LIP SYNC Tr eatm ent by Dawn Shadfor th
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THE FILM We open on a tight, super photographic shot of a pretty young woman in her late twenties framed from slightly above her shoulder. She’s wearing no lipstick – the scene shot in a delicate black and white. On our soundtrack we hear the familiar pre chorus hook of Jessie J’s Sexy Lady. “Do it, Use it, Flaunt it, Own it” starts. Then it stops. Then it glitches. It loops and starts again. Something’s not quite right. All is not right with the images of the girl either. She is singing, and we can see that her mouth shape is forming the right words - “Do it, Use it, Flaunt it, Own it”. But her lips don’t move in time with the track, she’s always a few moments out. The visual glitches and skips, It’s as if the music is being played a few seconds faster than our visual.
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THE FILM Cut to a tight shot of our device hovering over the woman’s skin. We see the graphic interface, the button is clicked in and BOOM the shot turns to colour.
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THE FILM (TRANSITION) We cut back out to our original shot - now also in colour. From out of frame a hand sweeps in holding a No7 lipstick. It applies lipstick to our girl but in super fast motion. The song skips back and forth as if a DJ was scratching a vinyl record on a turntable or digital glitch on a CD. The arm sweeps back out. Our DJ lets the record go. Our track whooshes back in, now perfectly in time with the visual - our girl starts singing in perfect sync. “Whooh - That’s right!” she delivers with cool confidence, hitting the synch perfectly. The frame is now beautifully lit and full of colour – her velvet maroon lipstick our main focus against the milky white backdrop.
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BEFORE
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AFTER
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THE FILM CONTINUED Moving swiftly on we cut in tight to an older black girl with an orange toned lipstick set against radiant skin. She performs the tune – eyes closed and quiet, lost in the moment in total confidence. Then: a sassy blonde girl with deep red lipstick set against beautifully pale foundation. She picks up on the backing vocals and says “hey!” to camera. The remaining drums of the track kick in and we meet the rest of our cast, about 10-12 women, more lipstick, sometimes seeing the same woman with a different lipstick, or the same lipstick set against a different skin tone. Each girl brings her own unique character to the performance and interprets the chorus of the song in a different way, from ballsy to quiet, cheeky to sincere, sunny to sexy - they all sing along confidently and in perfect sync.
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THE FILM CONTINUED We stay in very tight on the mouth now. Some delicate hazel lips with a light skin tone suddenly cut to a cool pink against a toffee brown complexion. We begin to flash cut between lots of different lips, maybe even having three different lip colours during the delivery of one word. Really building our intensity and visual impact. The track drops tempo to half speed and one woman moves in slow motion, hair billowing back gloriously. She stays perfectly in sync as she says “sexy lady”. Another woman’s movement is sped up fast motion to the beat as she nods to the music ‘… rock it till its burn in hot”. Again she magically stays in synch. We can do this through a super simple age old music video technique – a method I’ve never seen used in this kind of context before. Our final shot is a woman with a huge smile wearing golden rose lipstick and a beautifully dark complexion cheekily singing the words. Cut to pack shot V/O Sync your lips to match your skin tone, with the new Match Made Lipstick Service from number 7. (music continues underneath at lower volume)
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MY OUTLOOK There is a huge amount of fun we could have with our sync moments. We can play with this central idea of sync to reinforce our core idea. What I’ve found lovely in past music videos is when you cut slightly before a singer begins a verse, just allowing that little moment of extra personality and vibe to creep into a performance. OR sometimes miss a few words, then start the next line with confidence. So, for instance, we don’t always have everyone singing the hook “sexy lady”, we have someone just looking at camera and then starting the next line. It’s this cool confidence in execution and delivery that for me, underlines this idea of being in sync. It has to not try too hard and feel effortless to sell the idea of “synchronicity”. This concept also opens up some awesome opportunities in our edit to be playful and still on point in communicating an idea. This commercial by David Bailey is not only a fantastic reference for framing, which I’ll talk about later, but also has a wonderful tone. It is just a great example of something playful, that’s exploring an idea within a simple set of visual rules. For me it’s tasteful, timeless and visually stunning.
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MATCH MADE SCIENCE In the last commercial for Match Made, we focused our film upon the emotion of how make up made us feel good and gave us the confidence to be who we are. I see this spot as really moving this idea forward, taking apart the building blocks and forming something far more precise but equally as invigorating. The idea of being in sync with our minds and being in tune with ourselves, you could say allows us to really listen to who we are. Sometimes it’s just the right choice of lipstick that grounds us back into our natural rhythm. This is what the Match Made service is helping us do, and this is the emotion we need to capture with our new commercial.
