After a rather flourishing decade, the beginning of the '90s marked a net decline in the area of animated advertising. Only after about five years did we see a certain infatuation with the genre reappear, thanks to computer graphics and digital special effects. Today France has acquired a certain international reputation on the basis of a handful of very high level companies.

A Sparx imagined city. © Byzance Productions.

The First Wave
The pioneers of the genre are the Duran and Buf companies. The first was created in 1983, and the second a year later. Buf Compagnie emerged from Buffin Seydoux Computer Animation, whose original objectives were to create a complete 3D program (modeler, animation, rendering) and produce computer generated films for television and advertising. It was renamed Buf Compagnie in 1990. The two companies developed and diversified bit by bit as they both introduced departments dedicated to special effects for feature films.

Duran diversified into music videos, narratives, documentaries, video games and Internet sites as well. In the past 15 years, Duran has edited and completed special effects for nearly 1,500 advertising spots in a variety of different styles ranging from creating the most realistic universe ("Levis" by Michel Gondry, produced by Midi-Minuit), to the most dreamlike ("Kenzo" by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, produced by Bandits), to the most deliriously comic ("Red Orangina" by Joan Kamitz, produced by Molotov). As for short clips, some 1,200 have proven the talents of Marc Caro, Olivier Kuntzel and Florence Deygas, or Florent Siri, to name only a few. At the same time, the crew has contributed to the making of numerous television broadcasts, including documentaries and magazine shows, game shows and talk shows, of which the first, Tele Liberation, was commissioned by Canal+. Since then it is rare to find a channel that has not used their services for interstitials. Quite recently the people who created Skinner Box teamed up with them to create some new video games and the software programs on which to run them.

MacGuff Ligne CGI imagery in Alice in Digital Land, directed by Pascal Roulin. © 1998 by Kitakyushu Multimedia Dome/Dentsu/Dentsu Tec/MacGuff Ligne/De Pinxi/Pascavision. All rights reserved.

For their part, Buf Compagnie has chosen to limit its activities to the three areas of advertising, special effects for feature movies and television interstitials. Thanks to the teaming up of graphic artists and engineers, the company has applied itself to adapting technology to the artistic desires of directors. To these ends, all the programs necessary for the creation of a film, from rendering to shading, through modeling, motion and 2D painting, were developed without forgetting the necessary interfaces between 3D tools and Softimage.

The public and professional success of the feature City of Lost Children by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro led John Dykstra, supervisor of special effects for Batman and Robin to contact the company. For the first time a French business contributed 56 effects sequences to an American production, among them the love powder, magic grains and freezing of the town sequences. This experience incited Buf to open a unit in Los Angeles, which since then has worked on various local projects for advertising and feature films.