Cedric Lazerges (left) and photographer Julian de Hauteclocque Howe in front of the photo Crystal, Love and Fire, shot inside the Mexico Pavilion. Yong Kai / for China Daily

When Cedric Lazerges first laid eyes on the Little Mermaid at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, little did the Frenchman know the statue would ignite his passion and cause many sleepless nights.

During a meeting that followed his visit, the Shanghai-based event and photo shoot producer had a hard time concentrating.

"I probably listened to only half of what they told me," Lazerges says, with an embarrassed laugh, "because I couldn't get the mermaid out of my mind."

The life-size sculpture and Danish icon, inspired by a fairy-tale character of Hans Christian Andersen, was on its first trip outside its native land. That was also the first time since the statue was built in 1913 that it was removed from its perch at Copenhagen's harbor.

The 36-year-old Lazerges, who counts among his clients Louis Vuitton, Chivas Regal and Omega, felt compelled to immortalize what he considered a momentous occasion. The plan he eventually conceived was: Reinterpret the story of The Little Mermaid through a series of 11 photographs shot inside the Danish pavilion.

For this, he and his production team would need special access to the pavilion for an entire night, when the building was closed to the public.

"I was thinking, 'They're never going to give me the pavilion for one night. It's never gonna happen'," Lazerges says.

He was wrong.

Now, a year later, he's preparing for the photos' first exhibition, which is happening in Shanghai this autumn. But instead of 11 photographs, he has 99 in the collection that has come to be called World Fairy Tales.

Since the world was practically in Shanghai for the quinquennial Expo, Lazerges decided to take advantage of his strategic location and work on eight more fairy tales: one each from Canada, Iraq, Mexico, the Pacific Islands, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and China.

"My only criterion was to do one country's fairy tale and pavilion from each region," Lazerges says in his usual animated manner.

Three of the photos in the collection - The Sisters of Avalon (Britain), Crystal, Love and Fire (Mexico) and Sister from The Little Mermaid series - are hanging in Lazerges' office in Shanghai's French Concession.

At first glance, the photographs look like watercolor and oil paintings - the handiwork of Shanghai-based French photographer Julian de Hauteclocque Howe.

During postproduction, he digitally added more elements to the photos, printed them on rice paper and then added the final touches with a paintbrush.

"There are certain things that I like to do on the actual print," De Hauteclocque Howe says.

"Like for the Little Mermaid, some of the scales on her skin were golden. So afterwards, I went with some gold paint to reinforce that."

But the project's biggest challenges, the organizers say, occurred during production. One was last-minute replacements for scissors and aerosol hairsprays, which were confiscated at the Expo Village gates. Another was coaching models to temporarily become actors for the photo shoots as well as shooting with the sobering knowledge that they had only one or two chances inside each pavilion.

"During the daytime, you have so many people visiting the pavilions ... so we could only do our photographs and videos at night," Lazerges says.

"And then we needed to shoot all night, sometimes until 2, sometimes around 4, 4:30, 5 and quite often until 9 in the morning."

De Hauteclocque Howe, meanwhile, had to play both photographer and motivator to dozens of team members, including models, makeup artists and stylists.

"You have to keep everybody going," the fashion and ad photographer says.

"They're constantly asking themselves, 'What am I doing? It's 3 o'clock in the morning, I'm at the Expo'."

Despite the difficulties, Lazerges is so happy with the results he might do something similar at the next Expo in Milan, Italy. But he's not sure he'll be able to convince De Hauteclocque Howe - who worked pro bono along with everyone else - to sign up again.

"It's an exhausting project," Lazerges says.

"That's one of the most crazy projects I've ever done in my life."

China Daily