The Creativity Used in Making Fast Food Commercials

Business Insider visited The Garage at Industry City in Brooklyn, New York, to talk with food design experts Steve Giralt, Brett Kurzweil, production designer Paola Andrea Ramirez, and rigger Matt Huber to learn the immensely wild and creative ways fast food commercials are shot, particularly when the budget is low, and timeframes are short.

takes dozens of people, expensive robots, and fancy cameras to bring a fast food commercial to life. But they use real food on set, so they work against the clock to film each take before it starts to wilt.

We previously wrote about Giralt’s deconstructed hamburger with all the fixings in 2016. Giralt and his team still use robotics like this to get the shot they want, particularly when they can be built in-house.

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.

Here’s Giralt’s video from 2016.

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.