a wake-up call to life created by the iconic sonic of Perrier echoing across a deserted town. As she is pursued in a wild chase, she overcomes numerous obstacles to protect the water that is keeping her alive, embodying a solution for the future by revealing that she bears life.

The exciting new 2020 chapter draws on the creative and artistic codes of the brand, expressing the latest pop-culture and entertainment trends with a modern but also elegant and glamorous approach. Cary Joji Fukunaga and DOP Phedon Papamichael take the viewer to an unusual yet familiar atmosphere, where the heat is unquestionable. ‘Heat’ is a visual tribute to the spaghetti western genre and juxtapose it within the arid urban environment of a timeless city. This creative brief bears all the challenges that were given to the teams at Mikros MPC.

Key challenges included lighting and color grading to render the extremely dry and warm climate, which led to this unique orange tint. The sequences that took place within in the multi-level garage were especially challenging with the Mikros MPC team needing to render the impression of heat and sweat by working on the sunlight reflections from walls, floor and ceiling where the intensity and direction were impacted by the architecture of the building and camera movements.

“This project was one of a kind,” mentions Franck Lambertz, VFX Supervisor who was present on the live shooting. “Besides the thorough work on the look, we had a lot of work to do on the environments. Shot in Athens, there was a huge challenge in post-production to magnify the city in a consistent way that would meet the initial creative intention. We inserted some references to Paris and added unlikely elements on the building fronts. For all the sequences that were shot in the ground floor of a building on blue screen, we had to create depth, particularly for the last one in which the actress is running and jumping on the outer edge of the building up to the antenna pole. In the end, I think only one shot has not required VFX work.”

This called for a huge team work on rotoscoping, on flame to isolate every component of the movie that required the involvement of three flame artists working in parallel to craft each shot, but also on compositing.

Stephane Pivron, VFX Supervisor, conducted on-location scouting photoshoots and data capture to obtain references of the exact places that inspired the 70’s look of the Paris components. He comments:

“Given the location of the studio in the centre of Paris, I was quite lucky because I found everything I needed in a very close surrounding. We’ve inserted some references of our neighboring The Centre Pompidou and Haussmanian style buildings. We still had to create the set extensions with matte painting to ensure we could achieve a high level of realism. We are lucky to have amongst our team great experts in matte painting who have a long experience even in feature films.”

Fabrice Damolini, Managing Director of Mikros MPC and Executive Producer on the project, concludes:

“We were extremely happy to renew our collaboration with both Ogilvy and Gang Films on this extraordinary project for Perrier which is one of the most notorious and creative French brands. I am extremely proud of the team cohesion within Mikros MPC and our sister studios in London and Bangalore. We delivered a beautiful work in an extremely tight timeline. Because the live shooting had to be delayed due to the COVID-19 crisis, we had to deliver all the works within three weeks instead of the initial two months planned. This couldn’t be achieved without the involvement and dedication of everyone on this project and seamless communication between all partners.”

‘Heat’ was first aired on TV after the final of Roland Garros tennis tournament on October, 11th and consists in a number of formats from 60 seconds to 6 seconds vignette and has included teasers to respond to the different needs of campaign across TV and digital channels.

If you want to know more, please see below the making-of video: