ONCE Advertising Cinematography Research · Advertising Cinematography Research 01/10
Research article / Work analysis · ONCE Editorial Team
Freedom, power and immersion can all appear in an advertising brief. None tells the cinematographer where to put the camera. Freedom might become a person running through an expansive landscape, or a person finally entitled to refuse the camera's gaze. Power might come from enormous scale, or from something small remaining composed as enormous objects move. An adjective leaves those decisions unresolved.
Our question is how a director turns brand language into a visual thesis that can guide actual choices. We propose a contestable working hypothesis: when a director can specify what remains stable, what is allowed to change, and how the brand connects to that relationship, cinematography, production design and performance gain a shared object of judgment. This is a way to examine whether visual choices participate in expression, rather than a universal formula for successful advertising.
The material this analysis can address
We have purposefully selected three cases: Volvo Trucks' The Epic Split, KENZO's The New Perfume, and Apple HomePod's Welcome Home. They approach functional demonstration, cultural identity and experiential metaphor respectively. They are not a representative sample of advertising. The latter two were directed by Spike Jonze; they do not establish his intentions across his entire body of work.
For this article, we read project texts from brands, a production company and award archives, and inspected the KENZO project still published by MJZ and a Welcome Home still published by The One Club. The Volvo action is taken from its 2013 official press release. The accompanying publicity photograph of the performer and trucks was not treated as a film frame showing the stunt. We did not complete a full audiovisual or frame-by-frame examination of the three films, so we do not analyze unobserved editing sequences, musical synchronization or precise timecodes. Nor do we infer camera paths or focal lengths from stills. Below, documented facts, visible composition and our interpretation are distinguished. There are no audience experiments or sales attribution findings.
The trucks change position; the body remains controlled
Volvo Trucks' official release, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Volvo Trucks perform world-first stunt, dated November 14, 2013, describes Van Damme standing with one foot on each side mirror of two reversing Volvo FM trucks. It presents The Epic Split as a demonstration of Volvo Dynamic Steering's precision and directional stability and identifies Andreas Nilsson as director. This is the brand's account of the advertisement's purpose, not an independent vehicle performance test conducted for this article.
The interesting question is how that purpose acquires a visual form. The distance between the trucks and the body's support form one event: the more evident the change, the more specific the demand for control becomes. The performer adds more than celebrity value. His body turns the abstract word stability into an imaginable relationship of vulnerability. Beautiful truck exteriors alone could convey size; size would not, by itself, explain why directional control matters.
The resulting cinematographic requirement is to make the critical relationship available for judgment. For a similar concept, the viewpoint should be considered in terms of whether it can show the support points, posture and truck positions together. A face-only shot removes the action's conditions; a wheel-only shot removes the consequence borne by the body. This is a proposed framing condition derived from the documented action, not a reconstruction of the original camera setup.
A competing approach would put the performer and vehicles into separate shots and imply danger through editing. It might retain drama, while changing the basis on which viewers assess spatial continuity. Conversely, a shared frame does not automatically establish that an image is unaltered. Cinematography can clarify a relationship without guaranteeing every performance inference an advertisement might invite. Functional claims still require their demonstration conditions and technical assertions to be checked separately.
In Volvo Group's Behind the scenes of The Epic Split, published December 8, 2017, driver Mikael Rosell recalls the work of gradually increasing the distance and the advance rehearsals. His account adds information about organizing the action. It does not allow us to supply camera models, lens specifications or a complete safety procedure. The transferable idea is that stability is a relationship to be explained through action and viewpoint, rather than a grading mood.
KENZO: a brand can enter through a way of looking
If the previous example becomes a requirement that every good advertisement must have its product directly cause an action, perfume becomes a problem. A camera cannot directly record scent, and bodily autonomy cannot be described as an empirically established effect of applying perfume. KENZO requires our hypothesis to accommodate another connection to the brand.
In the project still on MJZ's Kenzo, The New Perfume page, Margaret Qualley wears a green dress with crossing bands and looks toward the viewer beyond the frame. A large eye graphic occupies the setting behind her. Her face and the background graphic put looking on two different scales. What we actually observed in that frame is a relationship among gaze, clothing structure, color and graphic form. It cannot supply the trajectory of the complete dance.
The KENZO World official page places freedom of expression and creativity in the brand's context, identifies Ryan Heffington's choreography and Qualley's performance, and describes the eye as an identifying graphic used in the Autumn/Winter 2013 collection. It provides no audience study of these shots. Our interpretation is that this frame makes the person an active subject who looks back, while locating that agency within a world carrying the brand's graphic. The green dress supplies more than color: its crossing lines also organize the body's silhouette.
The stable element can therefore be the person's agency and the brand's symbol of looking, rather than a perfume bottle kept at the center. What is permitted to vary is the form of bodily expression. The brand connection is primarily cultural and identificatory; it must not masquerade as a causal claim about product performance. The questions shift accordingly. What kind of person does the work invite identification with? Does that stance fit the brand's established expression? Could another brand occupy this world without rewriting it?
A reasonable objection is that a documented brand graphic need not be recognized by every viewer. The performer's appeal might also command more attention than the symbol. Its presence cannot guarantee brand memory. There is a further cultural limitation: a direct returning gaze can be read as agency, provocation, a fashion pose or celebrity charisma. This is an interpretation of a work, not a universal psychological law about women, perfume buyers or audiences across cultures.
Cinematographic discussion should consequently begin with what grants the person a leading position. It should examine whether the gaze is retained, whether action exists only for a spectator's pleasure, and whether the graphic responds to or overwhelms the person. These are choices that a storyboard can make available for argument before a lens model is specified.
