BBH Skip to the Beat for New Online Campaign

Detergent brand Skip has taken a different approach to advertising a laundry product by launching an interactive music video which concentrates as much on fashion as fabric cleaning.

Created by BBH London and shot by Luis Cerveró through Blink, the two-minute film, called Dance, is set to Janelle Monáe’s Tightrope (The Solo Version) and features a group of dancers performing a tightly choreographed routine.

When viewing the film online - which you can do by clicking right here - it becomes a interactive experience with the audience invited to instantly change the dancers’ outfits with just one click. Expert tips for caring for each garment are then seamlessly integrated throughout. 

As the making of video [top] shows, the entire film eschews the use of post production with the team instead opting to shoot the entire film in-camera.

"When Skip approached us and said they wanted to talk to women who love clothes, and not just women with children, we realised we had an interesting opportunity," says BBH's Carl Broadhurst, creative director on the project.

"It seems so obvious really but when you look at the category, nobody had done anything like this before. We wanted to create an experience that felt celebratory and fresh like a pop promo, so no kitchens, no science bits and definitely no white sheets hanging on a washing line."

Agency producer, Chris Watling, says that the hardest part of the project was making each shoot of the film, with the dancers in different outfits, exactly the same. "Luis was clear from the start that the effect should be achieved entirely in-camera," says Watling.

"This brought a huge production challenge; it required that everything - choreography, positions of dancers’ limbs, camera movements and lighting - had to be EXACTLY the same from one film to the next. If it wasn’t perfect, the effect would be lost and the whole project would fail.  

"Cue a painstaking motion-capture and pre-visualisation process," Watling continues, "a program of intense choreography training (the dancers at times feeling like they were in a bizarre recreation of Whiplash) and a typically temperamental motion-control camera...it was a lot of work, but we’re all thrilled with the result.