Thorne Healthy Aging

2022

Through a novel combination of painting, live-action, and 3D, we told told a poetic story about healthy aging for Thorne.

Visual Poetry

Steering away from traditional supplement commercials’ obsession with “anti-aging,” we focused instead on an aspirational view of healthy aging that delivers a holistic lifestyle, rather than a cure.

Playing with scale and surrealism, we created a set of sublime environments for real people to inhabit as we told our story. The painterly textures and serene natural landscapes feel like a natural extension of the visual language that had been explored in our previous work for Thorne.

3D as a Means to an End

The paintings themselves set the tone for each of the scenes, meaning the 3D elements needed to feel integrated and embedded with each landscape. Matching lighting between the painted world and our 3D objects helped to unify each environment. As well as modeling the products, we also used 3D to bring depth to landscape elements in scenes with dynamic cameras, adding parallax and a sense of depth where it was needed.

For non-product elements, like the blossoming flower, we used painted textures to break up some of the precision.

The Product as Support

Product moments were designed to feel like animated still-lifes: quiet and reflective moments, playing with the idea of passing time.

Discovery: Where we started

Our starting point was loose painting exploration —playing with ways to integrate humans and objects in natural landscapes in a way that pushed scale, lighting and saturation.

We took inspiration from Surrealist masters like Magritte & Dali, as well as Romanticists like Caspar David Friedrich, where landscapes tell as much of a story as the people and objects within them.

Cutting together footage of the natural world showed us locations for exploration and started to give us a sense of pacing and camera movement.

We also used some cutting edge machine learning (EBSynth) to apply our painted style to some complex elements, like clouds and water.

Live Action

Much like with the 3D, we wanted the live-action talent to feel natural within their painted environments while still feeling intentionally “real.” We kept brush strokes and texture on elements of the environment and instead unified people and background through light and color.

Our shoot involved live-keying actors on top of paintings so that lighting could be angled and adjusted in real-time.

The cast reflected different moments during the journey of growing older—different ages, body shapes and genders.

A Story Built for Social

As well as a standard widescreen format, we knew we would also need to deliver square and portrait aspect ratios.

We designed with this in mind, making sure that compositions could be cropped in multiple ways, and could accommodate typography as needed.