Seamless transition for Paris a tout prix by photogrammetry

This Gaumont production required 120 VFX shots which were all created by the French studio Plug Effects under the supervision of Laurens Ehrmann.

The movie Paris a tout prix tells the story of Maya, a promising Moroccan stylist living in Paris who discovers she has an expired visa during a police check. Despite being for 20 years in Paris, she is sent back to Morocco 24 hours later. She will have to readapt to a country and a family she wanted to forget. Maya will try whatever it takes to get back her life in Paris, but it is not an easy task for somebody who became an illegal immigrant.

The work consisted in invisible effects. The opening shot of the movie starts showing the Eiffel Tower and the roofs of Paris and continues inside Maya's flat going through her balcony. This long shot was made possible thanks to a CGI seamless transition merging one exterior shot and one interior shot.

The transition

The transition is done when showing the building facade and going through the window. In order to recreate the facade, VFX supervisor Laurens Ehrmann decided to go for photogrammetry and used Enwaii as the main tool for the job. The curtains were animated with Maya cloth.

Using Enwaii for such a job enabled the Plug Effects artists to use together the Enwaii photogrammetry toolkit and the regular modeling toolkit provided inside Maya. For this shot the combination made the reproduction of the curvy shapes of the balcony railing easier.

The final shot

The following video shows the final images created by Plug Effects artists where all is merged in one single shot.

Images courtesy of Gaumont and Plug Effects