nienko
ABOUT
A spec ad for sunscreen. Tagline: SOLACÉ SUNSCREEN. EXPOSURE, ON YOUR OWN TERMS. In a sun-bleached near-future city, two young people move through a public space where surveillance has become ordinary. Cameras watch from concrete walls. A drone passes overhead. There is no shade, only high noon glare. As they cut across the controlled pedestrian flow, a system locks onto them: AGE CHECK IN PROGRESS. IDENTITY MATCHING. They duck behind a concrete wall, but it offers concealment, not relief. The boy pulls out Solacé Sunscreen. Instead of using it only as skin protection, they apply it to each other’s faces like protective war paint. When they step back into the sun, the sunscreen catches the light and creates a soft reflective flare. The system scans again, but fails: IDENTITY: UNDEFINED. AGE: UNDEFINED. They walk past the camera and disappear into the blaze. Solacé protects against exposure in more than one sense: UV exposure, and unwanted facial recognition (the pressure to be made legible by systems that do not understand you).
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PROCESS
In creating EXPOSURE, I wanted to come up with something more than an ad. My goal was to make a small ode to agency that would also be fun and empowering. My main measure of a successful piece of cinema — and yes, I think an ad should be a piece of cinema — is rewatchability: do we want to watch it again, inhabit its mood again, does it inspire us to become a better version of ourselves? The process always starts with a script and character design. I usually sketch my characters on paper before moving into Nano Banana or ChatGPT image generation to build contact sheets and refine their appearance. In the case of EXPOSURE, another crucial ingredient was writing the song lyrics, which I later set to music using Suno. I wrote the lyrics before generating the scenes, and the finished track became part of the edit’s structure. All the scenes were generated in Runway with Seedance 2. I managed to get the results I wanted in under 50 generations, although quite a lot of masking and cleanup still happened in post, in Premiere Pro and After Effects. Last but not least: I’m meticulous about type. I spend a lot of time choosing — or sometimes creating — the typeface, integrating it into the frame, and avoiding generative gibberish artifacts at all costs.
Credits
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