French studio River expands a snippet of their brilliant 2020 mock-manifesto film into a full-blown and over-the-top faux-commercial for their own imaginary perfume while gently poking at the genre’s tropes.

CD and founder Keyvan Nourian at River in Paris: “We wanted to work on a perfume advertisement concept so we invented our own fragrance and decided to play with the classic codes of the genre, asking ourselves what we could bring to it personally and what we could transgress without altering the format.

“So we started from the name of the studio and extracted a narrative that focuses on what a river symbolizes.

“A river is this bridge that connects the land to the sea, it is the necessary connection between two universes that are often opposed and yet inseparable.

“We decided the movie would combine the imagery of the sea with that of the land. So we attempted to bring these elements into dialogue, like a chef around a land/sea dish.

“The narrative is largely based on this parallelism. From the rose emerges a singularity, a drop of water, like an oyster with its pearl, which will gradually transform from liquid form to rigid.

“The perfect diamond will then be adorned with asperities such as can be observed on a coral reef. The transitions put in place are carried by a characteristic change of rhythm similar to that of the waves in the ocean, all embellished with omnipresent aquatic sound imagery.”
 

 
Production: Studio River
Director/animator: Alexandre Scariot
Compositor: Alexandre Scariot, Keyvan Nourian
Edit: Keyvan Nourian

Sound design: Keyvan Nourian
Music: Koloto