"We wanted to do some comics and thought we would do something noir, but it was too violent," Prada told me in Paris last month.
She rejected his first submission, asking for something more fantasy-like. Jean obliged. The designer liked his nymph and flower landscape so much, she wanted to use it in her collection.
"Journalists are getting more and more difficult," Prada said, commenting on the demand for blockbuster runway collections. "They want to be entertained. You have to tell a story."
After the September runway show was a hit, Prada got back in touch with Jean and asked him to draft a treatment for a short film based on his drawings. She hired a producer, Max Brun, who turned to Lima to direct.
Lima is a conceptual artist and special-effects supervisor for film who has worked on big-budget projects with Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and others, as well as on commercials. Strangely, he never met Prada (they communicated through others and via e-mail) but says he found her ideas appealing because they were so anti-Hollywood.
"I assumed we were looking at 30 seconds or one minute of animation because I have been conditioned to accept that format, based on radio from 70 years ago," he said over breakfast in Beverly Hills recently. "But this was four minutes, and it couldn't be any more or any less."
Prada wanted to use motion-capture technology to create three-dimensional space, but without being imprisoned by photo realism. She asked the animators to tweak the nymph, making her move like a runway model and gesture grandly like a Disney character.
"The film is real and fake, and that is one of my obsessions in my work at the moment," the designer said. "In photographs, there is so much retouching, reality doesn't exist anymore. Perhaps it only exists for people on film."
Lima worked with a dancer at the House of Moves motion capture studio in Marina del Rey to create the movements of the nymph, and animators at Sight Effects in L.A.
"We got photographs of all the accessories and replicated them right down to the color and the texture," he said of the animation process. "On top of that, the shoes and purse and dress had to have the feeling of sketches."
Lima completed the film in two months last winter. "It is a commercial, but it doesn't put the brand in people's faces," he says.
