FLUX (Concept)

A cosmetics brand film that keeps its shade numbering across layouts

A beauty range film has one job the beautiful version reliably drops: the viewer has to be able to point at the shade they want afterwards. This one indexes them. Every shade is rendered as a liquid sphere with a number and a name set beside it — Bisque, Ember, Verdigris, Onyx — and the number rides with the colour when the arrangement changes, so the shade that is third around the ring is third along the row. That sounds like housekeeping until you have watched a range film where the order quietly changes between plates and a customer cannot map what they saw to what they can buy; at that point the film stops being merchandising and becomes a mood piece with products in it. One place the system relaxes, and it is worth knowing before you brief one: the closing compact keeps the names and drops the numbers.

The film states its line and then earns it, in that order, and the earning is the better half. It opens on a single dark bead of pigment under one specular highlight, and the title card sets its claim over that one bead — a range of twelve shades that is all one liquid. Only after the card clears does the bead break into a ring, and the ring arrives undifferentiated: every sphere still the same near-black, with the colour coming up in them afterwards. So the separation is shown happening rather than presented finished, and the range reads as one material dividing rather than as a set of products lined up. Everything in the piece is that liquid: no powder, no swatch card, no pack shot. What is not in it should be said plainly here, because a beauty buyer will ask on the first call — there is no skin in this film, no face, no hand, and no packaging. It is a range film rather than a wear demonstration, and putting the product on a person is a different production, not a re-render of this one.

The plate to hold us to is the formula plate. It sets four claims in display type across the top of the full shade row — the size of the range, a buildable tier, a wear time, and a formula descriptor — and those are precisely the four lines a retailer’s legal reviewer reads first, because in a real launch each one has to be substantiated before it can go on a carton. The words marking the formula illustrative and the piece a studio concept commission arrive on the closing card instead, so the one frame in this film carrying claims is the one frame with nothing qualifying it. The craft brand film with the materials record does it the other way round and prints its qualifier on the same card as its figures, which is the version to copy: a claims plate is the frame most likely to be lifted out and re-posted on its own, and a label it does not carry cannot travel with it.

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FLUX (Concept) is filed under dtc & e-commerce. Read next: what a product engineer actually does, the rest of the studio's field notes, and a film studio run by an engineer.