Opening Ceremony Enlists High Schoolers to Create Its Latest Video Lookbook

For its latest video lookbook, Opening Ceremony enlists a creative collective from Malibu High School in California. These high schoolers were tasked with creating the retailer’s latest video lookbook themed around their own interpretation of love. This visual representation sees a visceral and passionate result entitled “All of Us,” featuring of course, a lot of cool clothes. Check out what the co-writer and director had to say about the video and their concept.

The All of Us short film demonstrates an insight on a very familiar experience of modern relationships: the fact that things often just don’t work out. While this may seem trivializing, it can be heartbreaking to see something beautiful become unattainable, for whatever extenuating circumstances. This is what All of Us tries to show: love and loss, memory and rumination, and idyllic beauty up close—and from a distance.

While there are several different ideas floating around within All of Us, there was very much a certain aspect of breakups that director H. Marsalis and I tried to put together when conceptualizing All of Us. This is the visceral, often anxiety-provoking experience of falling into loose strings of memory. It is the inability to get out of your own head, post-breakup, when the dust has cleared and you are left with nothing but yourself, your feelings, and your memories. This is what H. Marsalis and I wanted to put forward.

This is All of Us.

—Nolan Webster, co-writer

Film, despite the intellect necessary for conceptualization, is a visual art form whose primary purpose is to evoke empathy. It provides a perfect platform for the intimacy—as well as the distance—that is attached to love. Love in itself is a word that is colored by emotions of anxiety, ecstasy, and lamentation. When we are under its influence, life is simplified. When that is stripped away, we are left utterly alone.

This is the approach we took when creating this film: incorporating the intimacy and solitude of love. We kept most of our shots tight, drifting from episode to episode in a very dream-like fashion, establishing it as a primarily visual experience to express the idea that love is felt, not said. We infused the larger aspects of a relationship, like the first kisses and the fights, as well as the little things. When it is all over, what we end up missing most are the quiet nights alone, the inside jokes, and the “I love you”s at the end of letters. We focused heavily on colors, pulling cinematography influence from films such as Spike Jonze’s Her, and kept the acting quiet, yet powerful. We pulled mostly from our own encounters with love, attempting to bring forth, as lucidly as we could, the emotions that we have experienced. All of Us hopefully expresses love as viscerally and realistically as it has felt for us.

—H. Marsalis Adriano, director