Films for Clinique since 2017, from demonstration films and Cyber Week animations to a fireside chat with Leonard A. Lauder and social content with Melissa Barrera.
14 projects by RIOT, creative agency partner to Clinique
Clinique launched in 1968 after a question in Vogue, can great skin be created, and it has been answering it with advice ever since: clear, simple and given by someone who knows. Since 2017 our creative agency has made films for Clinique's Global Creative team in that same spirit, from product demonstrations and Cyber Week animations to brand sizzles, a fireside chat with Leonard A. Lauder, social content with Melissa Barrera and the films that launched The Foundation.
In the fall of 2017 Clinique asked us to direct two demonstration films, and we advised against storyboarding either of them.
A demonstration has to feel live, and fixed frames make people perform to a drawing. So we sent a director's treatment and a detailed shot list instead, booked one crew with Sandbox New York, pre-lit the studio on 8 November and shot the two films on the next two days. For the Pretty Easy Liquid Eyelining Pen, Keiko Lynn showed one eyeliner three ways, applying her own liner while looking down the lens through a two-way mirror our director of photography built for the shoot. For the Sonic System Purifying Cleansing Brush, a Clinique consultant explained the brush and a model showed it working, and Clinique's brief kept the two out of each other's frames. Both were delivered as a family of lengths, down to :06, so every placement got a complete idea.
Much of our early work for Clinique started with footage Clinique had already shot, and a request to make it feel like ours.
For Fresh Pressed we cut two :15s and a set of looping :06s that ran on Clinique's territory accounts around the world. For Beyond Perfecting Concealer we turned one editorial with three talents into a main film and a version for each of them, with music supervision across the set. For Moisture Surge we handled the edit, color, effects, supers and music for a :30, a :15 and a run of :06s that passed 1.5 million views on Clinique's channels. And for Cyber Week 2017 we made sixteen animations, one deal at a time, posted across every Clinique social channel through the week.
A sizzle is how a brand reminds its own people why they love it, and Clinique kept coming back to us for them. The Brand Sizzle in 2017 tells the story from the beginning: Carol Phillips's Vogue article with dermatologist Dr. Norman Orentreich, Evelyn Lauder's attention, and a brand of allergy-tested, dermatologist-developed skin care that followed.
Clinique: A Brand Sizzle That Spans Decades →
Four years later, after Black Honey had a viral moment on TikTok, the Love sizzle played with the idea of people who don't just like Clinique, they love it, with hand-drawn animation and bold kinetic type. In 2022 came three more: the Innovation sizzle for the rebrand and its new products, a lookbook in motion for the visual merchandising and store design team and its Clinique Lab spaces, and Clinique Unique, a one-word manifesto cut like a lyric from five decades of archive, faces and formulas.
How do you film the man who started Clinique when nobody can be in the room? In 2021 we made a fireside chat with Leonard A. Lauder, and no camera of ours was ever there.
Leading Clinique is the brand's program for its new leaders: directors and above, from every function and every region, brought into Clinique's history and the way it thinks. It had paused for the pandemic. For its return, Mr. Lauder, Chairman Emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies and the man who started Clinique in 1968, agreed to a fireside chat with Michelle Freyre, Clinique's Brand President, and Clinique asked us to turn it into a film worth gathering a global team for.
The catch was the pandemic. The Delta variant was surging that August, and at 88, Mr. Lauder was among those most at risk, so nobody was sending a film crew into his home. We offered every option we could think of, from a single vaccinated, masked camera operator to a second camera synced to the call. Clinique chose to keep it simple, and rightly so. Mr. Lauder took the call in front of his bookshelves, and the two spoke over Zoom on 16 August. We weren't on the call. What arrived was two webcams, one shared audio track and a wonderful conversation.
So we set a rule: the Zoom would appear only where it earned its place, and everything else would be told in pictures. We cut the conversation on its own first, no music and no archive, to lock the story, then broke it into nine chapters, each named for a line from Mr. Lauder, from To Catch a Thief and The Beginning to “We Need Copy” and Great Skin Can Be Created.
If we couldn't film Mr. Lauder, the archive could film everything he talked about. We turned the conversation into a request list for The Estée Lauder Companies archives, talking point by talking point: the ads, the products, the letters, the launch at Saks Fifth Avenue and the consultants in their white coats. Then we ran it all through a vintage film gate, so the 1960s and a 2021 webcam feel like parts of the same film.
Great skin can be created. I believe that.
Leonard A. Lauder, in the film
The film runs twelve minutes, subtitled from the first line to the last, and premiered to Clinique's leaders around the world on 28 September 2021, six weeks after the call.
In October 2021, on Clinique's Spring 2022 campaign shoot in Los Angeles, we ran the second unit. The main set made the campaign. Ours made everything around it: short films Melissa Barrera would speak straight to camera, in Spanish, and reportage stills of her getting ready, with the light and feel of a behind-the-scenes moment rather than the polish of the main set.
