This week's hotshot comes courtesy of FFL Paris. The agency has recently won the Wrangler account and this spot, Humans, is the first offering in what could be a return to form for the denim brand.

The dark, mysterious and ultimately sexy spot was shot by American artist/photographers Ryan McGinley and Tim Barber over two nights in New Jersey, and features a succession of models placed languorously amid scenes of nature. It's almost like a wildlife film where the humans are the animals but then that, as Fred and Farid, executive creative directors at FFL explained, is precisely the point.

"It's about the animal spirit, the roughness, the instinct and the natural elements of the brand," explained the duo. "We wanted Wrangler to claim the animalism of humans. We believe that denim allows people to feel freer, more natural. When you wear a suit and a tie you're more restricted and also more likely to be careful where you stand or sit whereas with denim, you're freer and you can go where you want, sit where you want and get dirtier."

Winning the account, said Fred and Farid, was fantastic because of Wrangler's rich advertising history and because of the brand's own place in the fashion annals. "It's such an iconic brand," they said. "A very famous and very old brand that did really successful work with people like Fredrik Bond, Jonathan Glazer and Spike Jonze, so if you look at Wrangler's showreel, they have done some really interesting things in the past."

But of course, the past is the past and Wrangler, believed Fred and Farid, had kind of lost their way over the last few years. They didn't want to jettison everything that had gone before though and knew that, in America at least, Wrangler is synonymous with cowboys, but that that might not play well in Europe. "You have that heritage and you can't deny it, good or bad," Fred and Farid commented. "That heritage can be a hard thing when you take on such a brand, to understand what it means to different people in different countries. In America, Wrangler is still very much linked to the cowboy cliche and that's something very strong, but also very dangerous because it's not appealing to the youth in Europe. So it's difficult because you take a brand that had this heritage, and still does in America, but you can't deny it - you have to start from where the brand is."

Thus emerged the concept, or rather the statement as the pair refer to it, of We Are Animals. "We looked at everything Wrangler was and everything they'd done in the past and found a logo from the 70s," they explained. "It's the letters of Wrangler written out in the shape of a horse. It's naive in a way but we loved it and it was the starting point for us with this new platform. It led to a way out of Wrangler being about cowboys. We said to the client that it's not about the cowboy, it's about the horse, the animal itself. Keep it about the cowboy in the US but about the horse, the animal, everywhere else.

"Then we spoke about what was the best way to say it. We started thinking about cool expressions and things to say but then we realised that trying to come up with a cool expression isn't really very cool. In the end, we had We Are Animal. It's not a tag line, it's a statement."

Shot over the aforementioned two nights in New Jersey, it was far from a fun shoot, for the models at least. McGinley and Barber pushed the models as far as they could and the results are this beautiful, almost ethereal film. "Ryan's famous for pushing his models to the limit but he's so famous in the States that the models really want to work with him," said Fred and Farid. "It was two very, very intense nights where no one slept and it was really, really cold. The whole crew were dressed in North Face gear top to bottom but the models were naked. That's kind of the way we got those really raw expressions. We wanted to create our own look. They're beautiful people, of course, but it's unlike Levi's or Diesel, and they're not cliched beautiful people."

There's more work to come from the agency for Wrangler including a "less feminine and more masculine and violent" spot early next year as well as some viral work which, say FFL's founders, is less emotional and "more intellectual [and] about how everything we do is in response to one of four human instincts."

To view the Hotshot in full click here.