STKS to the face: directing a campaign from 15,000 km away

Before the campaign, the range

The work started well ahead of the film, with an Australian agency brought in to prepare the cultural ground. With them we worked on the range naming, the personas, the logo, the styling and the voice and tone.

That stage has a precise reason for existing. A French brand addressing Australian tradies cannot deduce its audience's codes from head office, and mistakes of register there are punished on the spot. Having the foundations validated by people who live in that market costs less than correcting a badly calibrated campaign.

Choosing a crew for what they understand

Flying Art Studios is an Australian production company whose culture is hard to sum up in a word: street and multicultural at once. We got on quickly, and our exchanges above all fed my understanding of the audience, confirming or correcting the visual codes I had started to prepare.

The selection criterion, though, was not their portfolio. Since I would not be on site, I needed a crew able to follow a written art direction and to settle as many in-the-moment decisions as possible without me. Choosing a supplier for their capacity to decide on their own rather than for the beauty of their reel is a reflex that distance imposes and that being present makes you forget.

An art direction designed not to drift

This is the project's most structuring decision, and it is counter-intuitive: I deliberately gave up on a technically ambitious art direction.

A complex setup implies constant judgment calls, and every call made far from its author introduces a gap. Along a long chain, those gaps add up and the final result no longer has much to do with the intention. So I reduced the campaign to four fundamental concepts, strong enough to give the range an identity and simple enough to survive being executed remotely: wide angles, dynamism, backlight and flares, warm-cool contrast.

To lock the look and feel rather than describe it, I produced intent visuals. Generative AI was only just becoming usable and was not worth what it is worth today, but it let me quickly build reference images that stated the intention better than a borrowed moodboard would. The choice of location was held to the same standard: on a shoot you do not supervise, approving the location is the last decision you fully control.

The casting, and the dead end that preceded it

The aim was to film tradies with a double life, the ones whose job and lifestyle do not resemble each other.

The first route, the most obvious one, failed. We looked among tradies with a following on social media, and the profiles that fitted perfectly were already under contract with SafeStyle, our main competitor in this segment. The others were not interested. With a more open deadline and a larger local marketing team, that search would probably have succeeded; neither was the case.

Casting was therefore handed to Flying Art Studios, on a criterion of consistency with the range's image and the audience's culture rather than of fame. They found what the influencer route promised without being able to deliver it: tradies genuinely leading a double life, disc jockey or professional boxer once the site had closed. And the situation should be stated plainly: on the day of the shoot, the tradies are performing for the camera. The aim was not to make a documentary but to illustrate a narrative, "24 hours with STKS", through an alternation of deliberately light work scenes, lifestyle poses and moments of afterwork or sport.

The 10 mm, or why a flat frame calls for an ultra-wide angle

The choice of a 10 mm fisheye on certain shots answers two logics that meet.

The first is cultural. The ultra-wide angle is the signature of 1990s board sports videos, a reference our core audience of tradies in their thirties reads directly: culturally young, but with means and a life built around them.

The second is optical and comes from the product. STKS frames are built on base 4, meaning relatively flat lenses, which is not the historical standard for safety eyewear, traditionally wraparound. The 10 mm compensates for that flatness: it gives the frame back a curve it does not have. This kind of lens magnifies whatever sits at the center of the frame, pushes back and stretches the background, and produces edge aberrations that isolate the subject without having to play with depth of field.

Obviously not everything was shot that way. The wide angle is reserved for a few scenes, the ones that echo the still key visuals, tightly framed on the eyewear. An effect that becomes systematic stops being a signature and becomes a tic.

A grade closer to film than to advertising

The color treatment rests on a complementary warm-cool contrast, but where it comes from is worth spelling out because it changes the nature of the work. The cool does not come from pushing the shadows toward cyan: it is brought by the setting itself, the blue site tarpaulins and the Australian sky. The warmth comes from the light and from the timber. The contrast is therefore largely native to the subject, and the grade goes along with it instead of manufacturing it.

What is genuinely a deliberate choice sits elsewhere: blacks deliberately lifted rather than crushed, and a slight halation in the highlights. That pair gives the image a texture closer to film than to advertising, echoing the board sports videos behind the whole thing. It is a way of getting a distinct character without going through a look recognizable at first glance as an off-the-shelf treatment.

The speed ramp as a tool for understanding

The rhythmic accelerations were designed at the shoot and only lightly retimed in post. Their function is not decorative, it is demonstrative, and it answers a problem of scale that this product poses more than any other.

A pair of glasses is a small object in a vast environment. Filmed close, it is legible but floats out of context; filmed wide, it disappears. Yet context here is the argument itself: without the construction site, all you see is sunglasses, and the whole proposition of the range collapses. The speed ramp holds both ends together, leading the eye from the establishing shot that sets the environment to the detail that identifies the product, in one continuous movement rather than through a cut.

One shoot, every format

The film was shot once, with variants planned in the shot list, then adapted in post to the three delivery formats, 16:9, 9:16 and 4:5.

The most useful adaptation, though, is not spatial but temporal, and it was anticipated at the writing stage. The thirty-second edits were built by placing the workplace shots first, then the lifestyle shots. That order is not narrative, it is functional: it allows the film to be brought down to fifteen seconds by cutting the end, which then yields a strictly professional version, usable wherever the lifestyle register is not appropriate. Deciding the order of sequences according to future cuts costs some thinking upfront and avoids a complete re-edit downstream.

Inspiring on one side, reassuring on the other

The setup follows the methodology applied at Bollé Safety, that of a clean separation of registers. The awareness campaign addresses the general public in an inspirational mode and does not try to convince on technical grounds.

Alongside it, a series of reassurance assets covers the sector's needs: distributors to be convinced, EHS managers and end customers who have to justify an equipment choice. That material talks product benefits and compliance, in a register the campaign could not have carried without distorting itself.