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 not a compromise version of a studio campaign — it 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.

Shot at home by the models themselves.

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

I directed people I could not stand next to. That changes the job: the brief has to carry the lighting, the framing and the makeup direction well enough that someone alone in a bedroom can execute it, and the direction has to happen live over a screen with no ability to step in and fix anything by hand.

I built the key visual 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.