Your skin is amazing. So too is "Sea", Vaseline's newest brand spot from BBH, New York. Channeling the work of guerilla photographer Spencer Tunick, the spot assembles hordes of naked bodies into undulating masses, representing skin and its amazing and versatile qualities.

As the cornerstone of a larger campaign for Unilever's respected but flagging brand, "Sea" sets the stage for various executions that present skin through metaphors - in this case, bodies as skin.

"What we realized was that Vaseline was a good brand, everyone had goodwill towards it, but it's kind of fallen behind. We thought we could turn that to their advantage," says BBH group creative director Kash Sree. "They're not about fashion or making skin beautiful, they're about making skin healthy. So if it's got nothing to do with skin being amazing then we're not interested."

Touting Vaseline as above fashion and trends was appealing to the client. Still, the process of getting Unilever on board with BBH's ambitious concept took nearly a year according to Sree, not least because the self-described epic splash carried a production price tag of over $3 million. "When they first saw the spot they saw it could be epic, but at that point they had about a third of our budget," says Sree, crediting client Steve Miles for trumpeting the idea. "What we said at that point was Vaseline needs to do something bold and different. Steve said, 'I don't want to go back to the old way of doing things'."

Additionally, because BBH won the Vaseline account in Oct. 2005 without a pitch, the agency didn't have an opportunity to position the brand for the client. "We were writing brand books for them in parallel, which helped put all this in context," says Sree. "We said to them, 'We don't want you to be a beauty product; in fact we want you to make beauty products seem superficial'." This insight greatly informed the copy of the spot, which espouses facts about skin's attributes: It heals itself, it's waterproof yet emits water, it contains 300 million cells.

These characteristics, of course, had to be conveyed visually, which resulted in stunning imagery from director Ivan Zacharias, who completed the job through his US prodco Smuggler. Utilizing close-ups or long shots to distort the images, a wave of bodies and arms illustrates how skin is constantly growing; to demonstrate its ability to heal itself, bodies repel and then reconnect; and clusters of bodies represent how skin defends against disease.

Capturing these evocative shots was a feat unto itself. Filmed in Iceland and Barcelona, Zacharias was faced with several challenges. Most uncomfortable were freezing temperatures in Iceland. That, coupled with the reticence of Icelandic locals to bare all meant certain things had to be fudged.

"The locations in Iceland were very beautiful but the weather was very bad so we didn't manage to shoot everything. And we had problems getting enough people. It's so small there that a lot of people know each other and they're shy to get naked in front of each other," says Zacharias.

"We had a revolt, it was so cold and raining," adds Sree, noting that extras were huddled in "armless duvets" during breaks and that some extras refused to return following a lunch break. "It was nighttime, we were on a black beach and it was about 0˚ Celsius with the wind chill. They were heroic and in the end they came around."

The dwindling numbers of willingly

naked actors meant that for many of the Icelandic scenes the masses of bodies needed to be created by shooting extra plates and by digitally augmenting the crowd.

This desire to create greater masses proved a point of contention between BBH and Zacharias. "Once we started shooting we realized that he had a slightly different vision than ours - but a significant one," says Sree. "One of the things that did happen throughout is that we kept trying to get Ivan to move the people closer together and he'd say no, no, no. I suspect he thought it was more about the humanity and the human condition. We saw it as more of this mass of people together, so you forget they're people and you just see them as this entity. I don't think that aspect of it impressed him. We had some discussions about that and we started putting more people in it."

Unfortunately, this was not the only sticking point and Zacharias was not terribly amazed with the final product. "They changed the music, they changed the voiceover and it gives it completely the wrong tone," he says. Zacharias' vision involved a much more informative, documentary-style voiceover than the more poetic version the agency chose. "It was basically all finished. We shot everything that we said and then it started to change in post."

Still, anyone outside of the inner politics of spotmaking will be unlikely to fault the final product, which is unlike any skin care commercial in recent memory. Not least because of its artful but blatant depiction of naked skin.

"It will be customized for each market. We were talking to the TV stations in the beginning because we knew it was such a big investment that we had to get that cleared up front," say Sree. "Nudity is the issue; if it becomes sexual it's a worry. CBS said they couldn't commit to anything until they saw it. They saw it and said absolutely no way. We're trying the main networks and we're re-editing for ABC. But NBC said they'll run it as is. That was really nice." Some might say, amazing.

BBH http://www.bartleboglehegarty.com
Smuggler http://www.smugglersite.com
Stink http://www.stink.tv