Audrey Hepburn Advert
Described by Framestore’s VFX Supervisor, William Bartlett, as being “very much on the edge of what’s possible”, Framestore has used pioneering VFX techniques to bring the benchmark of beauty, Audrey HepburnTM, back to the screen, with every shot of the icon in this campaign for AMV BBDO and Galaxy / Dove chocolate entailing full CG face replacement. The project also saw Framestore reunited with Rattling Stick director, Daniel Kleinman, after collaborating on Skyfall’s stunning opening sequence.
The process started with an exhaustive search for the perfect Audrey HepburnTM double. The hope was to find someone who could give Kleinman the performance that he needed, and ideally to share as many of her features and characteristics as possible. Framestore then completed a round of extensive pre-shoot facial scanning at its in-house Capture Lab in order to deliver the complexities demanded by this project. This included a FACS (facial action coding system) session that allowed the team to record more than 70 possible muscle movements and capture high resolution textures for building their CG Audrey.
Once this groundwork had been completed, the shoot then took place at various locations along Italy’s Amalfi coast. VFX Supervisors, William Bartlett and Simon French, were both on location alongside key members of the Capture Lab team to make sure all necessary tracking and lighting data was collected. Witness cameras were used to cover action from multiple angles allowing the team to obtain an absolutely perfect track of the actress's face.
After the shoot, Framestore set about building a facial rig using the FACS head scans as reference for the multitude of shapes the human face can achieve. For each of these shapes, combinations had to be carefully created to allow the face to blend convincingly between expressions during the animation process, which was pivotal to authentically reconstructing the actress’s face. Facial scanning usually...