The client Vigor & Sage approached us to shoot pet food and our instant association was a picture of a cat or dog in a natural environment. After talking to the client and discussing about the idea to create visually impactful images to claim the most elegant and fancy pet food in the market. The client came up with the idea to use actual ingredients and raw material to represent freshness as to conventional pet care packaging displaying the respective pet.
We wanted to make it as close as possible to human food as it can also trigger appetite to a person by looking at the packaging. We began to gathering a list of ingredients for each product to visualize the combination of the ingredients as a single entity.
We needed to make sure some of the materials were available during the season and everything has to obtained within a few days. Turkey was the hardest to get since it wasn’t the season and we are in China. We handpicked every single piece of ingredient to make sure it looked good in the photo. Getting all the material was already a big challenge and a time consuming task.
We had arranged a nice studio with some kitchen facility to operate and perform “surgical” procedure on the ingredients especially the meat. Julia the food stylist took care of this.
We set up a simple back light with a diffuser panel to diffuse the light and a reflector in front to soften the shades. I took care of the technicalities while Julia is prepping up and beautifies the objects. She faces the challenge to combine all the ingredients and merge it into a single entity of aesthetics.
The remaining items were salmon pieces and turkey. Due to the beautiful color and texture of the salmon it was easy to create a nice image so we kept it rather simple to avoid distraction of too many elements. We want the main focus to be the meat part and have the ingredients as subtle support. The turkey was heck of a challenge to cut and preserve, somehow we manage to slice perfect cuts from the entire turkey.
The client and art director were very pleased with the results. The final part was to implement the images onto the packages. The designer also kept everything rather simple and elegant to claim the most elegant and fancy pet food in the market.
This project won the WINA 2016 award for packaging:
http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/g7vZBeWEH1hUX-7LG1JCQA