HomePod: space embodies experience, while the face anchors judgment
The One Club's 2019 ADC record for Welcome Home describes a HomePod film directed by Spike Jonze and featuring FKA twigs, using dance and a changing physical environment to express immersive listening. The British Arrows 2019 project record credits Hoyte van Hoytema as cinematographer. Here, 2019 is an archive year; it should not be substituted for the film's original release year.
The archive still inspected for this article places the face very close to the viewer. Behind it are colored bands extending into depth and bright areas. Facial form and skin detail remain readable; the background has a marked directional quality. A single frame cannot establish that the bands move, or identify the focal length, set construction or compositing responsible for the image.
It nevertheless permits a specific aesthetic judgment: person and space do not bear change equally. The face offers a relatively stable reference, while the environment supplies an imagining of scale beyond the everyday. Read alongside the archive's description of dance and environmental transformation, we interpret this as a world responding to a person's experience, rather than a world simply becoming prettier. In a comparable proposal, spatial transformations completely detached from the person's state could still be spectacular, while losing their connection to the subjective change brought by listening.
A directorial thesis need not demand literal realism. Music does not physically lengthen a room; experiential metaphor lets space carry an interior feeling. But the force of that metaphor and the strength of a functional explanation are different. Such imagery alone cannot establish acoustic specifications, coverage or actual listening performance in every room. A performance-comparison brief would need another kind of controlled demonstration.
For cinematographic design, the useful question is which information about the person must remain readable as the environment changes. It might be the face, a gesture, bodily position or contact with an object. The choice belongs to the particular thesis. Copying this still's close framing cannot be expected to reproduce its meaning.
How the thesis constrains technical decisions
These cases narrow our opening hypothesis into three relationships rather than three style references: what remains stable, what carries change, and whether the brand connects through function, experience or cultural context. The relationships must be intelligible together; they need not all follow literal product causality.
If the stable element is an action's assessability, cinematography may need to establish the whole space. If it is the person's agency, camera position and gaze require discussion. If it is the person as a reference within subjective experience, cinematography and design must jointly decide how much the surroundings can change before the person becomes unreadable. These are creative deductions, not claims that a particular shot size always produces a fixed psychological effect.
Technical discussion must also prevent concepts from slipping into one another. Being close to a person can mean the camera is physically nearby, that the person occupies much of the frame, or that the audience is invited into their experience. In its Signature Lenses brochure, ARRI explicitly notes that its portrait comparison changes camera position alongside focal length to maintain subject size. Its ARRI Lenses Technical Legend identifies the entrance pupil as the center of perspective. These specific passages, read for this article, are grounds for keeping camera displacement, focal length and emotional distance distinct. A close face is not sufficient to identify a lens.
This distinction changes the conversation between director and cinematographer. Inviting the audience to approach someone as a friend is a viewing relationship. Deciding how much of the frame the person occupies is a compositional choice. Finding the camera position and optical conditions that realize it belongs to testing. With the sequence made explicit, the cinematographer retains creative freedom and has a reason to reject a reference that conflicts with the thesis. Production design likewise needs to explain which surfaces, scales and graphics are integral to the relationship, rather than simply building a moodboard.
A proposed experiment, and ways it could fail
To investigate whether this discussion is more useful than mood words alone, we propose two simple previsualizations of an ordinary product-and-person scene with no hazardous action. One brief would give only adjectives such as freedom and immersion. The other would specify the stable element, the variable element and their brand connection. Product, performer, location, duration and production resources would remain the same. Camera, performance and setting proposals would be recorded for comparison. This experiment has not been conducted and has no results.
People outside the production could first describe what changed and what the product did within that change. The creative team could then assess which cinematographic choices can be explained by a shared reason. This might reveal an unreadable relationship. It would not directly measure sales or long-term brand memory. Differences in creators' skill, previsualization polish, familiarity with the cases and question wording could interfere. If the explicit brief merely makes the image rigid and removes surprise, the framework needs revision. Clarity is not the only value, and rules should leave room for contingency.
As the starting point for this series, we understand the director's visual thesis as a creative agreement that a work can challenge: decide why the image needs to change this way, and specify the relationships for which cinematography, design and performance should coordinate. It does not require copying a famous director's surface or enlarging the product. It requires the team to explain why this particular change belongs to this particular advertisement.
For the production context, see ONCE's commercial production overview. If you are developing a directing proposal, bring the brand materials, one critical action and the current references to a project conversation with ONCE, beginning with the relationship you want the image to express.
Sources and research note
Sources checked October 4, 2026. Access without a login or proxy from mainland China was not tested for overseas sources. The Chinese edition retains identifiable institutions, titles and dates without adding unverified overseas links.
- Volvo Trucks, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Volvo Trucks perform world-first stunt, November 14, 2013. Official release in the brand newsroom hosted by Cision.
- Volvo Group, Behind the scenes of The Epic Split, December 8, 2017. Retrospective driver interview.
- KENZO World official page: brand context, eye graphic, choreography and performer information; no publication date displayed. MJZ, Spike Jonze's Kenzo, The New Perfume project page and project still. An image upload directory date is not treated as the film's release date.
- The One Club, 2019 ADC Welcome Home record, description and still; British Arrows, 2019 Apple, HomePod, Welcome Home credits.
- ARRI, Signature Lenses brochure, More perspective, more creative choice section; ARRI Lenses Technical Legend, entrance-pupil explanation. Specific technical passages were checked; manufacturer promotional judgments are not adopted as aesthetic conclusions.
This is an original comparative work analysis and creative research article by the ONCE Editorial Team, without academic peer review. The original commercial concept cover depicts none of the analyzed advertisements, client projects, production sets or experiments. No third-party film stills are republished here.
