The Client
L'Occitane en Provence, commonly known as L'Occitane, is an international retailer of body, face, fragrances and home products based in Manosque, France. The company was founded in 1976 by Olivier Baussan with the purpose to create a company that celebrates and preserves the traditions of his native Provence.
The Challenge
To create a series of social films for beauty brand L’Occitane in the lead up to the Chelsea Flower Show. The role of the films is to showcase the natural flower based ingredients in the L’Occitane products and to create a sense of excitement around the L’Occitane themed garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. It was crucial to L’Occitane for these films to appeal to a younger audience that wouldn’t normally look to The Chelsea Flower Show as an event they would participate in. The videos needed to work across Facebook and Instagram and as individual films for each ingredient / product but also longer films showcasing up to 5 ingredients / products.
The Solution
Stop motion animation was the perfect creative approach for this project. It allowed us to use the intricate elements of each plant based ingredient and bring the benefits of the product to life in a really creative way. Whether it was the petals of a rose forming the shape of a crown alongside the statement ‘The Queen of Flowers’ for their Violette & Rose de Mai or creating the shape of a sun with the flowers from an immortelle plant alongside the statement ‘Never fades’, all of the imagery and text worked beautifully together. Sound design and music played an integral role in each of the films. Reflecting the mood of each product and flower; for example we partnered the ‘Majestic Rose’ with a regal horn playing and the sound of a thunderstorm with the image of an umbrella made from shea nuts. We filmed all 10 social films across 3 days with a painstakingly meticulous approach to creating the stop motion movement, one petal at a time. We used a software called Dragon Frame to ensure the accuracy of each frame and refined the movement and colour grade once the stills were brought into the edit suite. The films were pushed via pre-roll on publishing websites including OK! MailOnline The Independent and Evening Standard and on L’Occitane’s Facebook and instagram channels. With 350,000+ pre-roll views (no idea if this is good??) and a total reach of 90k+ on Facebook.
