Why We Didn’t Film a Perfume Ad

From an Idea to a Million Views: Creating Afnan’s First Brand Film From Scratch. There is a traditional way advertising films are made. A brand briefs an agency. The agency develops the idea. A production company is brought in to execute it.

But sometimes, the process starts much earlier. It starts with an idea.

When we first approached Afnan Perfumes, the brand had never produced a film of this scale. There was no agency brief, no storyboard waiting to be executed, and no established creative direction to follow. Instead, we approached them with a concept we believed could position the brand in an entirely different way. And from the beginning, we knew we did not want to make it like any other perfume advertisement we were accustomed to seeing. The Plan That Took Us Across Borders Perfume advertising has developed a distinct visual language, particularly in the Middle East. Luxury settings, striking talent, dramatic lighting and imagery associated with the region have become familiar elements of the category. There is nothing wrong with that approach. But when brands begin speaking in the same visual language, creating something memorable becomes increasingly difficult.

For Afnan 9PM Elixir, we wanted to take a different route. Rather than creating a film that felt specifically tied to Dubai, the GCC or even the Middle East, we wanted something that could belong anywhere. The ambition wasto create a cinematic and timeless story that audiences would connect with before they even thought of it as a perfume advertisement.

Afnan’s CEO connected with the idea, although taking an unfamiliar creative direction naturally came with some hesitation.

That meant the creative process became collaborative from the very beginning. Casting, wardrobe, art direction, locations and the overall visual identity were discussed closely throughout pre-production.

Our role was no longer simply to produce a film. We had to protect the original idea through every stage of production and make sure the vision we had discussed on paper survived all the way to the screen.

Why We Looked Beyond Dubai As the concept developed, we realised that the location would play a crucial role in creating the world we wanted.

Dubai was an obvious choice. But that was precisely why we decided against it. We wanted the audience to enter the film without immediately knowing where they were. The setting needed character, history and texture. It needed to feel romantic and timeless without belonging too clearly to a particular market.

That search eventually led us to Saint Petersburg. Its architecture, streets, interiors and atmosphere gave us the ambiguity we were looking for. The city could provide a distinctly cinematic European setting without making the film feel like it was trying to sell a particular destination.Of course, choosing Saint Petersburg meant asking the client to take another leap of faith.

They were already trusting us with an unconventional creative direction for their first brand film. Now we were proposing to take that production to another country.

They said yes.

No Backseating, Just Us & Our Equipments

One of the most significant aspects of the production was what wasn’t there.

There was no agency representative on set. There was no client team behind the monitor reviewing every frame as it was captured.

Our production team travelled to Saint Petersburg, handled the local casting, secured the locations and executed the film based on a vision that had been developed months earlier.

That kind of creative freedom is exciting, but it can also be intimidating.

When the client isn’t physically present, there is no immediate reassurance that a The shot is working or that the film is moving in the right direction. Every creative The decision rests on the team’s understanding of the original idea.

The first time the client would see the film in its entirety was when we sent them the first cut.

There was, admittedly, more nervousness around that moment than we would probably admit. Then came the response.They loved it. There were no major creative changes. No request to make it safer or pull it back towards something more familiar. What they received was the film we had promised them.

A Million Views Hit & Counting

The response after launch gave us another reason to look back at the process.

The film crossed one million organic views within its first week, generated hundreds of comments and was shared more than 2,000 times. For Afnan’s first cinematic brand film, the response showed that taking a less familiar creative route could translate into genuine audience interest.

But the bigger takeaway was not the view count. It was what the project demonstrated how a production can be approached. When a production company is involved from the idea stage, it can contribute to more than execution. The creative concept, location, casting, visual language and production approach can be developed as one connected process.

Instead of asking only,

‘How do we shoot this?’

, the conversation becomes:

‘What should the film be?’

‘What world should the story exist in?’

‘How can the visual language make people stop and watch?’

‘What needs to happen during production to make that idea work?’That approach allows creative decisions to influence production decisions from the beginning rather than trying to solve them after the concept has already been finalised.

‘And That Is How We Went From Scratch To Screen With Risk Over

Reassurance On Our Backs’

The Production In A Nutshell

The Afnan 9PM Elixir film started without a brief.

It started with an idea we believed in, a client willing to take a creative risk, and eventually, enough trust for us to take that idea thousands of kilometres away and bring it back as a finished film.

For a production company, that kind of trust is rare.

And when it happens, it reminds us why we enjoy being involved from the very beginning.

Because sometimes our job isn’t simply to produce the film.