Damien Villière: Up, Up and Away
There’s big. And then there’s really, really big.
When creative director Frédéric Bault of French ad agency Euro RSCG hired multimedia artist Damien Villière to design the introduction of the Airbus 380, the assignment was clear: The A380 is the largest commercial airplane in the world. Its unveiling represents a significant coup in Airbus’ ongoing rivalry against Boeing. “As Europeans, we’re proud of our homegrown aviation technology,” says Villière.
So make it really, really big.
Villière is known in European advertising circles as the go-to guy for spectacular events, a specialty he first learned through working with Bault. They even employ Paris landmarks to ensure their happenings make a suitably grand impression: the Eiffel Tower for the Rugby World Cup, the Assemblée Nationale for the anniversary of D-Day, the Champs Elysées for the launch of Citroen’s new showroom.
For Citroen, Villière actually calculated how to divert the trajectory of the Eiffel Tower’s spotlight so it would illuminate the luxury showroom on every rotation. He climbed the tower at night to take photos, overlaid the images on his SketchUp model of the building, then used Photoshop to render the exact lighting effect.
J’adore Cette Machine
Villière’s work puts the “multi” in multimedia. A graduate of France’s prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, he’s proficient in sculpture, architecture and graphic design. A typical Villière project blends art, architecture, photography, animation and 3D modeling, all seasoned with a soupçon of whimsy.
He frequently designs gigantic live events like the Airbus introduction as well as inventive exhibitions and large-format displays. He’s a master of what the French call scénographie; like a film director, he conceives the look, staging, construction and production of multimedia happenings for his corporate and non-profit clients.
From concept to execution, every Villière project springs from his Mac. As he puts it, “Je passe ma vie devant mon Mac. Tout est centralisé — c’est ce que j’adore avec cette machine.” (“I spend my life in front of my Mac. What I love about this machine is the way everything is centralized.”) For someone who’s ever hopping between art forms, media and applications, the Mac uniquely suits. “With the Mac,” he says, “there are no constraints to what I can design.”
On a Massive Scale
The ceremony for the introduction of the bi-level, up-to-850-passenger Airbus 380 attracted a heap of attention. An audience of 5,000 VIPs gathered in a vast Toulouse warehouse (none of its existing facilities were large enough, so Airbus built a new assembly hall to accommodate the 380). TV newscasters swarmed to cover the four European heads of state — French President Jacques Chirac, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero — who lent their ministerial dignity to the affair.
“It’s important to try to appreciate the sheer scale of this show,” says Villière with a half-bewildered laugh. “Everything on stage was on the same huge scale as the airplane itself.”
Villière’s scénographie featured singers, dancers and, in keeping with the magnitude of the jet, massive renditions of ordinary household objects. A tome eight meters high by ten meters wide opened to reveal picture book illustrations that in fact were projected images. But the heartbeat of the show was his flying machine.
Flying Machine
To fulfill his assignment to represent the idea of flight, Villière designed a fantastical flying machine that could have sprung from the mind of a deliciously crazed inventor like Jules Verne (or, for that matter, Leonardo da Vinci). The multi-part contraption looked futuristic even as it paid homage to the first airplanes. It had old-fashioned rotating propellers and semi-transparent bat- and bird-like wings lit from within as they flapped dramatically. Suspended from the ceiling, the 14-meter wood, plastic and steel machine delighted the audience with its whirring animated parts and storybook charm.
Behind it Villière projected in HD gigantic clouds, airplanes and washes of sky-blue color. Not satisfied with the quality of traditional video projection, he created the images on his Mac, printed them on high-res film and used a powerful analog projector to display them on a screen 80 meters wide by 20 meters high. The large-format PIGI projection technique is an update of the original 17th-century “lanterne magique.”
“The goal of the flying machine and the projections,” says Villière, “was to build these really strong images before we showed the actual plane. Everything was too big, to go with the biggest airplane in the world.”
When the moment arrived, three children pulled a rope; a giant curtain, held in place by electromagnets, fell with an impressive swoosh to reveal the behemoth A380.
