Dove’s “Onslaught” is the latest in a series of viral films designed to draw attention to the company’s Campaign for Real Beauty and Self-Esteem Fund initiative that aims to disrupt the beauty industry’s narrow vision of who and what is beautiful and give mothers and other mentors the tools to instill their girls with confidence about how they look.
Created by Ogilvy Toronto and directed by the agency’s jack-of-all-trades Tim Piper, who is credited as associate creative director, art director and copywriter on this project, “Onslaught” depicts the pressure the beauty industry puts on young girls via marketing to conform to an unachievable and ultimately warped standard of beauty.
While “Onslaught” was only recently produced and posted on www.campaignforrealbeauty.com as well as sites like YouTube, it was actually conceptualized a year and a half ago along with a handful of other Dove films, including “Evolution.” Co-directed by Piper and Yael Staav, who was with Reginald Pike, Toronto, at the time and has since joined Toronto-based Soft Citizen (and Furlined in the U.S.), “Evolution” was a mega hit on YouTube, got tons of press and won, among other kudos, two Grand Prix honors at the 2007 Cannes International Advertising Awards.
Now the Piper-helmed “Onslaught” is garnering buzz and will, most likely, also snap up some major advertising awards.
In “Onslaught,” Piper has constructed a startling, thought-provoking film that opens on a live-action close-up of a fresh-faced seven-year-old girl on a sunny day, her red hair gently blowing in the breeze.
The track “La Breeze” by the band Simian starts to play, kicking off with the lyric “Here it comes,” and so begins an onslaught of hyper-sexualized images of women letting it all hang out in bus shelter ads followed by a series of infomercial snippets with hosts insisting their products will make you look younger, thinner, lighter–the list goes on.
The focus quickly shifts to eating, and we see, among other imagery, a woman standing on a scale in her bra and panties ballooning and shrinking in a sped-up depiction of the results of years of yo-yo dieting.
Then we move into the world of plastic surgery and see a barrage of women being poked and prodded with needles and other implements all in the name of looking good.
As the rat-a-tat-tat of “Onslaught” imagery comes to a close, a group of little girls is seen crossing the street, and a super suggests that parents talk to their daughters before the beauty industry does.
“Onslaught” hits hard, driving home just how bombarded even young girls are by messages from a beauty industry telling them that they just aren’t good enough.
Free of motion sickness
But while the film moves at a fast and furious speed, Piper was careful to pace the imagery in a way that ensured viewers weren’t overwhelmed, or even worse, sickened. “I am very prone to motion sickness, and the first test that Tim ever showed me was about 12 seconds long and had about a thousand images, and I thought I was going to die,” Ogilvy creative director Janet Kestin shared laughing. “I said, ‘It’s such a good idea. I totally believe in this idea, but how are you going to do this so it doesn’t make people want to run away screaming?'”
In the end, Piper, who also did the offline edit, found the right rhythm, giving viewers a bit of a breather in between each section of the film, Kestin praised.
Piper spent weeks crafting “Onslaught.” Much of the still imagery seen in the film was culled from a royalty-free image bank; Piper shot the live-action in Toronto and Miami with DP Marc Lalibert-Else. (DP Ray Dumas did some earlier experimental test footage).
Interestingly, the redheaded girl so prominently featured in the opening of the film was intended to simply be one of the pack of kids we see crossing the street at the conclusion of “Onslaught.”
But at one point during the shoot, Lalibert-Else took a moment to zoom in on the girl’s face and asked her to smile. During the editing process, Piper saw that charmingly innocent, full-of-promise grin, scrapped the original opening he had planned for the film and made this charismatic girl the initial focal point. “I saw her do that smile, and I thought it would be the perfect juxtaposition for the onslaught that was going to happen,” Piper explained.
Yo-yo factor
Piper had to work hard to sell the concept for “Onslaught” to the client. To do so, he constructed the scene, which later made it into the film, of the aforementioned woman on the scale whose extreme weight gain and loss represents yo-yo dieting. The woman is a friend of Piper’s. He snapped a photo of her standing in her bathroom on a scale and then manipulated her body in Photoshop. The rough version of that sequence got Dove marketing executives really excited about the potential for the film, Piper said, and won him the go-ahead to make it.
There was never a question as to who would direct “Onslaught,” according to Kestin, who affirmed, “Nobody has a clearer vision of what Tim sees than Tim, and he’s extremely good with actors, and technically fantastic. He’s a very gifted director.”
“Onslaught” won’t be the last of the Dove films, by the way. “There are others,” Kestin promised, noting, “Our goal isn’t to release a whole batch of things at the same time but rather to find the appropriate moment to set each one free into the world so it has its time to be considered because each film brings up a new thought to mull over.”
