HOSPITALITY
RITZ-CARLTON BACARA
A four-part social campaign for the Santa Barbara resort — built as one story about a family instead of four ads about amenities.
CLIENT
The Ritz-Carlton Bacara, Santa Barbara
RELATIONSHIP
2025
SCOPE
Concept, script, direction, casting, cinematography, editing
OUTPUT
Four social films · director's cut
THE SITUATION
The brief was a social campaign — four films, four amenities. Pool service, the spa, the cliffside sushi restaurant, and the grounds down to the beach. It's a familiar assignment, and it usually produces four familiar films: a well-lit montage of a facility, four times over.
The problem with that approach is that nobody books a resort because of a facility. They book it because of who they think they'll get to be there.
So we proposed something else. One story, told across four films, following a single family of five through a weekend.
And we cast that family deliberately. Leila Masterson made her runway debut as a worldwide exclusive for Givenchy and has since walked Chanel, Prada, and Versace and fronted campaigns for Tom Ford and Calvin Klein. She also has an audience of her own. Her husband Robbie is a photographer; their three kids brought the part you can't cast for. It meant the campaign could travel past the resort's own channels the day it launched.
THE APPROACH
Four deliverables, one idea underneath them.
01
Ask what it's for, first
The resort wasn't selling a pool. It was selling the version of yourself that shows up on the third day. We wrote a voiceover — Five Becomes One — so the four films shared one arc: five people arriving with five schedules and five different kinds of tired, gradually becoming one.
02
Cast it right, then get out of the way
We cast for the overlap between reach and truth. Leila has a high-fashion résumé and a following, but she's also a mother of three who wanted a weekend where nobody needed anything from her — and that's the film. Kids mid-air over the pool. A mother and son underwater, suddenly quiet. Her face in the spa, letting go of something. Leila and Robbie at a candlelit table, briefly not parents. The direction was mostly about knowing when not to.
03
Absorb the complexity
A fully operating resort you can't close, real guests in every frame, four locations across a weekend, and a brand standard with no room for interpretation. The amenity coverage the client needed still got delivered — it just arrived inside a story.
THE WORK
1. The Pool — cannonballs, pool service, and one still underwater shot
2. The Spa — Leila slips away
3. Date Night — the cliffside restaurant, ocean below
2. The Grounds — a golf cart, the beach, the five of them small against the Pacific
CLIENT
Written before the first shot. The four films were cut to it.
We came as five.
Five schedules. Five needs. Five different versions of tired.
But somewhere between the pool and the Pacific...we became one.
One rhythm. One exhale.
I forgot I was keeping score. Forgot what day it was.
[beat]
Remembered what his laugh sounds like when no one needs anything.
"Turns out luxury isn't what you have. It's who you get to be."
Closing lines — Five Becomes One campaign voiceover
OUTCOME
WHAT IT DID
4 films
one narrative arc across four amenities
1
directors cut, assembling the arc as a single film
Talent-led
cast to carry the campaign beyond the resort's own channels
WHY FOUR FILMS NEEDED ONE IDEA
Any competent crew can shoot a pool, a spa, a restaurant, and a beach. Four good-looking clips is a solved problem, and the resort could have bought that from anyone.
What they got instead was a reason to watch the second film after the first. The pool film means something different once you know the spa film is coming, and the campaign's last line isn't about the property at all — it's about the person checking in.
That idea wasn't in the brief. Neither was the casting. Both came from asking what the resort was actually selling, and who could carry it furthest.