WORK / DIRECTION · DESIGN · MOTION / 2016
Paris —
New Year 2016
Arc de Triomphe · Direction & video mapping
Paris — New Year 2016
PROJECT FILM
The project film combines footage of the projection with the mapping visuals.
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THE PROJECT
Paris,
together.
A few days before New Year’s Eve, Auditoire asked me to direct a new projection for the Arc de Triomphe. An extraordinary canvas, at a moment when the message mattered as much as the images.
Paris was coming to the end of a year marked by the terrorist attacks of January and November 2015. The event’s creative direction had been refocused around a united city: a moment of remembrance, friendship between peoples, and an affirmation of Paris’s values of openness, freedom and fraternity.
- Direction
- Raphaël Mechet
- Visual creation & animation
- Raphaël Mechet, Olivier Blaecke & Christophe Rannou
- Production
- FuckYeah!
- Agency
- Auditoire
- Client
- City of Paris
- Special thanks
- Robin Kobrynski, for lending a hand
- Location
- Arc de Triomphe, Paris
- Event
- 31 December 2015 → 1 January 2016
01 / FIVE DAYS
A small team.
An immense canvas.
There were five days to make the film. A very small budget, no opportunity to shoot new footage, and a team to bring together immediately. I called Olivier Blaecke and Christophe Rannou — Oliv and Tof — and we got to work.
We built the sequence from the material available, combining images of Paris, faces and animation designed around the monument. Existing footage became our raw material; the façade gave the composition its scale and structure. Decisions, animation and deliveries followed one another through days and nights that soon blurred together.
02 / IMAGE & ARCHITECTURE
A city on
a monument.
The Arc becomes a frame for the city and the people who give it life. Lines redraw the architecture, stone shifts, Eiffel Towers multiply, and smiling faces meet familiar Parisian landmarks.
These five mapping frames show the images prepared for the façade. The central opening remains black, allowing the monument’s architecture to shape each composition.
Drawing the monument. White lines reveal the structure of the monument.
Moving stone. The upper façade breaks into a sequence of moving blocks.
Paris in motion. A kaleidoscopic composition of Eiffel Towers wraps around the central arch.
Faces of Paris — the Seine. A face and the Seine at night, composed for the shape of the façade.
Faces of Paris — Concorde. A smile, the obelisk and the lights of the Ferris wheel.
03 / AFTER MIDNIGHT
Exhausted.
And there.
We delivered. Seeing those images on the Arc de Triomphe, in front of the New Year crowd, was a privilege — and an enormous relief.
I still see the compromises that come with making a film in five days. I would love to return to that monument with more time to develop what it could become. But the trust, commitment and friendship that carried us through remain among my strongest memories of this work. An exhausting, intense experience I will never forget.
Paris, 1 January 2016, 00:15. With Olivier Blaecke and Christophe Rannou, just after the projection. Five days of work, very little sleep, and finally a moment to breathe.