How Bodyform rewrote 300 millenniums of menstrual myths

What was the brief like from Bodyform, and how did your concept evolve from conception to completion?

Lauren Peters and Augustine Cerf, AMV BBDO: Bodyform’s brief was all about their portfolio of products. We were jumping off of the insight that their products are actually designed vulvas, like the core of their pads is curvy, and not rectangular like a lot of other brands’. From Bodyform’s vast range of products, catering for all sorts of needs, life-stages and flows, we started talking about how the world isn’t designed for us, and how little understanding we have about our own bodies.

We started thinking more about the historical injustice of it all, about ways to make it feel more collective despite us experiencing a lot of these things alone. 

We started over-sharing about all the things we wish we’d known, all the misconceptions we had from our first periods to menopause. We realised this is what our film should be about: how unprepared we are for a life inside our bodies. And its tone should be the tone with which we were sharing our experiences with each other: outrage and righteous anger, but also humour. Aug’s mother always says “you either laugh or you cry”, and we decided to go with laughter. 

As the concept evolved, we found the language of ‘it’s never just a period’ to be very resonant, and we started thinking more about the historical injustice of it all, about ways to make it feel more collective despite us experiencing a lot of these things alone. 

Why was it important to address all of these issues from a holistic perspective? Did packing so many important topics into one film bring up any challenges?

AMV: The track – Hot Chip’s Over and Over – felt perfect because it’s one thing after another. Over and over, throughout our lives, we are surprised, caught off guard, destabilised, left asking WTF? Over and over, we have more questions than answers about our bodies. Over and over, we are let down, systematically dismissed, undereducated, misinformed.

For this reason, it was important for us to include lots of experiences. And also because it’s not just about the lack of education before we start our periods – up until the menopause we STILL don’t know what’s going on. The perimenopause has like 48 symptoms, and most of us can only name about three.

This campaign was born out of 300,000 years of sighs. Because how is it that STILL, after all this time we still have so little knowledge about our own bodies.

We kind of wanted it to feel like a barrage of emotion – over and over. And, the film is a kind of maximalism in the face of the world’s minimising of us.

Our main challenge was keeping an eye on – we had to strike the balance between it being this emotional, hyperbolic, comedy-laden, metaphorical barrage that reflected how it feels to exist inside our bodies without a user manual, whilst still communicating each insight and experience properly and truthfully. Each had to land. And we didn’t want maximalism or hyperbole for its own sake either: each visual idea had to absolutely speak to the truth of the experience.

How did you achieve a balance between humour and heavy topics, and why was it important to incorporate a little lightheartedness?

Lucy Forbes: For me comedy and drama are the same thing. They walk hand in hand. It’s all about space and balance to let the joke land or the emotion hit. If you don’t laugh you’ll cry and despite the heavy subjects that we cover we wanted the ad to have a lightness and hope.

Not long ago, we’d only ever seen blue ‘blood’ in period care ads, and here we see children colouring blood onto pads! It’s amazing to see this kind of normalisation, can you talk us through the decision making behind this scene?

Lucy Forbes: It seems to me ridiculous that women’s experiences and the reality of their periods have been sanitised for so long. We all bleed. We all know what blood looks like. So why not show it. I don’t want my daughters to feel ashamed or scared when they get their first periods. I want them to be able to talk about it without fear with me and their friends. Showing it how it is, is how this happens.

Can you tell us more about the classical paintings?

AMV: This campaign was born out of 300,000 years of sighs. Because how is it that STILL, after all this time we still have so little knowledge about our own bodies. How are we caught off guard, surprised and derailed by our bodies throughout our entire lives? We wanted to articulate this sense of historical injustice in the film – hence the historical paintings, which tie the present moment back to the millions who have come before us, who have also not been told or taught anything about their own bodies.

Committing to the music and composition ahead of the shoot was nerve-wracking as it meant we couldn’t rely on exploring different emotions and tracks in the edit stage.

The artworks also had to speak to each emotion being felt in the present of the film, (all whilst ricocheting throughout time), like the drama of getting your first period and feeling like you’re collapsing/fainting, the boredom and frustration of waiting for your period to come back post-pill, the cosmic outrage, resonating across centuries, of ‘it’s never just a period’.

What was it like working with the orchestra for the film’s soundtrack? How did the collaboration work exactly, did they compose the music before or after you’d shot the footage?

Lucy Forbes: We worked with an incredible team led by Peter Raeburn at Soundtree Music, who wrote all the musical arrangements ahead of the shoot. We wanted a physical representation of the breadth of experiences we were covering in our film - a group of musicians who reflected every aspect of womanhood, our modern day Greek Chorus. Gathering the orchestra together from multiple countries was challenging but ultimately very rewarding. Luke Fabia beautifully led the orchestra performance on the shoot day and being on set with these talented musicians from all over Europe was such a privilege and very moving.

We played with visual hyperbole and maximalism to say: no, these experiences are big, they feel this big and they are this big.

Committing to the music and composition ahead of the shoot was nerve-wracking as it meant we couldn’t rely on exploring different emotions and tracks in the edit stage, but as we know, music has the incredible power to bring us together and make us collectively feel all the feelings, and seeing this reflected in this group of musicians was an essential visual thread to our film.

This campaign had a lot to live up to after the success of Womb Stories, how did you go about evolving and building upon the themes and tone of Womb Stories in Never Just A Period?

AMV: What Libresse campaigns do is take women’s emotions seriously – giving them huge amounts of care and craft and visual attentiveness. Every detail has to feel empathetic and thought-through. With Womb Stories, the visual metaphors were based on real women’s metaphorical accounts of how they felt. With this campaign, we were coming from the angle that women’s emotions are so often dismissed and minimised, but they are real and important and true and big. So, we played with visual hyperbole and maximalism to say: no, these experiences are big, they feel this big and they are this big.

working out the precise wobble of a jelly blot clot on a plate, choosing from Pantone-like trays of discharge in all shades and colours, trying to get a dog to sit on a plate...

We also lent more into the humour and absurdity of what we experience as women, which was a tonal shift from Womb Stories. But humour is just another way into empathy, another way to understand and reflect on these experiences, together, another way to get to the truth of them.We also chose insights that we felt we hadn’t seen before, and that we hadn’t represented yet as a brand: the huge, unsung clots of the perimenopause, the pain of IUD insertions, getting your period whilst breastfeeding, your period not coming back for months after stopping contraception, the various, wonderful smells of discharge. There is still so much about our experiences we still have never seen on screen.