It’s a virtual fashion flashback for women: poofy prom dresses, bad feathered dos, horrifying bridesmaid garb (that you only wore once), painted-on-tight jeans (that you couldn’t get off), conservative school uniforms, matching outfits for siblings. Dub in the raunchy yet melodic music of Hole’s Miss World and you have ‘Beauty Pageant,’ the newest cutting-edge look for a new Eaton’s cinema spot, that’s right, Eaton’s.

Directed by Rave Films’ Stephen Scott and lensed by Marcus Elliott, the :60 hit the big screen in Cineplex Odeon theaters across the country on March 27 and will run for the next month.

The idea behind the edgy new commercial through Roche Macaulay & Partners is not to show what the department store is offering fashion buffs for spring, it’s about a new attitude as Eaton’s attempts to shed its old image and arm itself with a hip new one, so that when the commercial tapers off moviegoers are left questioning, ‘That was Eaton’s?’ answered by the tag line, ‘That’s right, Eaton’s’

The spot, which according to Geoffrey Roche ‘cost a bit more than $200,000,’ contains no narrative, just clips set to music, which made Scott, with his music video background, a shoe-in for the job.

Scott, who was making his first stab at big-screen commercials, shot the clips in a variety of styles using different film stocks, manipulating 16mm (some of which will be treated to look like Super 8) and Super 8 and adding in jump cuts.

As for the overall look of the attitude-driven, high-energy spot, the director says he was looking for an amateurish quality and attempted to make parts of it resemble a poorly shot home movie by using a hand-held camera and putting scratches and dirt on the film.

‘We let light in the camera, fogged the film and basically did all the things you normally would never do in order to give it that look,’ says Scott.

Contrasting with the amateurish vintage newsreel-style footage of the ghosts of fashion past, all scenes set in a present-day time frame were shot on 35mm with pristine lighting to give them a crisp, clean look.

Utilizing many of the techniques from his music video experience, the spot was shot with quick flashes, extreme close-ups and wide-angle distortions with a certain rapid-fire, jump-cut editing style in mind, which was carried out by Panic & Bob’s Michelle Czukar, who also has experience in the music video genre.

Once resed-up from tape to film, a couple of days were spent on film adjustment with Susan Armstrong on the Flame at TOPIX/Mad Dog to achieve that distressed and aged look. Some little scratches that looked fine when viewed on a small monitor were overwhelming when projected onto a 40-foot screen, but overall Scott says he was happy with the process. ‘The colors stayed good and it looks filmic, not like a videotape.’

Aside from being a fashionable slice-of-life for many women, ‘Beauty Pageant’ was a walk down memory lane for Scott as well, as the commercial was shot partly on location at his old high school while some exteriors were captured on a street in the Don Mills area of Toronto, full of ’70s-style bungalows, where he spent the first 10 years of his life.

Although it is Scott’s first stab at big-screen commercials, that is not the case for Roche Macaulay, which recently did a cinema ad for Reebok.

‘When you are coming up with a cinema spot you have to keep in mind that you have a self-contained audience who are paying and you better make sure you are entertaining them, not pissing them off, and I think you have to be pretty careful about that,’ says Roche.