Product photography, food styling and film for a premium Japanese knife brand, Acton Town, London

The business

Global Knives are premium Japanese kitchen knives, made in Japan and known for one thing above all: they are very sharp. In the UK they come through Grunwerg.

What they needed

A launch for Global Elements: four ranges at once, Fire, Earth, Water and Air.

Delivered for it: forty styled photographs, a product film for each of the four sets, an advert for each of the four, and three reels on top.

Nobody has ever craved a spec sheet. A knife is bought on feel, and a website cannot hand anyone the knife.

What I did

The knives in action, on premium food, in recipes worth watching. A knife is not an object, it is the thing that transforms the food, so I wrote a recipe for each element and cooked it, and every cut in every frame and every film is a professional chef's hand making the clean, perfect cut the brand is famous for.

Fire

Fire went to the grill and the wok: sliced sirloin, grilled aubergine, king oyster mushrooms.

Earth

Earth went vegetarian: tofu, ramen, bok choy.

Water

Water went to seafood: a mixed seafood soup, and hot smoked salmon.

Air

Air took the poultry.

Four entertaining recipe films came out of it alongside the stills, one per range.

The range is Japanese inspired, so the sourcing was too. I shopped it myself, the herbs and the spices and the tofu and the bok choy out of Asian supermarkets, the meat from butchers, matching what somebody who buys these knives actually cooks. Getting the right ingredients is not a preliminary to this kind of shoot. It is most of it.

Food styling was part of the job and it is quoted as part of the work.

We shot it in a commercial kitchen in Acton Town, London, and that was a deliberate choice. Four ranges, four full recipes, real fire and a wok going: that needs proper extraction, proper burners and the space to cook at that level. A photo studio with a hob in the corner cannot produce this food. The kitchen is why the heat in these frames is real.

What it gave them

The pictures are still on the client's own site, on the live Global Elements range page, years after the launch, and the recipe films went out on the brand's own channels.

The set, in the hand

Behind the scenes

The film below is the process from that shoot: sourcing the ingredients, building the studio, the creative plan, the tether.

Three questions I get asked

Do you cook the food yourself?

Yes. On a job like this the recipe development, the sourcing and the plating are all mine, and that is usually why I am hired rather than because of the camera.

Can one shoot cover product, food and film?

It has to, on a launch. This one produced stills for the site, a film per set, adverts and reels off the same days.

Do you shoot in a studio or on location?

Both, and the choice follows the food. This one ran in a commercial kitchen in Acton Town because four ranges of real cooking needs real extraction, real burners and room to work. A studio with a hob in the corner would have limited the food.

Launching a range? Tell me what is in it.

Product photography, Acton and West London. Global Knives, premium Japanese knives, premium kitchen knives, food photography, food styling, product styling, product video, knife photography, kitchenware photography, recipe development, product launch photography, behind the scenes film, commercial kitchen shoot.

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