Food Photography Project: Cinema Popcorn

Background.

As a food photographer, I have a love for all things food and content - giving me lots of great opportunities to creatively brainstorm on clients’ food photography briefs, and of course, shoot them too.

A big part of applying a creative treatment to a food photography brief, is in immersing yourself in content, both digitally, and online - as well as knowing the best time to set aside an idea, that may be visually strong - but not the right fit for their specific brief.

Aside from shooting - any food photography client, collaborator, of friend of mine could tell you that as well as taking inspiration from food content - I’m a massive movie buff, and go to my local cinema 2 times a week... or around 100 times a year!

Looking to acknowledge the many tons of popcorn (and Tango Iceblasts) that I very likely consume, I wanted to produce a short-form food photography project that I could expand on over time.

Approach.

Like all of my food photography commissions, I kicked off this project with a brief - this time written for myself. The core of this was to produce three pieces of content that took direct inspiration from popcorn food photography signage seen in cinemas.

Across a few visits to cinemas ranging from ODEON, to Picturehouse and Everyman - I archived inspiration to guide me on my brief treatment.

I settled on producing one piece of branded food photography that aligns with indie, Picturehouse, another for ODEON, and a third that covered graphic imagery of the popcorn - all with the intention of being used over POS, DOOH, and OOH.

For the Picturehouse content, I soured fabric, vintage ticket stubs, and traditional popcorn boxes and painted a surface to create a scene that felt like traditional theatre imagery; for the ODEON food photography, I used a collection of grunge backgrounds, fluffy salted popcorn and orange popcorn buckets that are usually used in moves themselves.

I plan on doing more cinema-inspired food photography in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for more!