Marie claire deck final

MARIE CLAIRE

SWO O N N E W YO R K

ASPIRATION + INSPIRATION For decades we’ve made the worlds of fashion and art inaccessible, exclusive, secluded, difficult to understand… for a reason. Distance created a perception of a surreal, dreamlike world that everyone wanted to become part of. It was aspirational.

But it was also hard to get and it eventually lost steam when women gained access and equal rights in full.

Today’s woman has a very different approach. She doesn’t want to live in a different reality to look and feel good, removed from others. Instead, she wants to be playful with her day-to-day reality and turn it into a warmer and more exciting experience.

Fashion is a vehicle to express herself on how she’s feeling that day. And through personal style she can give a seemingly dull experience a new life, a new form nobody would have thought of. Fashion is now inspirational.

Marie Claire’s woman represents that high-fashion aspirational model, yet very approachable inspirational woman. I want to explore that dichotomy and contrast with her and through the eyes of your fashion director. These two videos will give us an opportunity to explore both worlds, steering away from the cliche low-production quality questionnaire video and introducing Maire Claire’s high-fashion modern woman: aspirational, but also very relatable, inspirational and fun.

Ramon J. Goni Swoon New York, July 2015

THE CONCEPT

I envision this series as a slightly more stylized version of how many magazines approach this kind of interviews (from Vogue’s 73 questions to Bazaar’s The Look - Inside the Closet of…).

The goal is to elevate the fashion and style component of the interview through the cinematography and the locations we’ll film, also showing the fashion looks in action, not just at somebody’s house. Our talent will wear them for us.

IN THE CLOSET

Zanna Roberts Rassi will step into our interviewee’s closet, pick a few looks for her and prop them up with some accessories, makeup and style. We’ll give our interviewee the total Marie Claire look. And while we’re doing that we’ll get to know the stories behind the places, people and moments the chosen dresses were worn for and the little tricks to make these looks shine. We want to learn more about these women through the choices they make. Their choice is their talent, also in fashion and style. And through their choices and with Zenna’s help they’ll provide inspirations to your audience on what to do in their daily lives.

S T R E E T FA S H I O N

In the second part of the video or maybe intercut while we speak about each garment, we’ll get to see the looks (3-4) in motion, on the street. Many creative people find inspiration in going outside their space and observing the world around them. Then they choose what to do about it and they express themselves in that world through their style. While we’ll start in the interviewees house, we’ll also take it to the surrounding area, their familiar places they go to every morning before going to work, the little corner in the park next door they like to go to read a book over the weekend, etc.

You can get a sense of what those day-to-day scenes look like in the film I directed for Glamour magazine’s branding campaign. However, this time I’d like to make the pace slightly more cinematic, more along the lines of this commercial with Zooey Deschanel.

I would also like the pace and the format to be a bit different when showcasing the fashion, particularly when on the street filming the 3-4 looks. While the music and the energy can still be very upbeat, we’ll also create moments of relative stillness. The slow motion split-screen portrait format (see reference here) will help us show not only the detail of the accessories and our interviewees personality and facial features, but also a full head-to-toe look next to it. This series (still in post-production) I directed recently with a new blogger in Los Angeles shows very well those moments.

Reference: Cotton Zoey Deschanel

C I N E M ATO G R A P H Y + L I G H T I N G In the first part we show our interviewees house, she interacts with Zanna and she gets ready for her closeup. This part needs to be very approachable and simple, but beautifully framed and naturally lit.

Reference: Lucy Chadwick for Zara, A Selby Film

C I N E M ATO G R A P H Y + L I G H T I N G In the second part, we’re creating portraits with natural light, reflections, shooting through objects with long lenses, and a soft but vivid color palette which will provide the warmth, proximity and energy. We’ll also use the split-screen, vertical shooting technique.

The locations near the talent’s house will be fundamental to create a very New York urban feeling for the videos. This part needs to feel more like a fashion shoot, but not too much so we’ll keep our talent’s personality very present in the way we film her, making her smile and do things she would do in her dayto-day not forcing her to pose uncomfortably.

STYLE The purpose behind the our talent’s style will be to show some of their secrets by putting focus on their personal style throughout their daily routine, but also revealing what that style tells about them.

Each subject will express themselves through this elevated ‘street-style’, with the help of Zanna, which will further show the audience how the subjects everyday environments play a role in their personal fashion and how this relates to their creative process.

Whatever the subject is doing; whether it’s getting coffee in the morning or going on a date or taking their dog for a walk, their clothing choices play an important role in these routines, in their daily lives, and as individuals. His or her elevated personal style will also serve to further highlight that Marie Claire is not just a magazine on a newsstand doing the typical videos everyone else is doing, but it’s also a place to go for inspiration.

FINAL THOUGHTS I hope you like the way I’ve started to interpret your script. I look forward to speaking with you very soon so we can clarify some of these ideas and develop them further together, particularly the artistic aspects of it.

Very best wishes, Ramon J. Goni Swoon New York, July 2015

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