Libresse: Smashing The Patriarchy

Turning a felt vagina, paintings of nuns rolling their eyes and a daunting smear test into a masterfully funny and liberating narrative might sound impossible, but that’s exactly what Bodyform’s ‘Never Just A Period’ did.

Sure, it may have been disconcerting to some, but it was meant to be – because that’s just a window into the inner monologue that comes with navigating a period.

That it has won a total of eight awards at the British Arrows comes as no surprise. Such recognition has rightfully become par for the course for Bodyform: from showing menstrual blood on TV for the first time, to tackling the hidden challenges of miscarriage in ‘#WombStories, to highlighting the impact of endometriosis in ‘Pain Stories', the Essity-owned brand has made a name for smashing the patriarchy and binning taboos.

Following the jubilation of the awards, Rebecca Scharf, creative production partner at Bodyform’s agency-of-record AMV BBDO, breaks down the production techniques – from channelling the absurd, to creating hyperbole with Bach, and harnessing the power of arresting analogies.

Creative Salon: Talk us through the brief and how it shaped the production process

Our research uncovered that 59 per cent of women+ wish they’d been taught more about their periods. 

We wanted to make a film that reflects the destabilising experience of not having the proper knowledge about your own body – whole lifetimes spent having more questions than answers! – to represent the truth of women’s experiences and to start a global conversation, asking “What do you wish you’d been told?” 

'Never Just A Period' is about the gap between what we’re told about our periods and what it’s actually like. Because hundreds of thousands of years of human progress later, girls still see blood in their pants and think they’re dying.

Nobody prepares women+ for a life inside their bodies. This film is for anyone who has been told, “it’s just a period.” Or who’s asked themself: How do I put a tampon up there? Why does my discharge smell like wet dog? Why did nobody tell me it could hurt this much? Oh, so you can get your period whilst breastfeeding? Endometri-what?  It’s never just a period. It’s so much more. 

How did you integrate all of the creative concepts into the campaign?

The challenge on Bodyform is always to give it the richness of insight and visual texture that is such a big part of the identity, yet moving it on to be new, to be different and to be original.

The orchestra of women is where we started our production. They are our Greek chorus for periods, a thread throughout our film, commenting on this ancient tragedy. Fundamentally, the film’s conceptual emotion is a 300,000-year-old sigh.

With Soundtree we found the mood and intention of the film in Hot Chip’s track 'Over and Over'. 

Playing into how misconceptions about women’s bodies are overwhelmingly repeated, again and again and again. And emotionally-laden periods that arrive monthly, over and over, seemingly without end. To add to the dramatic, tongue-in-cheek feel of getting a period and thinking you’re dying, we lead the arrangement with Bach’s 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor'. Then, we started visually building everything around that. 

Plates of roast chicken and wet dog seem absurd in a script until you can bring them to life in a beautiful way – the depth and attentiveness of the craft allows us to talk about subjects that may feel ‘gross’ to some, like discharge and enormous clots, and treat them in a beautiful, emotional way, to take away some of that stigma. 

The film we created is a visual plethora of insights and textural beats that have been woven together to take you on a sometimes sad, sometimes funny emotional rollercoaster. It leaves you with the poignancy of all the things that you could and should have been told – and all of the things you can still tell others, changing the narrative. 

What tools did you use in the production process and were there any particularly innovative or exciting opportunities?

Having the script dictate that you’re deciding on music before you shoot, is daunting, especially for control freaks. Because when it’s music that delivers your idea and critically your emotion, there are no fancy innovations that are going to help you. Except brains.

So our relationships with our wider teams were our tools – relationships with incredible partners like Soundtree, Tenthree, 750 and Smuggler, and the brilliance of our director Lucy Forbes, and her excellent producer Claire Jones, working together and in sync to uncover the magic of 'Never Just a Period' as we went through the production process. This helped mould and shape the vision of what it eventually became.

How did you distil the key concepts into the varied range of assets, what were the challenges in doing this and how did you manage that?

It’s the most ambitious disparate lot of insights all thrown together to weave a storyline. The overwhelming tapestry and onslaught of multiple images coming at you one after another is what drives the emotion and poignancy of the idea.

We wanted to embrace the absurd chaos, so we threw musical complexity and detailed art direction on top.

And you can imagine, as a producer, what that does to the whirring brain. It’s the “How the hell do we do this?” that actually makes it so exciting. It’s what we as producers love doing, and it’s why it pays off.

Can you talk about how you used hyperbole to create the visual world we see in the film?

Playful visual hyperbole allows us to treat each experience in the film with humour – which speaks to the truth of how women actually get through all this: by laughing together – but also with seriousness within that humour: acknowledging that these experiences are big. They feel huge. And they are huge. We’re taking them seriously and giving them the largeness they deserve in a world that minimises and dismisses us. 

Hyperbole heightens the emotion. Whether that was bringing to life a giant coil with a button that you pressed to shoot out razor-spike teeth, ancient paintings made to eye-roll and sigh post, green-screening a dessert into a toilet scene, showing a wet dog on a plate (he was real and super cute), slow-mo jelly shots, or building a womb-like environment for the set of the orchestra, we used every textural trick in the book to solve each scene.

Either for real and in-camera. Wherever we could or in post. But visual craft and storytelling is everything in Bodyform’s world. They have carved a path in embracing and bringing to life the full emotional spectrum in an otherwise dull and very functional category