I have this song in my head, you know that Mr. donut ad they brought out in the late 80’s?
“Hey Mister that’s a Mr. donut donut”
I feel like I’ve been transported back in time as I was making some fake ice cream for the shoot the night before.
This was my first Mr. Donut job and schedule was pretty tight. We didn’t have time for a preprod and I was glad that Jen was able to give me good direction to what we were going to do. I’m just lucky that I was working with very familiar artists I’ve known for years — Jen Lapira, graphic designer and a fun obsessive compulsive; and Allan Tuazon, our image-captor with the giant camera and all the set-ups I’ve always envied. Call time was 11am, but since this was the first time I was going to Allan’s studio (yes, we’ve always worked at the CACS halls before), I didn’t want to be late. I had my set-up done by 10:45am and I was already sorting some corned beef before the R&D and Marketing Managers came to the studio.
Jobs like these make me wonder at the fact that these food images are made with hours of preparation…sorting, picking, cleaning, enhancing, painting, molding on the foodstylist’s side… lighting, getting the coorect exposure, shooting, composition on the photographer’s side…looking, deciding and approving on the client’s side …and we’re not even in post-production yet! And yet, sometimes we take these images for granted, not that very many people stop and REALLY look and scrutinize the food’s styling, lighting, composition…because of my job, everytime I see food pictures like posters and stuff… I always stop and stare. It makes me look so hungry all the time, atleast to other people.
Going back, the meatie buns consisted of the most perfect looking buns, cheese sauce, nice corned beef, patience and a few dabs of oil. We made 2 versions of it, and it will be up to them entirely which one they want. The best part was being able to munch on the Cheezy Corned Beef Meatie Bun itself which was a great snack I must say. Allan did his magic on the lights and camera, the R&D watched me if I was doing things over the top, and the Marketing Manager & Jen were there to decide whether it was good. It’s nice to be able to hear everyone’s input to make the picture we can possibly get. I also had it creeping in the back of my mind that they had a standard (the corned beef meatie bun peg which was styled by a different stylist) to follow. Which made things both easier and harder at the same time.
Our second layout was a fork with a chunk of corned beef, with a glorious plate of corned beef in the background. For this shoot, I was very glad that I had a bunch of products to pick from, and I wasn’t waiting in front of the oven, cheering my food on (check out my previous post). In this case, I did some sorting to get the perfect corned beef.
For the very interesting and summery ice cream donut-wich, I brought out my fake ice creams from Allan’s fridge and got into forming and texturing. I picked out beautiful donuts for this one, and carefully added the toppings to the direction of their R&D.
All I can say is that Ms. Denise and Ms. Cindie were right — no job is too easy.
Especially when you’re going for perfection, especially when you’re deifining what it SHOULD be.
The shoot finished at around 8pm. With all smiles, I got my stuff together (I didn’t have my assistant, Ray with me for this one), cleaned up my utensils and said bye to Allan, Jen and the very refreshing staff of Mr. Donut (they were mostly my age!). Can’t wait to see how it looks!
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