MATCH MADE: THINKING IN SYNC The choices we make on the outside reflect how in tune and in sync we are on the inside. Making the best choices we can gives us the confidence to be who we are meant to be and feel free to really enjoy our lives. For me, this film is all about composure. It’s about listening to yourself and noticing the change in your mind and your appearance. As if everything were linked, it’s about the connections between the music, the performance and the emotional impact of these relationships on our audience. But in essence, it’s all about how it makes us feel.
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SYNC OPTION 2: DIALOGUE An interesting option would be to replace the Jessie J track with some authentic dialogue. Using exactly the same style and technique as our original opening sequence, every word mouthed would be out of sync and would glitch and skip out of time. The feeling at first would be uneasy and confusing. The longer we held on the idea however the more interesting it would become. I love the idea of looping the same piece of dialogue over and over “sync your lips to match your skin tone�, then when our device and lip stick swoop in, our woman delivers the phrase straight to camera in perfect sync. Once we are in colour, there should be a whole range of dialogue with every woman having a different thing to say. We could play with overlapping of sentences, sound design, and even double up voices to really communicate this idea of being in sync. Flash cutting between 4 shades of lip colours and hearing 4 different voices say one or two words, could look and sound pretty amazing.
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SYNC OPTION 2: DIALOGUE In my experience talking about the product directly often sounds insincere and a little forced. I think having our dialogue being loosely about lipstick, and the way it makes us feel would give a far more authentic effect. We could even write some interesting poetry or prose that each woman could learn and perform in a similar way to the Jessie J track. These poems could be about being Match Made, or the feeling of being in sync. As long as we use some lovely similes and rhythmic elements, it would be sure to add a graceful dimension the piece. Our first film option is of course the more obvious choice, however I think there is definitely some fun to be had with this. We could even go as far as creating our own rhythm/music in the way we edit the dialogue together and jump cut between different women’s lips. Layering this up with a few musical elements and creating our own simple composition is something I’d love to explore.
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PERFORMANCE I acknowledge that our last commercial was all about movement and dancing, which was great fun to shoot and worked brilliantly. With this new piece however, I feel we are really pushing the campaign on and taking a different approach with performances. I’d really like to move from a feeling of euphoria, the Match Made feeling, to something far more stripped back and composed. What I love about this is it’s real potential for subtlety and true style, each tiny shift in facial expression totally changing the feel of each scene. For our girls, it’s all about expressing themselves confidently yet subtly. Anything over the top and the idea will misfire, they won’t seem in sync and it will look like karaoke.
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PERFORMANCE Through all my experience in music videos I’ve found there are usually parts of the track that sing well; that give the performer a real space to express emotion and feel, whilst others dictate a more uniform style of performance and actually end up being quite restricting. Therefore it’s important that we choose the perfect section of the track to suit our performance, which I’ll discuss later on. I have also learnt that you really can’t fake this kind of performance, It’s essential the girls actually sing and don’t just lip-synch, you can always tell. I see each woman’s performance being playful, yet composed and packed full of flair. Getting those little moments of joy and flickers of real character is going to be a question of casting the right people. People who are not scared, people who feel music. Our casting process is going to need to be more extensive and I’ll talk about that later. But as we found out before it’s also very much about creating the right atmosphere on set.
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PERFORMANCE Despite this shift in our emotion from our previous spot, we would still be working with a real cast, albeit in a different way. The last thing we want is for our performances to feel forced or stale on the day. These girls need to really be loving every moment if we are going to capture some genuine emotion and create a feeling of free-flowing and natural style. Last time we really did well to form an easygoing and authentic atmosphere. It really is as simple as chatting to people on set, rolling during rehearsal, and just making sure no one feels isolated in front of the camera. All of this natural precision emphasizes the idea of sync in a fun and original way.
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OUT OF SYNC PERFORMANCE There’s lots of fun to be had with this; I’d like to try playing not only with the performances but also the way we work in the edit. We could play with the idea of lip synching badly by shooting rehearsals and scheduling our day so we get some real mistakes captured on film. I think that is less on point with our idea though. It’s not about bad performance, it’s about bad sync. No doubt we will have moments of bad sync to play with anyway full of authentic mistakes. I really feel this section of our performance is about getting precise performances, then changing and playing with our music to picture sync in the edit. We can also shoot people more than once with different lip colours and no doubt our performances will grow in character and vibe during the day. Shooting in this way will mean when we it comes to the edit, we’ll have the option of using genuine mistakes alongside changing the synch of the music to the picture.
