The commercial Dolce Vita, directed by Bruno Aveillan, was done to introduce the French Gas de France users with the company new positioning and logo. The whole idea of the spot is to associate Gas heating with comfort, simplicity and weightlessness.

The film is divided into three parts: Father and son on a floating sofa made of glass bubbles; a woman dressed with a floating feather coat that makes her fly; a man taking his bath in a floating bubble of water.

We formed three teams of two people who worked one month and a half on each sequence. The compositing was done by three people during one week.

Glass bubbles sequence
Real balls were present as reference in each shot. We had the chance to test the Spheron HDR device on stage. It gave us a 13000 by 5000 pixels HDR map containing 26 f-stops in 20 minutes’ work. We didn’t use so much data of course and after reducing everything a little bit it was very useful to get the right reflections and refractions to match the real balls. Each character was rotoscoped in CG and camera mapped to get the refractions of them inside the balls.

Coat of feathers sequence
For the second part, we wrote software to control particle behaviour around the body and the coat of the girl. Each feather was made of a simple mapped geometry plus hairs to give a soft shading and then was instanced on the particles, which would control the rotation and position of each feather.

Bubble of water
The man was shot in a plexi bath. We started with a single surface around his body. We used realwave to quickly generate uniform wave around this surface. Then we hand-animated lattices deforming the surface to give the global deforming and floating animation. RealWave was also used to simulate the interactions between man and water. We would then output many layers like reflections, refractions, highlights, mattes and composite them together with live action.

Technical details
CG tracking for all the shots: 3D Equalizer, Hubble armchair, white feathers, water: modelling, animation on Softimage XSI, Rendered on Softimage XSI and Mental Ray. Compositing on Inferno, Hardware: Onyx, PC Bipentium 3. Software: Softimage XSI, Inferno, Combustion, Mental Ray.