Mill ECD Dan Williams delves into our collaboration with Fendi, House and Holme & Lumen Lab
What was The Mill’s involvement with this project?
We were excited to work with Fendi and Luca Guadagnino, one of Europe’s most established and recognised directors and Model/Actor Adwoa Aboah. They can be seen floating through Rome in the campaign. Our central involvement on this spot was to build a contemporary Rome landscape around Adwoa in complete VFX. We wanted Rome to have a dreamy, languid feel, so The Mill replaced all the skies and re-lit the environments accordingly to give Rome the beautiful and timeless quality you see in the campaign. We did a lot of cleanup on the locations, removing satellite dishes, scaffolding and rooftops.
What challenges were encountered during production?
Due to the schedule, we had to shoot Adwoa first; this locked us into lighting and camera movement. We had to carefully plan our background drone shots to match the lenses, lighting and choreography; a separate rooftop shoot on Alexa for the middle ‘landing’ section.
Because of the very tight shooting and post schedule, the job required meticulous planning. Producer Elle Lockhart deserves a lot of praise for how she could navigate all the production demands and organised the team. The team’s care and attention can be seen in the result of this campaign.
How did the themes of this project influence the artist’s decisions?
This spot has an effortless, elegant quality, so the world we created had to reflect this. As always, effortless requires a lot tremendous amount of planning. The team supervised and led by Jay Bandish, made a soft clouds bed to give the shots a layered feel. The skies were animated and treated to provide the film with warmth and texture. The Rome plates were stabilised and re-tracked to match the studio camera moves. This combined looks and feel that can easily be seen in the campaign.