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CASTING
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Casting in this film is absolutely key in many respects; each of our ladies should ooze natural health and wellbeing whilst having their own unique style and character. I’d recommend an extensive street cast as we need to find people who have more confidence than last time. They must be musical and need to be able to learn a song well! We are really looking for a range of radiant women with great skin and great lips, who are totally comfortable with who they are. Not only do these women need to look amazing but we need to feel as though they have lives on the outside too. We should wonder who they are and feel totally connected with them.
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I see our casting acting almost as a test for the commercial. I’d like to shoot the lips close up and at a range of angles, as each woman sings their favourite track to the camera (lip synced to playback). Cutting out wider will allow us to get a great gauge of each woman’s vibe and emotion too.
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FRAMING The most important thing to remember here is that we are not always shooting young models and we have no re-touching, therefore a whole commercial of super close up of the lips and teeth could be distracting in terms of the look. The David Bailey commercial is a perfect example of how working within a set of “rules” can be very graphic and effective. I’d like to use a combination of 2 or possibly 3 frames, one on the lips and the other cutting slightly above the shoulder. The women should have the freedom to move within our frames as we shoot the angles of their faces. Unlike the David Bailey ad, we need to really flatter the women and “straight on” does not suit everybody. Let’s remember they are not models. But let’s still operate within 2/3 set lenses and frame sizes. This is where we need to be: somewhere in between the two storyboards, selecting the best lips and the best full face angles possible for a really fun and dynamic edit.
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FRAMING
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THE SET We would be shooting in a simple studio set up in front of an off-white screen for a clean modern feel. The reason for this is that although our commercial is about performance, vibe and emotion, it’s true visual focus is of course the lips. Changing the back screen of our last commercial looked fantastic in the context of skin tone. In this instance I feel it would really distract from the impact of our lip shades and skin tones.
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MUSIC & EDIT The edit is where we can really have fun, be modern and really reflect our core concept of how being Match Made helps us to be in sync with ourselves. We want our audience to feel this as much as see it, so for me it is all about speeding up and slowing down the visual and music before letting it go and enjoying the women’s performances. I love the idea of having a DJ actually scratching to create our stuttering in the track at the start. Equally we could do this digitally and create glitches in a sound studio. This Fatboy Slim video is great despite it’s really different content. It’s an example of a moment, and how lips almost saying the lyrics can be cut against a stuttering track in time with the beat. Also this Madonna video plays with the idea in a simpler way. We could do this for real with two of the same vinyl playing at once. The DJ would scratch each one in and out of time giving an awesome effect.
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MUSIC & EDIT Whilst the out of sync moment could maybe feel jerky and very simple, the in sync section should be littered with moments of impact. I love the idea of Flash cutting between each woman through one long word like “yeaaah� in the chorus. Then loosening up for some longer held moments that really focus on expression and vibe. In terms of structure, I feel the chorus is actually a great part of the track for our women to sync too. It feels like we have been building up to this moment over the last commercials and to sing the chorus feels somehow logical. However I would say we have the women learn the whole song and explore which parts they feel the best in rehearsal and on the shoot.
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LIGHTING & LOOK: BEFORE I see our before look as being very natural, elegant and very understated. Our woman will be wearing no lipstick and very little makeup. The whole impact of our switch into colour relies upon the contrast between the imagery. It needs simple, delicate lighting to bring out the gentle highlights in the natural lip and skin tones. I like the idea of having this scene in Black and White for the contrast and the way it communicates the idea in a clear way. But equally we could stay in colour, but be less saturated and lit in a softer and less glamorous light.
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LIGHTING & LOOK: This isn’t only about making our different lip tones look stunning, it’s about finding the best composition, so the skin tone and lip colour work together in perfect harmony. Tiny touches in terms of lighting can make a huge difference to the feel of a frame when shooting lips very close up. Different shades of lipstick react differently to certain styles of lighting. Using a super talented cameraman will ensure we get some even and radiant shots, exposed to perfection.
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LIGHTING AND LOOK: AFTER The way David Bailey almost lights from the bottom up to give a lovely effect is definitely something we could play with, bringing his natural style into a more contemporary arena.
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IT CONTINUES WITH YOUR MATCH I love the concept of this script. It allows us to really build upon the last commercial yet capture something far more intimate and concise with a similarly strong, but different core concept. Exploring these authentic moments with our women, collaborating on engaging subtle performances and showing off their relationship to the music, is something I love doing and in this context it would be a buzz for me. I’d love be involved. Best, Dawn
Š Sonny London