product / film
product / film
Klarif has been making vegetarian, cruelty-free formulations for skin and hair since 2013. Both products here are named for exactly what is in them: binchotan oak charcoal, and medium roast coffee with sugar cane. So the shoot uses the ingredients as the set. Nothing here was lit to look clean.
01
Black Magic is built on binchotan, the white charcoal Korea and Japan have used on skin for centuries. Oak branches are burned near 1,800 degrees for days, then quenched in white ash. The bar is burnt wood, so it gets photographed on burnt wood, under a hard low key where the only things allowed to catch light are the embossed name and the edge of the box. The second frame is there to prove the thing works. A product this dark needs at least one photograph where you can see it doing something.
02
The shampoo is medium roast coffee, caffeine and sugar cane, and Klarif calls it one of their cult products. A cult product does not need to introduce itself. So the beans are not styling here. They are what is in the bottle, poured around it and then over it until the label has to fight to be read at all. That fight is the shot.
03
Three setups on one table, cut into a single twenty second film. The pour, the bed it lands in, and the bottle it ends up in. It closes on the label, because that is the part a viewer needs to carry away.