Case Study: The Curators
by Clare Cassidy
Taking your food brand to new heights
The Curious Crab team love one thing more than filming, and that’s eating. Once we’ve bagged the last shot of the day it’s a race between the team to get to the food first! Arthur, our camera op and self-styled inspector gadget, usually wins but sadly there is one person always lagging behind. That’s Chris, our head of creative and only vegan on the team. Chris doesn’t often get an opportunity to partake in our feasts, so when The Curators commissioned some brand videos from us, he was leaping for joy. The Curators produce a line of vegan products that really deliver on flavour. Mushroom burger for dinner anyone? Once you’ve tried theirs, you’ll never go back to boring old beef.
The brief was to make 30 second brand videos showcasing The Curator’s Mushroom Burger and Mushroom Meatballs. Aimed at parents who want to tick the sustainability box when rustling up a quick dinner for the family, these videos had to be fun, eye-catching and delicious looking. Scouring burger adverts, we knew we wanted to create an advert to rival any popular take-out brand, but we also had to elevate it in some way, find at least one shot that would stand out from the crowd. Our executive producer, who loves to challenge us with insane ideas (exploding truffles, Johnny Wilkinson drop-kicking a fruit juice) thought a floating stacked burger would do the trick. Now we never back down on a challenge, so we set to work figuring out how to suspend a burger in air.
This is the result, and this is how we achieved it. Let’s just say it took a glue gun, some skewers, a hole in a table and many, many iterations to get it right. Ever tried to glue a flimsy piece of lettuce to a wooden stick? We have, but that’s because, as a video agency for food brands, we love to go the extra mile for our clients. The next challenge was to perfect the saucing of the burger. We shot this five times. Each time the sauce was extremely uncooperative, but we finally got that magic moment when it oozed onto the burger and dripped delicately down the front of the bun at just the right angle.
The eye-catching moment for the meatballs would be achieved with some flying meatballs and a probe shot of the sauce being dolloped onto a meatball sub, using our Laowa 24mm F14 2x Macro Probe Lens. Its shots like these that really elevate a video. They take time and a lot of plotting but are always worth it in the end. The probe shot requires a lot more lighting than a normal shot, and a very steady hand. Matching the timing of the camera push- in with the saucing of the meatballs was loads of fun, time consuming, but fun nonetheless.
The final element was finding a way to bring the product into the video. We decided to recreate the packaging photo in the last frame, and then transform that into the product at the end. This took a lot of detailed graphic work, but at the end of the day it’s an effective and seamless way to bring the product in. The end result: the videos were a great success, and the burger advert is now a TVC. Great for us and great for the curators. Just one way hiring a video agency for your food brand can really take it to new heights.