Why Food Commercials Cost Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars | Big Business | Business Insider

there's a bustling operation behind the fancy cameras of food commercials it takes dozens of people and a few customized robots to make a burger look this juicy oh nothing here is simple as far as the work we do is incredibly complex very technical has filmed commercials for big Brands like Hershey's Heinz and Pepsi through his production company the garage and there's a lot of money on the line filming one 30 second ad can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and they're working against the clock because they use real food which doesn't stay pretty for long that's the misnomer about everything baking makes things harder we visited Steve's studio in Brooklyn New York to see how his team films the perfect burger today Steve and his team are working on a test shoot for Burger King they'll use it to try and land the client yeah good Brett Kurzweil is a veteran food stylist it's his job to make the burger look like a Whopper he usually has a budget of a couple thousand dollars and he always buys a lot more than he'll use so he can pick out the perfect looking bun Patty and veggies then he gets to work but he doesn't cook the meat all the way through because I didn't want it to shrink too much I wanted to get as much volume out of this piece of meat as I could get even perfect patties need final touches so he uses a colorant made of gravy darkener and soap to add a charred look he only has to paint half the burger because the camera films from just one side a mixture of Vaseline and pulverized meat helps fill in any holes and those grill marks another trick of the trade Brett heats up metal skewers and then I just pushed into the burger with the hot hot metal and it seared next he melts the cheese using a clothes steamer I just Cho I just said you're for food but I also I'm trying to um control how much comes out so I've covered up some of the holes he cuts the onions and tomatoes on a slant so they lie flatter I think you would have been a really good surge in another life well yeah my mother would have been happier some other tricks denture cream to hold up ingredients for condensation on cans we'll use glycerin yeah not that much too far too far while Brett finishes up Steve's team is making sure everything is ready on set the trickiest part is combining what the client wants in the commercial with what's technologically possible they have no idea about engineering yeah they're just like robots are cool we want a robot but since today he's working on a test shoot he just has to implement his own vision I'll be one of those people that wears the protection then he turns to master rigor Matthew Huber he says half the time he has to build the rigs completely from scratch they provide the structure for the specialized equipment that makes food dance across the screen his work goes hand in hand with the robots the robot obviously is a hugely complicated and expensive thing that's used for a lot of what we do but if you only just need a straight line movement pulling back it's easier to set up a simple machine that just does a single type of movement like these air Pistons he uses to launch food or these catapults to save on buying new parts he uses a lot of the same base pieces it's like Legos you know you just put stuff together um take it apart do something different with it the next time so we've used like a lot of these pieces probably like hundreds of times meanwhile Paola Andreas Ramirez is finalizing the set from the tables to the ketchup bottles off to the side I want it to feel real so if it's blank it won't feel like it's it's a real commercial kitchen every inch visible to the camera matters so Paula's team built this tile wall just for this shoot but they said it still felt empty so we just added this through these two floating shelves up there you plan for something and then we just have to be ready for the unexpected her typical props budget is forty thousand dollars a shoot but she can pull a lot from her Personal Collection this has been 20 years of collecting and this is like Salvation Army garage sales years and years of recording I always like to have extra so if you're shooting example a glass of soda I need to have at least six of the same glasses for quick changes if they're scratched because it's video so it's a little bit one breaks exactly so when that burger arrives it's game time I gotta go on set yeah now it's a race against the clock we have the tomatoes to Crunch the angle feels right go ahead and roll camera [Music] and push in a little bit closer all right good today they have custom built water cooled lights that don't torch the food you just you just have to have like these really hot lights that would like cook the food and it would die really quickly so like the ice cream would be like impossible to shoot in slow motion because it would just melt the second you turn the lights on but that lettuce will start to wilt in a matter of minutes hot lights or not so quick moving robots and tons of planning are essential to keep a shoot on schedule because any delay could mean running over budget the first action uses the dolly Zoom to create something known as the Hitchcock effect but the whole background is like warping around it cue the robots they're actually the same kind that build cars this robot cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it can pretty much do any move you can think of sometimes you could program the robot pretty quickly some moves take a whole day here's the second shot Steve envisioned the camera moving through a field of burgers as each gets pulled out of frame we're probably only like an inch and a half away from that burger when we land so to try to do that with people will be almost impossible it's a really complex move that the robots do really easily and they do it the same exact way every time but speed is not the only challenge every shot has to be identical if a burger is even a centimeter off or if something on set gets bumped between takes they might have to start over the surprise don't want to behave this laser helps them keep track of the Burger's position guys you might do a job where there's you know 100 takes of the same move like I think that would be a nightmare they also have to be really flexible on set there's always curve balls that happen because there's a lot of problem solving which I love that shot Steve ties all the ingredients on a fishing the robot slices the string and the camera catches the perfect drop this exact move was actually Steve's claim to fame in 2016. yeah this famous burger Drop video that went viral all over the Internet he slowly raked in millions of views across platforms and Global Publications started covering his work all that social media Buzz earned him a lot of viewers and new clients and he was able to launch the garage in 2019. the burger drop was kind of like the spark that started the path towards where we are today and now Tick Tock is like crazier than Instagram ever was for me Steve is a former food photographer but he wanted to combine his love of engineering food and video and amazingly there's a job that lets me do that it's a lot there's a lot of different jobs that my guidance counselor did not tell me about including my own today his team films 40 advertisements a year billing over 5 million dollars annually kind of feels like CGI but it's actually done in camera and I think to accomplish that like larger in the Life feeling takes just a lot of technology and skill Steve says they know they've done a good job when viewers can't tell a whole production is hidden behind a shot they have no idea what we do at the end of the day it is fun for me to people for people to understand how complex this stuff is but all that complexity is worth it because there's a lot of money on the line fast food companies poured five billion dollars into advertising in 2019 and for good reason they know just how valuable the power of food suggestion can be a Yale University study found that visual cues like food ads can have an effect on food cravings another study showed visual cues can influence overeating and even weight gain and that can convert into traffic and impressions for a brand be included these Brands led the pack in ad spending in 2019 and budgets just keep ballooning in September Burger King announced it'll invest 400 million dollars in restaurant Renovations and advertising a 30 increase from 2021 which is why Steve and his team filmed this Whopper pitch hoping to hook a new client with their dancing robots and Juicy Burgers [Music] I smelled like I was at a Burger King all day

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 9,964,669

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, Big Business, Money, Expensive, Commericals, Food, Photography, Mechanics, Technology, Robots, Burger King, Fast Food, Sandwiches, Burgers, Crafting, Production

Id: FBP-DxfZCgo

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2022