#ACID ATTACK Beauty Tips by Reshma: How to get perfect red lips

The set is a beauty vlogger’s corner. Fairy lights strung across the top of frame, a white vanity of cosmetics, framed pictures on the wall, a lamp, pink flowers. Reshma Qureshi sits centre frame, looks into the lens, and offers to teach you how to get perfect red lips. Everything about the shot says beauty tutorial. Nothing about it says campaign.

Sixty-seven seconds later it is a petition to the Government of India. The film does not change setup to get there. It changes one sentence.

At a glance

• Client: Make Love Not Scars
• Communication partner: Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai
• Production partner: 1st December Films
• Director: Atul Kattukaran
• Year: 2015
• Running time: 1 min 7 sec
• Format: Digital film, one of three in the series
• Recognition: Cannes Gold Lion and Glass Lion, D&AD Impact White Pencil, One Show Gold Pencil, Kyoorius Black Elephant

The brief

Concentrated acid is cheap in India and easy to buy over the counter. Make Love Not Scars, the survivor charity founded by Ria Sharma, wanted that stopped, and needed signatures on a petition asking the government to enforce rules that already existed.

The difficulty was never the argument. The argument is obvious the moment anyone hears it. The difficulty was audience. A film about acid attacks is watched by people who already care about acid attacks. Everyone else scrolls past, because they know what it will ask of them before it asks.

The idea: borrow an audience instead of asking for one

Beauty tutorials are among the most watched things on the internet. Millions of people go looking for them on purpose, which is the exact opposite of how a public service film usually finds a viewer.

So the campaign did not make a film about acid attacks. It made a beauty tutorial, and put it where beauty tutorials live. The title card reads Beauty Tips by Reshma in a fine serif. The thumbnail, the length, the direct address to camera, the numbered tips: all of it is the grammar of the format, used sincerely rather than as parody.

The turn is written, not staged

The tutorial is real and it is specific. Exfoliate with a toothbrush, which she notes makes the lips rosy. Apply lip balm. Line the lips in the same colour as the lipstick, and, she cautions, “Just the lips, not the edges.” Then apply the lipstick. On-screen cards count the steps off as TIP #1, TIP #2, the way a vlog would.

Then she says you will find a red lipstick easily in the market, and lets that sentence sit before finishing the thought about what else is just as easy to buy. The film closes on the reason a girl becomes the victim of an acid attack every day, and asks the viewer to click the link and help enforce the ban on the open sale of acid. The last card is the hashtag.

Nothing about the picture changes at that moment. The set is still the vanity, the lights are still on, she is still looking down the lens. The audience arrived for one thing and is holding another, and the film never raises its voice about it.

Direction: the hardest choices were the ones not made

A subject like this offers a director every temptation. Reconstruction. Slow motion. A score that tells the audience how to feel. A reveal that withholds her face for a dramatic beat. The film refuses all of it.

Reshma is there in the first frame, lit plainly and framed centrally, at the same size any beauty vlogger would be. The close-ups sit at conversational distance and cut on the tutorial steps rather than on her scars. The inserts are a toothbrush, a lip balm, a liner and a lipstick bullet, which are the inserts this format always uses. The set is dressed with care rather than irony, because a set dressed as a joke would have made her the joke.

She performs in Hindi and the film carries English subtitles, which is part of why it travelled as far as it did. The direction’s whole job was to hold the format intact long enough for the writing to work, and to let her carry the frame while it did.

What happened after it went up

The series went live on 31 August 2015. The petition had been set a target of 25,000 signatures. It passed 2,25,000 inside the first fortnight and went on beyond 3,00,000 from people around the world.

On 8 December 2015 the Supreme Court of India directed states to enforce restrictions on the over-the-counter sale of acid. The film did not achieve that on its own and it would be dishonest to claim so, but it put the question in front of a very large number of people in the months immediately before it.

Make Love Not Scars has since been candid about the distance between an order and its enforcement, which in this case remained considerable. This is honest work on a problem that is not finished.

Reshma Qureshi went on to walk at New York Fashion Week in September 2016, the first acid attack survivor to do so.

What it won

• Cannes Lions 2016: Gold Lion in Film, and a Glass Lion for Change
• Cannes Lions: nine further finalists in 2016, and a Silver Lion in 2017
• D&AD Impact 2016: White Pencil, with two Wood Pencils at D&AD 2016
• The One Show 2016: Gold Pencil and two Merits
• Kyoorius 2016: Black Elephant for Best of Show, with eight Blue Elephants
• Spikes Asia 2016: two Gold, one Silver, one Bronze
• Effie: two Gold and a Silver in India, and a Silver at Asia Pacific
• Adweek: listed among the World’s Best Commercials of 2016

Fifty honours are recorded against this film, and the campaign remains among the most awarded pieces of work ever to come out of India.

What the film proves

This is the reference to reach for when a brief needs any of the following:

• a message that has to reach people who would avoid it if they saw it coming
• an existing internet format used straight, rather than sent up
• a real person carrying a film, with the direction staying out of their way
• restraint as the persuasive tool, where the obvious treatment would be dramatisation
• a single link as the entire call to action, with the film doing all the work before it

Credits

• Client: Make Love Not Scars
• Communication partner: Ogilvy & Mather
• Production partner: 1st December Films
• Director: Atul Kattukaran
• Producer: Ganesh Pareek
• Chief Creative Officer: Rajiv Rao
• Executive Creative Directors: Harshad Rajadhyaksha and Kainaz Karmakar
• Creative Group Heads and Copywriters: Geetanjali Jaiswal and Harshik Suraiya
• Media partner: The Logical Indian
• Digital partner: Hyper