Her day was ten hours with no overtime, and most of it belonged to the campaign. Our list got about two hours on the first day, in pieces, whenever she was free between setups. With no lighting budget, we set up by the makeup station on natural light and planned every film as a straight read or a short memory she could tell in her own words, so it could be captured in whatever window opened up. Eight films came out of those two hours.
The most urgent was an announcement for a contest whose prize included the first Clinique NFT. There was time for one read, so the edit is built from jump cuts, and the :45 runs as three :15 parts that play back to back in Instagram Stories. A holiday unboxing ran as paid media in Spanish-speaking markets, in exactly fifteen seconds. Her holiday message and a three-part Mother's Day series, with her memory of her mother's green Clinique case, keep everything she says to camera in color and every cutaway in black and white. A Spanish translator sat with our editor in the studio to subtitle every line.
Photographer James Law shot the stills alongside our camera, more than five hundred frames over the two days: Melissa in the makeup chair, at the foundation counter, laughing between looks and settling into the chair on our set. Clinique and Melissa's team chose 36 of them for Clinique's social channels and press.
Clinique x Melissa Barrera: Social Content and Behind the Scenes →
In early 2022 Clinique launched The Foundation, its creative hub for the logo, the color, the typefaces and the guidelines, and asked us to make the films that introduced it.
The first was hosted by Nick Sterlington, Clinique's VP of Global Creative Operations, who built The Foundation and recorded his film over Zoom from the West Coast. We cut him out of his room and sent him wherever the script needed him: above the clouds, onto a beach, under concert lights for a drum roll and into a hypnotic spiral. Because The Foundation was brand new, we sold it with nostalgia, from beige computers and floppy disks to a Memphis-style burst for the features still to come. A guidelines film is rarely something people choose to watch. This one runs five minutes and earns every one of them.
Across fourteen projects, the brief underneath the briefs has stayed the same. Clinique wanted its films to feel like good advice: clear, honest and given by someone you trust, whether that was a consultant in a white lab coat, an actress talking about her mother, a creative leader in front of a cloud, or the man who started the brand, talking from his library. Our job as a creative agency was to make that feel effortless, on every screen and at every length.
What the Clinique team wrote to us the moment they first saw the work, straight from the inbox.
“I shared with our Brand President and we both LOVE the video. It's fantastic, thanks so much.”
Elizabeth NolanSVP, Global Creative Director, Clinique“WOW. Just fantastic. I had a smile on my face the entire time. I think you really brought Mr. Lauder's story to life.”
Timothy StrudwickVP, 360 Global Creative, Clinique“This video is stunning. Better than I could have imagined, truly one for the archives.”
Cari LutkinsClinique“This looks AMAZING! Really incredible work, I'm so impressed!”
Ingrid MontoyaVP, Global Retail Design & VM, Clinique“Everyone LOVED the edit you created of the Fresh Pressed, the way it cut between close and pulled back.”
Colleen StokesCliniqueMore than one. Clinique works with several agencies and production partners alongside its own Global Creative team. RIOT, a New York creative agency and production studio, has made fourteen projects for Clinique since 2017, from product demonstrations and social campaigns to brand sizzles and internal films.
RIOT directed, shot and finished both in New York in November 2017, with production by Sandbox New York. We pre-lit the studio on 8 November and shot Sonic System and Pretty Easy over the next two days, working from a director's treatment and a shot list rather than storyboards, and delivered every film from its full length down to :06.
RIOT, in 2021, for Leading Clinique. Leonard A. Lauder and Michelle Freyre, Clinique's Brand President, spoke over Zoom during the pandemic, and we built the film afterward from the recording, The Estée Lauder Companies archives and our own motion graphics.
RIOT ran the content unit on Clinique's Spring 2022 campaign shoot in Los Angeles in October 2021. In about two hours of Melissa Barrera's day we captured eight social films in Spanish, subtitled in English, while photographer James Law shot behind-the-scenes stills for Clinique's social channels and press.
RIOT, in February 2022. The Foundation is Clinique's creative hub for its brand guidelines, and we made the films that introduced it, led by Nick Sterlington's Top Five Things You Need To Know, recorded over Zoom and turned into five minutes of clouds, beaches, drum rolls and 90s nostalgia.
Films for every stage: directed product demonstrations, social cutdowns from :30 to :06, animation for sales moments like Cyber Week, brand sizzles, celebrity content captured on campaign days, and internal films for leadership and brand teams. For Clinique that has meant fourteen projects since 2017.
You're in good company.
Making something for a beauty brand? A few lines is enough to start. We read every brief the same day, then set up a call or a meeting to talk it through, and tailor a plan and a bid from there.
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