Kahf Sunscreen Stick & Cream

There's a category of shoot where the concept sounds simple on a slide and turns into an engineering problem the moment you're standing on set. A man skydiving through harsh sunlight, sunscreen holding strong against all that exposure, unbothered by the wind and the altitude. Easy sentence. Then you remember nobody in the room can actually skydive indoors, and the whole image depends on a body looking like it's genuinely falling through open sky.

Kahf came in with two products this round, a sunscreen stick and a sunscreen cream, both built around SPF 50 PA++++ and aimed at men who've started actually paying attention to sun protection instead of treating it as an afterthought. Two key visuals, two completely different physical registers. One needed extreme sport intensity. The other needed the quiet confidence of a first jobber walking to work under a punishing midday sun, not performing effort so much as simply existing comfortably inside it.

The skydiving visual was where the real production challenge lived. We rigged the talent, suspending him fully horizontal in the air, wires doing the work gravity normally would, so the body reads as mid-freefall rather than posed. That's a strange thing to direct, honestly. You're not coaching an actor through an emotional beat, you're coaching a body through a physics problem, getting the arms, the leg position, the slight arch of the back to all agree that this person is plummeting at speed rather than dangling from a rig in a studio. Small adjustments in rigging tension changed everything about how convincing the fall looked, and we spent real time calibrating that before a single frame felt right.

Wardrobe added its own layer of authenticity. We sourced actual skydiving suits, sized specifically to the talent's height, alongside a real jump pack and goggles, because a costume that looks slightly wrong reads instantly wrong once a body's suspended mid-air with nothing else in frame to distract from it. Every detail had to hold up under scrutiny precisely because the premise itself was already asking the viewer to suspend a fair amount of disbelief.

Lighting across both visuals chased the same sensation, that particular harshness of direct, high sun, hard on the highlights but kept soft enough in the shadows that skin still looked healthy rather than scorched. It's a fine line. Too hard and the talent looks damaged by the very sun the product claims to protect against. Too soft and you lose the sense of real exposure the whole campaign is built to sell against. We held that line frame by frame, checking that the light told the story of intensity without ever undermining the product's promise.

What made this one satisfying wasn't the rigging trick itself, clever as it was. It was watching a genuinely absurd technical setup, a man hanging from wires in a studio, resolve into something that reads instantly and believably as a man falling through open sky, sunscreen holding, unbothered, exactly as advertised.

Indra Dipta
Photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta.