By Ken Liebeskind
NEW YORK --Prescriptives, Inc., a division of Estee Lauder Corp., has launched a video campaign to promote its mascara, with four videos featuring Jillian Veran, a makeup artist and the director of artistry for Prescriptives, offering makeup tips as she applies mascara to a model.
The videos, which run at a Prescriptives site and YouTube, began playing September 28 in association with the introduction of a new mascara.
The videos, which run a little longer than a minute each, feature humorous dialogue from Veran as she applies the makeup. “They wanted it to be lighthearted and instructive,” said Renée Torrière,
casting director at Shadow Casting/New York, who oversaw the production of the videos, which were shot by Glenn Schuster, who runs Industrial Strength/Montclair, NJ, a production company.
Sari Sternschein, e-commerce director at Prescriptives, said the videos are being utilized to highlight four mascaras that are used to create different looks. “The purpose is to help customers find the perfect mascara, while providing them with expert tips to get the look, using coordinating products, such as eye color and eye liner.”
Schuster said the videos were shot in hi-def with a Panasonic HVX200 camera. “We shot directly to cards, off loaded it to a laptop and backed up the files on hard drive,” he said. “Once it was backed up, we reformatted the cards and continued shooting. There was no videotape involved.”
He said, “They wanted to keep the videos light and the makeup artist had a fun personality. They were amused by the outtakes and the ad lib moments, so we kept them as bloopers.” The bloopers appear at the end of some of the videos.
The videos are intended for “any woman who wears mascara or even the woman who is intimidated by mascara and needs expert advice,” Sternschein said.
The videos are part of an exclusive online campaign for the products. “Since mascara is such a cult product for women, we have chosen to focus our advertising efforts completely online,” she said.
This is the first time the company has used online video advertising. “Video is an amazing asset for us because a consumer can see a product in action, how it applies, what the effect is on the skin,” she said. “It’s a more interactive shopping experience for any customer that researches a product online before shopping in-store.”
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More