Nutrafol x Sephora: Product Range Launch

Client

NutrafolThe hair growth supplement brand

Retailer

Sephorasephora.com from 31 January 2023, stores from late February

Films

TwelveTen science films, one per product, and two Beauty Advisor trainings

Versions

Every one twiceWith and without subtitles

Made in

Six weeksStoryboards to delivery

Shot on

Three RED camerasSix days at RIOT’s studios

Twelve films in six weeks, to explain the science of hair growth to Sephora shoppers in about a minute each.

This January, Nutrafol arrived at Sephora. The launch brought the hair growth nutraceuticals and the new hair care range to sephora.com on 31 January, with select stores to follow in February, and every product needed a film. Ten of them, one per formula, had to make clinical hair science feel simple enough for a beauty aisle. Two more had to teach Sephora’s Beauty Advisors the whole range. We made all twelve, start to finish, in six weeks.

Nutrafol x Sephora•Hair care product film•0:51•2022

Women

Women’s Vegan

Women’s Balance

Postpartum

Men

Strand Defender, the conditioner

Root Purifier, the shampoo

Stress Reliever, the scalp essence

Growth Activator, the hair serum

Build-Up Blocker, the exfoliating mask

Science, without the nerves

Nutrafol’s brief came in on 5 October: short consumer films about the science behind each product, plus internal films to train Sephora’s staff. “Science” is a hard word on a beauty shelf. The treatment answered it with calm, clean product films, warm hands and soft light, and with the science itself drawn as simple vector animation in Nutrafol’s own teal, rather than charts or stock b-roll.

One film, built from parts

Twelve storyboards would have eaten the schedule. So we boarded two films, Women and Strand Defender, one from each range, and broke them into parts that every film would share. Nutrafol signed off on the parts, knowing the exact pictures would change product by product. From then on, each new film was the same system with a different formula inside it.

The storyboards, 3 November 2022

Anatomy of a Nutrafol film

Every one of the ten films is built from the same parts, in the same order, so the whole range plays as one family.

Open

The animated Nutrafol logo sting.

The hook

One line of kinetic type, full screen.Hair thinning will happen to over half of us.

The hero

The product, alone in its own light.

In use

Close-ups of hands, capsules and hair, and a top-down view of the daily routine.

The proof

Animated before and after results.

The science

The causes of thinning, drawn in vector, and what the formula does about them.

The ingredients

A flyover of the natural ingredients in petri dishes, then a split screen.

Close

The logo again, and the product placed back into frame.

The science, drawn

Rose Hidalgo designed and animated the science. Each film names the everyday causes of thinning, from hormones and stress to metabolism, nutrition and aging, and gives every cause its own vector symbol and its own movement: a tangle for stress, a circle that turns for metabolism, one that drains for nutrition, a pie that fills in for aging. The symbols drift together, turn into abstract strands of hair, and resolve into the daily dose. Nutrafol asked for vector rather than hand-drawn and a deeper teal, so the art was built in Illustrator and kept vector all the way through After Effects, ready for a late change on any film. We cut a voiceover edit of every film first, so the animation always had its final timing to land on.

The Nutrafol logo, in motion

Every film opens on the Nutrafol logo, animated for the series. The sting is quiet on purpose: the white wordmark on the brand’s teal, easing back into place, so each film starts calm before the first line of type. Nutrafol passed on a drop shadow in favor of the flat mark. The type follows the same rule. We designed the type treatments for the series, from the full-screen kinetic lines to the subtitles set in Nutrafol’s ABC Diatype in off-black on soft off-white cards, and Nutrafol adopted them across its own videos from then on.

Six days, three REDs

We shot the whole range over six days at our studios. A pre-light on 14 November, then three or four products a day, the training films and every voiceover on 18 November, and a final day of nothing but natural ingredients for ten different formulas. A RED Raptor held the tabletop, a RED Komodo hung overhead on a Dana Dolly so we could switch from hero shot to top-down routine in seconds, and a RED Ranger worked the close-ups in our daylight studio. While one studio was being reset, we shot in the other. The full breakdown, from the boards to the plugin that kept the art vector, is in our journal.

For the shop floor

The films were made for sephora.com, and the shoot also fed the stores. From the same set we pulled 8K stills for Sephora’s in-store displays: capsules in hand, the routine from above, the jars side by side. The two Beauty Advisor films, with Nutrafol’s Sam Archer walking Sephora’s staff through the nutraceuticals and the hair care, stay behind the counter.

ServicesProduct Films·Motion Design·Creative Direction·Editing·Color Grading