Christopher Masto › Likes

You know how in commercials and ads the milk in cereal always stays pure white? It's because they use Elmer's glue instead of milk. Also, those sesame seeds are superglued on. - Mark Trapp

-la la la i can't hear you- .........please let me be delusional =( - Mona Nomura

It's amazing how your fast food orders normally don't look even remotely close to the way they're advertised. I can't think of any other product where that is acceptable. - Robert DeBord from twhirl

maybe i'll do that next time: HEY, my food doesn't look like the pictures! - Mona Nomura

oh, mark! never heard about the sesame seeds. Eeek. Hee. - edythe

Oh yeah Polly; they're individually placed. The bacon looks so crispy and shiny? It's shellacked. - Mark Trapp

What is shellacked..? It doesn't hurt the bacon, does it? - Mona Nomura

Mona, it's the glossy resin-based finish that you put on wood to protect it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Mark Trapp

The company that makes all those fake products is called Comp 24... they are located in Burbank (yay) across from the Empire Center. http://comp24.com/ They shared a building with the creative firm I worked at. - Brandon

Brandon, do you know what they make them out of? It's not really food, is it? Shellac soaked food :( - Robert DeBord from twhirl

Ads for Subway subs look like they have enough meat in them to feed an Army platoon. Same for most fast food ads. It should be against the law. False advertising. It is the same as bait and switch as far as I am concerned. - Michael Tefft

Michael, check out: http://www.diet-blog.com/archive... Food stylists, as they're called, don't think it's deception because they are only compensating for the "extreme" conditions of a photo shoot. The fact that your food doesn't look like the ads is not their problem, but an unfortunate byproduct of underpaid workers preparing your food. - Mark Trapp

Robert, it's real food "treated" to look perfect. - Mark Trapp

have you guys seen the japanese plastic food? hold on, i'll post pictures - Mona Nomura

@Robert ... none of it is real food. Everything is pretty much made out of resin or foam. If the prop is to be used on a tv-spot it is colored treated differently. Because of the high-cost of each prop most of them are made for tv-spots and then color-corrected after photo-shoots. - Brandon

I used to work on photo and film shoots. First rule: Never eat anything you've taken a picture of. - Oldengrey (Jay)

Jay: what was the most 'creative' thing you saw? - Mona Nomura

Either burgers look good to me. - €€€€€€€€

i am now craving a whopper - Mona Nomura

...with cheese - Mona Nomura

xtra mayo - Mona Nomura

but to be fair - the picture on the left is a professional picture the pic on the right is an amateur picture. - Harry Myhre

hence pulitzer caliber! - Mona Nomura

It's called "styling". There are rules, and you can't really do anything that is "deceptive". We used to put marbles in noodle soup so the veggies would sit pretty on top. We didn't "add" veggies then per se. The perfect grill marks on those chicken fillets were done with a curling iron. The steam rising is made from some weird chemical that makes smoke. We used to put 30w motor oil on pasta so it would roll nice onto the fork. Some stuff wasn't really cooked so and was painted and color corrected. - Oldengrey (Jay)

The worst when was we had to take macro pictures of dry dog food. Styling happens in all commercial photography -- fashion, auto, even computers. We did a lot of trickery when we shot launch videos for Apple. Kinda makes you want to buy, doesn't it? ;) - Oldengrey (Jay)

Jay that is AWESOME! I saw a documentary (in Japanese) a while back about food styling and they did some crazy things... but because of my old age I totally forgot. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. MAN I love FF! - Mona Nomura

Mark: I think the elmers glue and super glue might be apocryphal. Heavy cream for cereal works fine. Super gluing sesame seeds takes too much time and you can see it up close. We threw away a hundred buns to get 1 good one. Huge amount of wasted food on shoots. The saddest waste was when we had to do beer pours, hundreds of bottles of beer -- 50 gallon trashcans full. It's weird what you end up learning if you live long enough ;) - Oldengrey (Jay)