The moving spot follows as a young woman as she narrates her personal make-up journey, arriving at the ultimate reasons why it is so special to her. 

Running alongside her thought-provoking narrative, viewers watch as the woman walks through a landscape of changing seasons. The grass begins in rich in shades of green while flowers transition into full-bloom, a clever and eloquent representation of the woman’s own feelings at each stage of her relationship with make-up, and a contarst to the stark autumnal tree that she arrives at towards the end of the spot.

The final frame then reveals a strikingly beautiful moment as the leaves of the symbolic oak tree seemingly float up from the ground and return to the bare branches in an array of striking autumnal colours.

Mill Colourist James Bamford comments; “We had lengthy chats with Jeff Labbe about how the direction should go with the grade in order to maintain the narrative visually through every element.

Our biggest focus was really bringing out the contrasting dormant-feel of autumn, pushing back the greens as the spot developed. We wanted to keep the look as cinematic as possible, and really played with the printed film visual. We added a grain to give it texture and maintain the desired feel throughout.

Another challenge was to maintain the color of the leaves, particularly in the final wide frame. The tree, in reality, was not in autumn and so we manipulated a lot of the colors to reflect those emotive autumnal shades whilst also using a lot of support in flame to get the right look to the shot.

The 8mm cutaways were also another collaborative idea with Jeff Labbe; he wanted to contrast the soft focus of the running film with moments that felt like they were from another world.”