Blog #1 How to make a perfume video advertisement

I put together a mock advertisement for a perfume company. In the sub 30 second video advertisement, I used a combination of perfume shots I took, stock footage and some title templates from my editing software (DaVinci Resolve). I also used music and an A.I. voiceover. Here is the video in question:

In the first few seconds you see the first shot of the perfume bottle on top of a silver metallicy material. This material is kitchen tinfoil and is the basis for the perfume shots.

For the perfume shots, I used only one light. It was a small 60 watt LED light, set to 3000 kelvin. This colour temperature is very warm and helped sell the feeling of warm luxury. To diffuse the light, I put the included silicone diffuser over the light beam and then held a t-shirt over that, to diffuse the light even further (you can never diffuse light enough). The t-shirt works well but does get hot quickly, so it is not a permanent diffusing solution.

Then I simply moved the light slowly up and down, side to side to allow the light to bounce around the different surfaces (including inside the glass bottle), which brings me to:

Tinfoil.

I used tinfoil in the shot because of it’s reflective qualities and I had some lying around. For the shot, I put tinfoil underneath the perfume and this helped the moving light create interesting angles to bend around the perfume bottle. This is a technique simliar to recreating campfire flicker on actors in movies, where a silver reflector is often used to reflect warm light onto the actors face and clothes. Someone outside the frame will physically shake the reflector to simulate the flames motion.

Campfire shot from Burial

Note that the room was completely dark when I took these shots. I drew the curtains and placed the perfume on a table and used only one light to move around and create different light movements. The light was quite small, which is needed because I only wanted to cover the perfume bottle area and not blast light everywhere, which would not have looked as pleasing.

I also took the piano shot in the short video. This was the same technique, but with cooler light and no reflector. I started with the light facing away and then panned across the piano keys and away again. This created a useful transition from dark to light, which was used together with the black fades on the video track.

After that, a combination of stock footage, music, titles and a voiceover spoken by an A.I. voice finished off the video, leaving only a little work on colour and audio to do. I turned the saturation down on some of the stock footage because perfume advertisements tend to be a little more stylised.

-D.C.