Fashion illustrator/artist Robert Wagt doesn’t do animation but when his work for Alize’s print campaign was sent to Thought Agency and PURE ( New York) as reference, PURE’s creative director Aaron King thought: why not bring Wagt’s characters to life? This wasn’t easy as Wagt’s signature is languid, pencil-thin characters, collaged from bits and pieces of photographs. That didn’t stop King.

PURE came up with a simple and compelling scenario: focus on a woman (whom they dubbed " Lady Bleu ") as she embarks on a night out, first primping, then going to a series of bars where a bevy of beaus offer her Alize. Not only would PURE need to mimic Wagt’s 2D photographic collages in 3D space, but they were faced with the trick of placing the characters as reflections on the distinctive Alize bottles.

"The idea was to keep the characters paper-doll-like," says PURE director of animation Michael Wharton. "It was very important to maintain Wagt’s cut-paper collage feel." With freelance technical director Alex Arce, Wharton brainstormed how to pull it off. They decided that Lady Bleu should be treated in traditional 3D style, modeling her elongated body in Softimage XSI. The other characters were cheated as 2.5 D in a way that adhered to Wagt’s aesthetic: they were layered with an array of small, flat 2D disks. "It’s as if all these disks were paper, with the texture of artwork on them, like a collage," Wharton explains. Arce created a way to orient the paper-like disks to the 3D camera, which gave them 40-degrees of play in a fully 3D environment.

Broadway choreographer Peter Gregus worked with King to design the steps for the entire commercial, a kind of dance across a row of Alize bottles. They then videotaped the routine from front and side views, making certain that the choreography stayed within the 40-degree viewing angle. The resulting video was used as a template for rotoscoping the animation. "We used it only for reference," explains Wharton, who says he, Arce and Jason Goodman animated. "Rotoscoping in 3D is an art in itself, and it helped us push for a more elegant feel. Seventy percent of what you see on screen was a pretty accurate rotoscope- the rest was artistic license."

The resulting animation- which took two months to complete- was warped and texture-wrapped around the Alize 3D bottles, also built in XSI. "This is where we took the illustrator’s vision in a different direction," says Wharton. "He’d never warped his characters, and we displayed them as reflected on bottles." The ultimate validation: Wharton says Wagt loved the result.