to
Love
the centre.
Thanks for bringing me in. Crafting everything around the jewellery from the centre rather than around the deal is the right instinct, and it’s what I want to build on.
KAY is asking people to say the scary thing. The voiceover is make it obvious, to do too much, what are you waiting for. I want the films to carry that same nerve, so they read as brand work that happens to have a price on it rather than promotional work that happens to look good.
Free space, falling and turning through darkness with no ground beneath them. Then settled onto a surface, held and reflected, light moving across them rather than through them.
Moving between them is the story. Suspension resolving into arrival, the same gesture the brand is asking of its audience, told through how metal behaves in light. It gives a fifteen second promo an emotional register without a single lifestyle frame.
in front of us.
There’s a version of this that’s abstract, all light and refraction and fragments, where the piece is implied. And there’s a version where the shape of the stone reads clearly enough that someone recognises it in a store window. Both are right at different points in a fifteen second film. The risk is choosing between them in a meeting rather than in an edit.
So I’d rather build the choice into the capture.
One built to blend.
Every hero move, shot twice on the same motion control path. Clean for legibility, abstract with glass worked in front of the lens. The two cut against each other frame for frame. Bridal leans clean. Boxing Day leans abstract.
not cut to them.
A tennis bracelet sweeps through the foreground and wipes the frame. A ring turns toward camera and blooms out of focus as the next piece arrives sharp behind it. The abstract pass is what makes it possible — there is always a frame soft enough to cut on.
Motion control moves the camera and the piece, so the transition can come from either, repeatable to the frame. Your scripts already ask for it. Glimmer as they fall through the frame. Camera rotates to reveal. Connective tissue rather than three shots stitched together, so the percentage off is revealed by a piece moving instead of printed over one.
somewhere to land.
No gradient falling off into grey, no surface texture. The sleekness is the point and it’s the world KAY owns. But the difference between a void and a room is reflection. Each piece sits on a surface that holds it, a soft controlled return underneath that puts a floor in the space without announcing itself.
Light here is hard and precise. Small sources, sharp specular hits, deep falloff. The kind of light that makes a stone look expensive because it isn’t being flattered.
The same surface returns a reflection when light rakes across it, giving the piece a floor to sit on, and reads pure black off axis. Worth testing two or three and showing the difference rather than describing it. We’d build with slightly more surface information than the final frame needs and bring the contrast up afterwards.
KAY
atmosphere.
It’s a pointer.
Blue changes what’s possible, because now the surface is in play. Texture reads and shadows have somewhere to fall. So Peoples becomes the more sculptural world, and it moves at a slower register. Movement can come from the light rather than the object.
Your note about shadows falling toward the centre of frame, where the content and logo live, is the sharpest instruction in the deck. Shadow direction is a rig decision. Set the key so the cast shadow travels into the type zone as the move resolves.
PEOPLES
not laid over it.
Your type direction only works if the shooting gives it somewhere to live. Negative space held open on the axis the type will occupy. Light and shadow that continue out of the product, so a shadow can travel into white space and become a word.
In practice that means shooting elements as well as shots. Clean refraction sweeps, caustics thrown from the stones themselves, prismatic fringing pulled off a facet edge. Real light, from the actual pieces, that the type can key to. It’s the one thing that can’t be generated afterwards.
repeatable.
A rotation designed for one ring can be run again with a different piece, at a different speed, on a different surface. Because each stone cuts light differently, the same move gives back different footage every time. We layer takes in post to build repetition and variation, while every piece still gets its own beautiful single frame.
A :15 with a front card and an end card leaves about three and a half seconds of product. A single continuous move passing through three pieces gives five seconds of one unbroken beat and covers three SKUs.
its own physics.
Engagement rings shot overhead and rotated so the shape of the stone reads, the upright profile built into the same move so both readings come out of one pass. The Unstoppable Love pendant moves, and that movement is the product. The tennis bracelet wants a move along its length rather than across it, light running it like a wave.
Chains and mirror finish gold are the hardest thing in the range to light. Polished gold is a mirror, so what you’re really lighting is everything around it. That’s a set decision rather than a lighting one.
Two brands.
One build.
Every film shoots once, wide, at 6K, and delivers in both 16x9 and 9x16 from that single capture. We compose with room top and bottom, so the vertical crop keeps its shadow and its space rather than losing it.
Where it works on camera, we shoot the same moves and takes against both black and blue, so the surface underneath can swap without a second setup. Two of the six Peoples films come from that swap, built on KAY’s black rather than their own.
Bridal and Gifting, each in an Early Black Friday and a Black Friday cut. 11 Nov to 30 Nov.
Early Black Friday and Black Friday, shot off the KAY black setups. 6 Nov to 30 Nov.
Big Holiday, Live for Love, Ultimate Gift and Boxing Day. 1 Dec to 31 Dec.
is its own discipline.
The watch work is the closest analogue to this brief. Same scale, same intolerance for dust, same need for motion control fine enough to move a few millimetres convincingly, and the same problem of making polished metal and faceted glass behave under a travelling light.
Confidential