Cartier: The Iconic Age

Client

CartierWith WSJ Custom Content

Film

The Iconic AgeA 2:26 brand film and a :15 cutdown

Watch

Santos de CartierDesigned by Louis Cartier in 1904

Shot

17 to 20 May 2022A pre-light, two studio days and a day in Manhattan

Formats

8K and 16mmPlus archive from the NYPL and the Library of Congress

Delivered

13 June 2022Approved by Cartier in Paris

In 1904 Louis Cartier moved time from the pocket to the wrist. We told that story through the New York buildings that rose in the same years.

Cartier and WSJ Custom Content, the Wall Street Journal’s branded content studio, asked RIOT to make a film for the Santos de Cartier: a portrait of a design that changed how people kept time, set beside the New York landmarks that changed how a city looked. The Iconic Age ran on the Journal’s partner site in June 2022, with a :15 cutdown and a set of 4K frames for banners and social.

Cartier•Brand film•2:26•2022

A watch for a pilot

At the turn of the twentieth century, if you wanted to know the time you reached into your pocket. Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator, had no hand free to do it. His friend Louis Cartier designed him a watch he could read at a glance from the controls: a square face with rounded corners, visible screws, worn on a strap. In 1906 Santos-Dumont flew his 14-bis over Paris, one of the first powered flights in Europe. The watch Cartier made for him became, in the words of the film, the first modern watch designed to be worn on the wrist.

One idea, one week

RIOT came in at short notice at the start of May. The idea was a pairing: every innovation in the Santos had a twin in the city. The Chrysler Building’s spire, assembled inside the tower and raised in one piece, for the complex movement inside a streamlined case. The Battery Maritime Building’s zinc, copper and rivets for the watch’s mixed materials and visible screws. The Flatiron’s unexpected triangle for a square face in an age of round ones. Four Santos watches, three landmarks, and an ending that brought them all back to the skyline of 2022.

The treatment went to WSJ on 10 May. The storyboards were finished at two in the morning three days later, between shoots.

Two days in the light box

The watches came to our studio for two days, 18 and 19 May, after a day of pre-light. Nobody from Cartier was on set. WSJ’s team was, and every frame went to Paris for approval. Each watch got a morning or an afternoon to itself: an hour to set up, three hours to shoot.

For clean reflections we built an eight-by-eight light box, lit from four sides, and gave each watch its own color-blocked world of material: marble, copper, gold and steel. Then we went in close. Macro lenses on the movement, the bracelet links, the screws on the bezel, the blue cabochon on the crown. Everything Louis Cartier cared about, at a size you could read.

Sixteen millimeter

To capture the look and feel of the period, we did not stop at 8K. Our director of photography James Regan also put the Santos in front of a 16mm camera: real film, processed and scanned, with the grain and the gentle weave of the era the watch was born in. The black and white Santos that opens the watch’s story in the film is on that roll.

16mm film

8K digital

Three landmarks

On Friday 20 May we took the camera into Manhattan. At the Chrysler Building and the Flatiron we shot texture, the ornament and the steel up close. At the Battery Maritime Building, home now to Casa Cipriani, we shot wides, details and timelapse. Stock libraries had nothing usable of either building, so we shot them ourselves.

The archive came from the public domain collections of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, from Wikimedia Commons, and from the building’s own history. Then the edit made the pairs. The Chrysler spire, shot at sunrise, drops into the dial of a Santos until the needle of the tower becomes the hand of the watch.

Black and white, then color

The grade does the storytelling. The past stays black and white: the street in 1911, the 14-bis, Louis Cartier and his friend. The watches stay in color, so the gold and the steel read as they do on the wrist. And the city only turns to full color at the end, when the film comes back to New York at dusk in 2022, the skyline the opening promised, before a last look at the watch on black.

In the Journal

The Iconic Age launched on WSJ’s partner site in June 2022, voiced by Rachel Kamrasch of WSJ Custom Content. Alongside the full film we delivered a :15 cutdown and 4K stills for the Journal’s banner and social placements.

Archive credits: Deuxième vol d’Alberto Santos-Dumont, unknown author, 1906, CC BY-SA 4.0; Homenagem aos 144 anos de nascimento de Santos Dumont, EBC na Rede, 2017, CC BY 3.0. Both excerpted and graded black and white. All other archive is in the public domain, from the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, including the Historic American Buildings Survey, and Wikimedia Commons.

ServicesCreative Direction·Concept Development·Brand Storytelling·Film Production·Branded Content·Product Photography·Editing·Motion Graphics·Color Grading