It's rare that a director manages to ingratiate himself with an agency to the extent that he becomes intertwined with a product, but François Vogel's contribution to HP's digital photo campaign has been so essential that he's practically become a part of the brand. A few years ago, when Goodby Silverstein & Partners first approached a handful of directors about a new HP campaign, the relatively unknown Vogel responded with an idea that was too strong to ignore. "François came up with the concept of putting a frame in front of a face or an object and having it turn into a print," says friend and executive producer Claude Letessier. "It was his idea to match the agency's concept."

On the strength of that iconic idea, Paranoid Projects: Tool's Vogel has secured some high-profile boards and has seen his own stock rise exponentially. So when it came time to revive the idea for another batch of spots promoting HP's new digital photo printer, creative director Josh Reynolds says that Vogel was the agency's first and only option. "We realized how magical [the technique] was from the responses we'd gotten within the industry and the general public," he explains. "We knew since we owned the technique, we wanted to use the director who helped us create and craft it, so François was the obvious choice."

But it wasn't just Vogel's previous experience with the campaign that made him a shoo-in for the job. A talented compositor in his own right, the French director had long established a working method that included doing highly sophisticated 'test' runs on his laptop in Adobe AfterEffects. "You can discuss doing an effect [like this] all you want but until you actually see it, you can't truly understand it," Reynolds says. "It's extremely exciting when François opens up his computer. He usually waits until the end of a meeting or a conversation and goes 'Oh well, before we go, I did this little thing' and that's when everyone crowds around his computer."

This new campaign boasts four spots, the first of which ("François 2") sees Vogel reprising a starring role. Consisting of a simple interior shot and a lot of what Reynolds calls "digital trickery", this lead spot (which features Vogel once again playing with frames and snapping pictures within pictures) was filmed in Paris and is the least complicated of the bunch. The rest, filmed over a five-week period in Argentina last February and scheduled to hit airwaves this autumn, contain variations on the picture frame theme that incorporate a variety of Argentinian elements, such as a local café and Patagonia's singular backdrop. "We wanted to go somewhere that had a good landscape and a city," Vogel says. "There was this neighborhood in Buenos Aires where all the houses were painted in different colors, and we also knew we wanted to shoot in Patagonia."

Once filming wrapped in early March, Vogel took the work to California's Zoic Studios, with whom he liased closely on the first campaign. Once again, his test runs proved invaluable, and opened the door to a new way of working. In an attempt to do as much of the FX work on the fly as possible, Vogel recruited one of his favorite French compositors, François Colou, to come to the shoots and line up all the commercials in AfterEffects. Zoic's creative director Chris Jones says that having those roughs to work on eliminated a lot of compositing guesswork. "Rather than us rebuilding the wheel, we brought the projects here, up-resed his basic ideas and frames and then took care of all the tracking, rotoscoping, final lighting and finessing," he says. "We ran the project this year in a different fashion and it was far more effective."

For Jones, the opportunity to work with a director so well-versed in the post process proved invaluable. "François was able to work out things in his head and be able to test those things prior to getting to the final and the finishing process," he says. "That means you weren't doing a whole lot of experimenting, but you were able to simply focus on making the spots frame-to-frame perfect."

Although Reynolds admits that there was some hand-wringing over whether to continue mining this concept ("we'll have to re-evaluate after this campaign to see whether or not it's going to continue," he says), Letessier is confident that the new spots adhere to the campaign's lofty standards. "I hate to use this word, because it's overused every day in our business, but it's very organic," he says. "In the end, I think everybody perceives something very true, very raw and very simple from these spots. They're not staged, they're not plastic - there's something really honest about them."