99% Invisible - 205- Flying Food

Episode Date: March 23, 2016

The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact: real food usually looks pretty unappetizing on camera. It’s static and boring to look at, and it tends to wilt under the glare … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Malser watering, lemons are squeezing, and stomachs are growling. Of all the ads you see on TV or on billboards or on the sides of buses, an overwhelming number seem to be for food. This is our masterpiece. Boorshead of an gold turkey, eggs and sausage, hotcakes and butter. I see coaks in frosted glasses, fajitas sizzling on the grill. And longhorn, what's in season matters.

A guy biting into the perfect hamburger on a sesame seed bun. He can breathe in perfectly cooked. But of course, you know, in real life, these foods don't look like they do in the ads. I'm here with a question from Isabel Abem from Toronto, Ontario. She asks, why does your food look different in the advertising than what's in the store? It's a great question, Isabel. We can ask that a lot.

And if you want to come with me, I'm going to take you across the street, and we're going to find out a bit more. In 2012, McDonald's Canada put out this video about the process they go through to photograph one of their burgers. What I'm gonna do is introduce you now to Noah, who's our food stylist. And here I think that's important to note that all the ingredients that Noah uses are the exact same ingredients that we use in the restaurant. So, the video follows food stylist Noah as he painstakingly selects the perfect slices of onion and pickle. He places them on the burger with tweezers and then precisely melts the cheese just so.

So I'm just melting down the cheese with my palate, right? Then he picks up a plastic syringe filled with ketchup and applies it with surgical precision. Then they photograph this fancy burger and Photoshop it to perfection. They place a picture of a real burger just ordered at McDonald's next to the image of this stylized burger. And the difference is striking. That's reporter Danny Lewis. I would like to eat the burger that no a styled and disempled.

The other one, not so much. The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact. Real food looks bad on camera. Shooting food and even photographing food has always been fiendishly difficult in advertising. This is Terry O'Reilly. For decades, he was an ad man and he now hosts a radio show about advertising

called Under the Influence. Terry says the challenges of shooting food are obvious. First of all, food is boring to look at when it's just sitting on a plate. Because food is generally static. Then, when you subject it to the hot lights of a studio, the food starts to wilt. It's just simple science.

And so advertisers have had to constantly walk this fine line between enhancement and fakery, trying all kinds of tricks to get food to look good. For the first half of the 20th century, well after photography was widely adopted, advertisers and magazines and newspapers relied heavily on illustration. The reason illustration was the preferred method was because you could completely control an illustration.

In other words, there's no lighting issues, there's no wilting food issues. A marketer could really completely dictate what that food would look like right down to the strand of pasta with an illustrator. Then TV came along in the 1950s and 60s, and advertisers faced a whole new set of challenges. I'm going to show you how McDonald's builds a big-max sandwich. A lot of them didn't really understand how to shoot food in a compelling way. In this ad, the hamburger just sits there on the counter, while the ingredients get piled

on. It starts here with a lightly toasted bun, and then a pure beef hamburger, sizzling hot. Without compelling visuals, there'd often be a voiceover, just describing the hell out of the food. Listing ingredients, telling you how good it tasted. And a little more sauce just for good flavor. Crisp, dill pickles, and a sesame seed crown. These early TV ads relied on relatively static shots.

Advertisers would use a wide-angle lens mounted on a camera, and it might zoom in and pan a little, but that's about it. There were lots of shots of boxes and labels. The food did just normal food stuff. You might see something being ladled out of a pot. You might see, you know, a spoon serving peas at a dinner table or serving cream corn at a dinner table. So that would be the extent of the motion. On top of the new challenges of television, food advertisers in the late 60s found themselves facing new scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission was keeping a close eye on TV ads, following the now infamous Campbell Soup incident of 1968. They were introducing a new brand of soup that had a lot of vegetables in it, but the problem is the vegetables sink to the bottom.

So what they did was put a bunch of marbles in the bottom of the bowls just to hoist up the vegetables. When the FTC found out they threatened campals with legal action, the event led to a new push for truth in advertising. A lot of the old tricks advertisers had relied on in the past were now off the table. No more using glue instead of milk and cereal ads. No more substituting mashed potatoes for ice cream. But in the 1970s, food advertising took a radical turn. Food started moving. And that opened the door to all the fancy tricks we see in ads today. Shrimp, executing acrobatic flips, lobster claws, cracking open and slow motion, french fries bouncing across a table. Food wasn't static anymore.

Food was flying. And we've got one man to thank for this new aesthetic, Albert Buton. He didn't want anything stagnant. Everything was always moving. He wanted to romance the food or whatever was there in front of him. This is Harry Drennan, who spent years working for Albert Buton. That's how he met his wife, set director Jackie Kanto. I've been in the film business for 35 years, 40. I don't want to say how long. The ads that Kanto and Brennan made with Putin until his death in 1996 were unprecedented.

Working with clients like McDonalds, Burger King, and Coca-Cola, Putin invented a whole new visual language for food commercials and really pioneered the genre of advertising known as tabletop. Many of the terms and techniques that tabletop directors still use date back to Buton. For example, the prep shot, which tells the backstory of the product, showing all that goes into making the food.

You know the ones, chopping a crisp head of lettuce, dicing some juicy red tomatoes. He would make these elaborate banquet things of raw ingredients, and that was his look. And creve shots. That's when the camera zooms way in and lingers on some tantalizing bite of food on the end of a fork. Sex in a way, you know, it's almost food porn, you know, it's made it all real tactile to you. And the hero shot, a last magnificent look at the food on the plate, ready to eat. Usually in the final seconds of the advertisement.

