Catherine Deneuve is a French icon of cinema and haute couture. Even though time has passed, her elegance has remained intact and it is for this reason that Cartier has chosen her to embody its emblematic "Tank" watch.

We had to recreate Catherine Deneuve in 8 shots at 4 periods of her life so 4 different deep fakes. The 4 periods were targeted: at her 20 y.o during the movie "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg", at her 40 y.o in the 80s, at her 49 y.o during the movie "Indochine" and finally at her 54 y.o during "Place Vendôme".

The perception of Catherine Deneuve is a mix of styling, lighting, acting and expressiveness: we had to find the right balance each time. Our main challenge was to combine CG and AI techniques to achieve a realistic result.

In the pre production stage, we worked closely with the production on all the artistic choices, from the casting, to the wigs positioning and the choice of make-up. We were able to test the faces in AI very early on, and to make sometimes complicated choices between physical resemblance and acting similarities.

We chose to do the deepfake with an AI and we fed it with many references but the result did not reach the quality standards we wanted because there were rotations of the face and our reference images were not in high definition. VFX Supervisor: "That's why we developed a specific pipe for this project, where the CG relies on the life generated by the AI to improve its quality, and to take over when it was no longer efficient."