Macro impact

Industry films director Jeremy Lynch created a colorful kaleidoscope look for a cosmetics campaign by experimenting with a medical lens and some weird science.

Two :30s – ‘Eye’ and ‘Thumbprint’ through TBWA/Chiat Day – introduce Quo, a new line of makeup from Shoppers Drug Mart, in an eye-catching and abstract mysterious manner.

‘Eye,’ the more interesting of the two from a production standpoint, is meant to be a journey from the inside of the iris to the outside of the eye and starts out with circles of blue light flowing outward against a black background.

The following shot fills the screen with an orange-ish color peppered by flecks of light, which gives way to white crystals before reaching the surface of the eye and revealing a slow-spinning, multicolored iris.

The spot was shot on digital Betacam by dop Miroslaw Baszak using an endoscopic lens. According to the director, the medical lens was perfect for the job since he needed something smaller than the eye that could be submerged in liquids.

The opening shot of the blue was stock footage (cut up in post) of a jellyfish. The orange was created by sticking the lens in a concoction of mineral oil and gelatin, and the crystals, a mixture of household chemicals, were inspired by a grade-nine science experiment.

But the real fancy photography came with shooting the eyeball itself.

To effectively achieve the look Lynch was aiming for, the lens had to be no more than two millimeters away from the eye’s surface, and to ensure the actress didn’t move, she was strapped to a chair, Hannibal Lecter style, using a specially designed face mask.

‘The lens had to be really close to the eye; a macro lens wouldn’t give enough detail and everything else would be too flat,’ explains Lynch, who spent weeks searching for the perfect lens. ‘This lens is going to be huge.’

For ‘Thumbprint,’ which travels along the curves of a thumbprint to reveal the full picture at the end, straight lines were shot with a 35mm camera against convex and concave mirrors.

TBWA/Chiat Day art director was Jeremy Carr, Steve Gardner wrote the copy and Pat Lyons produced. Industry Films executive producer was Tina Petridis and producer was Jill Van de Kamper. David Hicks edited at Panic & Bob, and Henry artists Gary Thomas and Sean Cochrane handled the online at Crush.