Citroën C4 Picasso

I use AI every day now. I can use it well because for twenty years I made things the old way, with crews, budgets and a lot of people's time. This film is one of them.

At Havas, as art director, I had an idea for the Citroën C4 Picasso. Its strength was the windscreen, a huge panoramic glass that turned every trip in this French family car into a view. Those were the years when everyone wanted the new flat screens, 4K and billions of colours, so we sold the windscreen like a television. Through it, the sky fills with butterflies, a hot-air balloon, kites and a cloud of balloons, each with its spec on screen, colour and emotion coming at you like a dream, until the camera drops through the glass and finds the car. It had to be a single take.

A single take like that meant joining live action with high-end CGI. The production company proposed a team in Los Angeles that worked for the film industry, and they brought a director of photography who could not leave the city: he was in the middle of shooting a film that later won him an Oscar. The car had to be shipped to Los Angeles as well, because Citroën doesn't sell cars in the United States. Months of meetings, a production budget of several hundred thousand euros, professionals at every stage. Everything was in place for a great result, and I was thrilled.

The shoot itself was hard. The weather worked against us. That year the temperature was wrong for the butterflies, and even with a specialist breeder on set the poor things moved as if they had been drugged. We filmed hours and hours of balloons, which were later composited in CGI, and the result never quite matched what I had in my head.

Years later, one of my first experiments with Seedance was this same simple idea, made with today's tools. I first rebuilt the keyframes in Seedream 5.0 pro and animated them, then dropped them. The final film starts from the original take, edited with one prompt that removes every caption, relights the whole shot at golden hour and leaves the car untouched. It took a few days.

All the pleasure, the nerves and the stories behind that spot, which marked a moment in my career in advertising, ended up condensed into one prompt. Writing it was cathartic. The result is not perfect, and next to the original it feels a little cold, but ideas that would have stayed in a drawer can now be told faster than anything I have worked with before.

An independent experiment by White Rabbit Hole, not commissioned by, affiliated with or endorsed by Citroën. The original spot is shown for comparison only.