What better way to create publicity and get the most out of an advertising campaign than to use it not only to promote the product itself, but also to share the spotlight with young, emerging talent?


Fashion designer Giorgio Armani [2] teams up with Rai Cinema [3] creating Films of City Frames [4], a project, which is both promotional and philanthropic, which is aimed to revive the 2010 Frames of Life campaign. In 2013, the campaign [5] involved four short clips, set around a busy café in a city square with people hurrying to and fro, and unveiling the stories of five diverse characters (all wearing Armani’s eyewear of course!)


This year the initiative extends a helping hand to emerging film school talents, as the project plans to finance shorts by six selected students or young graduates at international films schools. The selected films schools are USC’s School of Cinematic Arts [6] in Los Angeles; the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia [7] in Rome; the National Film and Television School [8] in London; the Ecole Superieure de Realisation [9] in Paris; the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts [10], and New York’s NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts [11].


Each of the schools is to select a young director who will then shoot a short with the goal to depict fragments of life “that describe a city’s perspectives; that seize emotions and situations by using Frames of Life collection glasses as a perceptual filter,” states Armani’s website. The spot announcing the project is represented by a short executed by Piero Messina, a young director chosen by non other than the recent Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino [12], who not only joined the initiative but stars in the pilot film by Messina. Messina certainly lived up to Sorrentino’s expectations and delivered a solid and well carried out short using cut frames of ‘La Grande Bellezza’ [13] and Journey to the End of the Night [14], a book by Louis Ferdinand Céline as inspiration.


Having a recent Oscar winning director backing up the project was quite a clever move for Armani’s campaign and will certainly aid in the publicity around the project. “I felt that Paolo would be the best person to share this project with. He has a clear and inspiring view of reality; he captures the most exciting and poetic aspects of everyday life with a neat, contemporary style. Above all, I think that Paolo embodies the real magic of cinema, which is barrier-free language: he speaks to everyone, but with an undeniably Italian eye. And this is precisely what we wanted students to grasp: the importance of having a personal perspective,” states Armani on the project’s website.


From mid-April, the different production stages of the short films will be described online in a dedicated area at www.framesoflife.com [15] and shared on the Armani social media networks.


What’s there to add? It’s a great project, a clever add campaign and everyone involved wins… Including us: the future recipients and viewers. We are all looking forward to the completed shorts…