‘A group of oversharers’: The making of Bodyform’s ‘Never just a period’

The making of Bodyform’s latest film 'Never just a period' invited some unusual conversations in the Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO office. Augustine Cerf, creative director at the agency, describes a time when one of her friends thought her discharge smelled of roast chicken.

“She was tutoring this really posh kid in this big house in the country, and on the way, she thought, ‘Wow, it really smells like chicken’,” Cerf says. “She got there and the kid was like, ‘Oh my god, mummy’s making chicken for lunch. My favourite!’”

Anecdotes like this one bounced around the creative team, from worrying that masturbating with a shower head can cause infertility to phantom pregnancies after a first kiss. 

Nadja Lossgott, chief creative officer at AMV BBDO, describes a time when her period came back while she was still breastfeeding and how scared she was thinking about the implications. “Never just period” took inspiration from many of these experiences, including footage of a mother breastfeeding her child while changing her pad (pictured below).

These stories, alongside a study surveying 10,000 women, made it apparent “how little we know about our bodies, while we can fly humans to the Moon", Tanja Grubner, global innovation, brand and communications director of feminine care at Essity, tells Campaign.

“We are a group of oversharers,” Grubner adds, discussing the creative process. “We’ve become much closer. The gap between client and agency doesn't exist as much because you end up sharing that creative process and you have to be vulnerable to get to the insights.”

Lauren Peters, art director at AMV BBDO, describes the 145-second film as “an antidote to the research [and] knowledge gap about women's bodies”. The film takes viewers on an exploration through the taboos, mystery and beauty of menstruation, addressing the misinformation and silence around the subject. 

Jellies, giant IUDs and a ‘smorgasbord’ of discharge

Despite the campaign touching on important issues such as contraception and endometriosis, there was also plenty of fun on set. Peters recalls a time when the large, mechanical coil would take at least five minutes to reload after the spikes were deployed, meaning every take would encourage minutes of anticipation, climaxing with fits of laughter (filming for this scene pictured below). The giant coil was made to illustrate the fear many people experience when getting an IUD fitted, and how this is often shrugged off by medical professionals.

Peters also notes the time AMV BBDO enlisted the help of some “burly Serbian men” to create a “smorgasbord” of discharge and blood, in varying colours and thicknesses. “I cannot express how seriously they took their job,” she laughs, although the ingredients used to make these concoctions remain a msytery.

Grubner says that to authentically replicate these bodily fluids as well as understand what the brand’s consumers need, Bodyform asked for pictures of used products to measure where the blood lands on the pad and just how much, to ensure the product demonstrations are “authentic and real”.

Although realistic portrayals of what people experience when menstruating were important for the campaign, the agency also had fun with its depictions by taking a mixed media approach. 

The film contains a stop-motion womb, historical paintings and even a series of red jellies wobbling on a pad instead of period blood (Peters, Cerf and Lossgott pictured with jellies below). Cerf adds that there were “a lot of very detailed conversations on set about how the jelly should wobble” and that Lossgott, in particular, had some “very strong feelings about the direction of the wobble”.

“Sometimes when you're dealing with bodily fluids and anatomy, it's easier if you have the licence to be a bit more abstract with it, because then you're still landing the emotion but you're not turning people off with anything that's too gory,” Peters explains.

Direction 

Lucy Forbes at Smuggler directed the film, and Lossgott explains that they were looking for a “comedy director that could also bring to life real feelings”. She says: “It is a dramedy, and I think from the minute that we met [Forbes], she not only exuded that in her work, but in her approach to how she spoke about it and saw the film.” Lossgott adds the creative team became “giddy” after hearing about the Forbes' vision.

Grubner says: “When we saw her treatment, it was very clear that she understands the brand. She understands women+. What got us excited was this optimistic, light-hearted, positive, fun point of view that she brought to something that's serious.” 

Forbes felt like a natural comedian, according to Peters, but also brought her own experiences into the story, and was willing to lay herself bare for the campaign.

Forbes spent a lot of time in the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy and the V&A in preparation for the shoot, taking herself out on dates and photographing women throughout history that could influence the style of the film.

Challenges

AMV BBDO wanted the film to feature children to illustrate the benefits of educating them about menstruation from a young age. However, Forbes was “close to having a breakdown” having to work with this set of youngsters. There just so happened to be a lot of "group politics", as one of them in particular "wanted to be the star" and became "disruptive" when she found out she wasn’t.

The music, performed by an all-female, Greek chorus-inspired orchestra (set pictured above), was also a daunting task as it played a crucial role in the film’s narrative. Initially, AMV BBDO were going to go with something “more angry and pushy” but the shop chose to incorporate Hot Chip’s Over and Over into the orchestral music instead, as Lossgott puts it: “The lyrics of Over and Over were just so pointed, because [menstruation] never ends, and then when it ends, something else happens. Over and over and over it goes.”

For Grubner, the music was the scariest part of the process. “Music is so important for us and for all our campaigns, and when we heard it the first time, it felt intuitively right,” she says. “But when you haven't seen any of the visuals, except for storyboards, what do we do if it doesn't work?”

Lossgott says the editing complemented the music and married the visuals with the track “beautifully”. “The craft of trying to connect all of those things, both visually and in an editing sense, was obviously quite important,” she says.

For Cerf (pictured above with creative partner Peters), the biggest concern was whether people would get it. “Sometimes when you're so deep in a project, you can't see the wood through the trees. So we were like, is this going to make sense to somebody else?” 

“Always in advertising, we’re thinking about simplicity and immediate, clear communication,” Cerf says. “But we also wanted to do maximalism. It was a bit of a gamble, whether that was going to pay off because it was a slight deviation from the usual principles of making an ad.”

Cerf felt an overwhelming sense of relief when other people understood their story.  

“We craft every single thing to within an inch of its life and half kill ourselves doing it,” Cerf concludes. “Using mixed media and stop motion, things that are made with love and made with other women's hands, make you feel like this has been given care and attention, which it has.”