MENU
It’s not often you get to spend a day throwing food at people!
Nutracheck is a nutritional science and calorie tracker app which helps empower its customers to get and stay healthy.
We pitched 6 different ideas, and after a bit of research and storyboarding decided together on this beauty. We actually created a sample film from stock video and photos with little arrows and bits of text to give them an idea of the concept.
We found, of all things, a disused yoga studio and turned it into an office for the day with a full set build. Our cast were absolute troupers, which helped as we spent a day hurling various foodstuffs Yoghurt, potato salad and couscous at them (it’s cool, we were gentle!)
The concept was to show people taking back control over what they put in their bodies, from being terrified of the upcoming lunchtime and not knowing what’s in the food they eat to being fully in the know when it comes to their nutrition.
Despite the run time being just 1 minute long we wanted to give a sense of character to everyone shown, with one office worker gamely bopping along and conducting an invisible orchestra whilst listening to music on her headphones, another fitness freak jogging at his standing desk and 1 guy tending to his rock collection!
For the shots with food flying into people’s hands, desks and laps we considered CGI but then someone remembered an old-school Hollywood trick, used to show people being hit with arrows. You’d start the shot with the arrow embedded in their chest, then pull it out in one big yank before reversing the film reel so that it seems to fly out of their chest. We learnt into film heritage and did just that, tying see-through fishing wire onto various food items and then pulling them away, after a bit of trial and error the effect worked a treat (we cheated a bit and used CGI to remove the wire in post production where it caught the light) It’s brilliant that a trick from classic 1920s cinema still works wonders today!
As you can imagine, the clean-up operation after hurling food around all day was pretty immense, but we left with a great deal of satisfaction, and Nutracheck loved the film!
