Glade "One With Nature"

"One With Nature" is a Glade film directed by Rick Wayne for Glade and SC Johnson. Published in November 2017, it is the earliest film in the selected work on this site.

Scent is the hardest thing in advertising to put on a screen. It cannot be photographed, it cannot be demonstrated, and the product itself is visually inert. What can be photographed is the state a scent produces, which is why the category lives or dies on atmosphere: light, texture, air, the specific quality of a room. "One With Nature" points its title straight at that territory. The film has to make an interior feel like an outside, and it has thirty six seconds to do it.

This is a director's problem before it is a design problem. The temptation in the category is to outsource the feeling to a color grade and a stock music cue. The alternative is to build the sensation into what is actually in front of the lens, so the film has something to photograph rather than something to fix later.

Its position in the timeline is worth noting. 2017 predates the Intel, CenturyLink and Android films by two to three years, and predates the Sharpie, Graco and Warner Bros. work that defines the current chapter by six or more. Wayne has been directing commercial and brand films for more than fifteen years, across a career that began in Chicago, expanded in Los Angeles and is now based in Brooklyn. This film and the Open Sound trailer, published the same day in November 2017, are the earliest surviving markers of that run in the selected work, one commercial and one documentary, which is the shape the career has kept ever since.

The film runs 0:36.