A lone torch bearer walks into a packed 1900 Olympic stadium, imagined as a modern sports photograph

Paris 1900 — A Self-Initiated Experiment

What if they’d hadNike?

The film

Paris 1900 — 2024

It was the summer of 2024 and, while watching the Paris Olympics, we started digging through Olympic history. That’s when we stumbled onto something we somehow never knew. Women first competed in the modern Olympics in Paris in 1900. And 124 years later, the Olympics had returned to the same city. That got us thinking.

The discovery

women competed in Paris, 1900

1,000+

athletes were there in total

124

years later, the Games returned to the same city

The experiment

What would we have made of them today?

These women competed long before women’s sports had the cultural machinery they have now. No billion-dollar sponsorships. No athlete brands. No Nike films. No giant portraits hanging over Paris.

What if modern sports culture had existed in 1900? So we started making.

Chapter 01

1900 meets 2024.

The experiment became a collision of eras. Period clothing and modern sports photography. Belle Époque Paris and contemporary art direction. Historical research and a healthy amount of fiction. The goal wasn’t to recreate 1900 literally.

Women athletes of the 1900 Paris Olympics marching in delegation uniforms

Portrait of three women swimmers, imagined through a modern athlete-photography lens

A woman runner alone on the track before a crowded grandstand

It was to imagine how we might remember these women if we’d celebrated them then the way we celebrate athletes now.

Chapter 02

Then the tools changed.

The project started as an experiment in AI image-making. But while we were working on it, generative filmmaking was evolving incredibly fast. So the experiment evolved with it. Still images became motion. Motion became sequences. Sequences started becoming films.

An athlete looking out over a floodlit stadium at night

Portrait of an athlete with braids, holding her medal

Each new generation of tools created another question: How real could we make this feel? Not AI-real. Real real.

Chapter 03

No client. No brief. No rules.

Nobody asked us to make this. There was no media plan. No deliverable list. No presentation. No rounds of client feedback. Just an idea we couldn’t shake and a new set of tools that suddenly made it possible to explore.

Women runners mid-race, packed shoulder to shoulder

Paris 1900 became an experiment in history, storytelling, creative direction and emerging technology. But more than anything, it became an exploration of what happens when curiosity comes first — and the tools are allowed to follow.

The experiment covered

HistoryStorytellingCreative DirectionEmerging Technology

A self-initiated GRAND AVE. project

Sometimes the best briefis the one nobody gives you.

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