Alex de Mora directs and shoots new global campaign Tough As You for Dr Martens.
‘I was approached to direct four films, and shoot stills for a new Dr Martens campaign called ’Tough As You’. The campaign needed to be about embracing imperfections in everything from the aesthetics, to the cast and the narratives of the films. I wanted to come up with something unique within my treatment, and after many days of research, I decided to pitch in the idea of shooting the campaign by manually loading and shooting redscale 35mm film.
Redscale is where the roll has to be taken out of the canister, in a dark room or changing bag and loaded back in flipped the other way around. The green and blue layers of the film essentially get cancelled out by the red layer, and the results produced are beautiful warm orange, red and yellow tones (which vary depending on the film stock and sensitivity).
From the research I had done, it seemed that this technique hadn’t had much use on a larger scale, especially within moving image. so we were really excited to test it out. I brought the excellent Ollie Ford onboard as DOP for the films and we had a load of fun and surprises in the testing process. We used black and white film as a narrative tool, to help the redscale burst into life and tell the story of all of our characters.
The brand and agency, We Are Social put great trust in us, as the process really was an unknown quantity (even a bit to ourselves) but the results, were just madness and super exciting when they came back from the lab each time.
The 4 films feature Nakhane, Sistren, Blaine Harrison and Sarah Lu. Each film is a story of pushing on in the face of adversity.’ – Alex de Mora