Buton's big breakthrough was that he didn't just describe the food and promise viewers it tasted good. He made them feel actual hunger with his images. His real thing is just food in itself, its essence is really sensual. You know what I mean? If you see a hamburger commercial, you really want to eat a hamburger,

and that's the point of it, and I think that's what he introduced. And you'll never see it any other way now. Kanto and Drennan remember working long days and sometimes long nights to meet Butans high standards and to achieve his vision of flying food and mouthwatering close-ups they had to use a whole bunch of crazy tools like giant high-speed cameras that would burn through a thousand feet of film in seconds and make a ton of noise they start shooting and it was like,

whew! It was just this all day long. It was something. These cameras were originally designed for the military to film rocket tests. It was used for ballistics, but we were the first ones to do it with food. Thanks to these cameras,

Mutin could achieve super slow motion effects. He'd take a split second of time and look jury-aid in it. He'd have oranges splashed through a sheet of water. Condensation would drip down the side of a bottle. In order to get the perfect take, butan started designing strange, rube, goldberg sort of machines to help him get the job done.

These contraptions were called rigs. They ranged from simple spouts for liquid to machines that would drop pancakes into a perfect stack to catapults that would fling oranges across the studio. And sure, the production team could have just thrown the oranges by hand. But with rig, they could get the exact same results over and over, which meant fewer takes, which meant less time and less money spent. It also meant that they could achieve a certain level of precision and artistry. It was so much prettier than other people's work as far as I could see. It was beautiful and lighting. And then once he got into all the movement, I mean, he was ahead of the curve.

ahead of the curve. To see how mutants techniques are still being used today, Danny went to my Guffin films in New York. Okay, so just quick descriptions. My Guffin does commercials for Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Starbucks, and a bunch of other restaurants. The day Danny was there, they were shooting a chicken sandwich. So they are shooting a chicken sandwich. Uh, here's what it looks like.

On a black slate with a little tray of chili peppers and garlic and stuff. A hand model stands near the edge of the table where the sandmatch is displayed. So now they're doing the crowning. Crowning means the hand model takes the bun and puts it on top of the sandwich. Just presses it there, elaborately, then takes the crown off. Between shots, a guy comes on with a fan brush to brush any crumbs off the top of the chicken. Then the crayon goes back on again. You might just put the crayon back on the sandwich please.

It took them all day to film this sandwich. The whole shoot precisely orchestrated, relying on highly technical tools. Downstairs in McGuffin's prop room, there are all sorts of rigs sitting in storage, a lot like the ones that buton developed. But these are way more high tech. Riggers today use lasers and sensors and pre-programmed motors,

and depending on the shot or the rig, there can be some intense physics to take into account, like if you're trying to slice an onion in two while it's flying through the air. We break down the elements, so we know we've got to get an onion to a certain height. This is Anthony Derroberts. He's a special effects technician at McGuffin Films, and he designed a special rig just to get this shot. Everything's computer controlled, so when the onions in the right spot, these two sharp knives come through, split the onion and leave you with the sliced in the middle. And slices of onion,

artfully tumbling across a table, classic prep shot. But while Buton may have introduced rigs and action to tabletop, some directors like McGuffin's Nick Fugelstad are trying to get away from Buton's fantastical dreamscapes of flying shrimp and oranges. I think that's a little bit of an older point of view. For Nick Fugelstad, the idealized images of food that Budein tried to bring to his ads just

don't cut it in a world that's now totally saturated with food porn. While Budein's commercials often zoomed in so close to food that you couldn't see the space around it, tabletop directors like Fugelstad now frame their food in a space that you might see out in the world Like at a restaurant or a barbecue. You know when you dig into a lasagna Do you want it to sauce to go all over the place when you to taco or stuff got to fall out? Yeah, so let's shoot that You know let it the flavors mix. It's alright. It's what tastes good But the thing to remember is this on the set of a food commercial everything But the thing to remember is this, on the set of a food commercial, everything, everything is highly orchestrated and contrived, even if the ultimate effect feels somewhat natural.

Because a 30 second TV spot by a firm like McGuffin can cost literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it's got to do one thing to make it all worthwhile. Sell a lot of food. I would say the number one rule in food advertising is that the first taste is always with the eyes. So you're trying to create a shot that makes somebody's a salivate. This is Terry O'Reilly again and he's fascinated by the links people go to sell something. He tells a story about working on a commercial for a hamburger company and watching an actor do take after take, biting into a hamburger and then gazing into the camera with a look of total satisfaction on his face.

Then you cut and then there's the spit pale right beside the actor and then they just spit it right into the pale. You know, cut And you watch that happen 40 times or 30 times or 20, and it's so hilarious to me, just the mechanics of advertising. The illusion and the reality of creating it, that's exactly it in a nutshell. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Danny Lewis, Delaney Hall, and Avery Trufflement.

With Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Cherifuse, F Kurt Colestead, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Terry O'Reilly, who hosts Under the Influence on the CBC. We'll have a link to it on our website. We are a project of 91.7 KLW San Francisco in Produced under the offices of Arxine, an architecture and interiors for in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. All of us are on Twitter, Instagram and Spotify, but to find out more about this story, including

cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible. You must go to 99pi.org. Radio Tempia. From PRX.