Face First

Fashion Week 2020 happened with the industry shut down. A Maybelline NYFW campaign normally means a studio, a glam team, a stylist, a crew and a director standing four feet from the talent. This one had none of that. Every model was at home, alone, with a phone or a camera and a direction call.

They did their own makeup. They dressed themselves. They lit their own rooms, framed their own shots and shot their own footage, with me directing from a screen. What came back was closer to the product than a studio ever gets, because the person applying the makeup and the person wearing it were the same person, in the room where they actually do it.

The campaign was called Face First for a reason. When you strip out the set, the crew and the styling, the face is the entire campaign.

Creative lead at Gotham on Maybelline New York’s Fashion Week 2020 campaign. Concept, campaign image system, remote direction of every shoot, and the full asset build — campaign images, Face First talent portraits, Get The Look application stills, and product stills across the Super Stay, Colossal, Matte Ink and Tattoo Brow lines.

Every shoot on this campaign happened over a screen. Each model was alone in her own room, so the brief had to do the work a set normally does — set the light, the framing and the makeup — in words clear enough to follow with no one there to move a lamp. Direction was live, and nothing could be fixed by hand.

Built the campaign image system, wrote the shoot direction for each model, ran the remote sessions, and brought the whole thing back together as one campaign across talent, application and product.