Back in 2013 Steven Briand invited us to imagine the exhilarating freedom of stepping out of our daily routine in his physics defying dance short Shunpo. Now the Paris-based writer/director/producer taps into the all-encompassing emotion of the first kiss between two lovers in Plume, his elegant short inspired by Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture The Kiss.

As you can see, Briand’s film eschews explanatory narrative mechanisms, instead encapsulating the feeling of time stopping and the world outside of this public moment of intimacy melting away wholly through the visual metaphor of a couple floating in a photorealistic sky.

“I envisioned Plume as a parenthesis in our day. A reminder to breath, love, and dream. I wanted to keep that experience as minimal and simple as possible, to make it feel instantly familiar, without dialogue or backstory. To appeal to the very universal experience of kissing a crush for the first time, and magnify it.”

To achieve the ethereal tone needed for the film dancers and actors Dorine Aguilar and Nicolas Huchard delivered the choreography of their aerial kiss whilst strapped into uncomfortable harnesses, a performance which was later augmented by extensive post work.

“Integrating a floating couple in a photorealistic sky to create a believable image contains many challenges. From erasing the cables on spinning faces and clothes, in broad daylight, with a camera movement, to generating a photorealistic ocean of clouds streaming under their feet, the challenges were multiple. Only a solid post prod house could do that, and Mikros MPC Advertising accepted the challenge.”

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