Eating delicious food is a fairly common obsession. Only slightly less common is the obsession for making food look delicious on camera. This commercial brings both of them together like salt and pepper, or (if you prefer) prime lenses and soft-source lighting.
Professional kitchens these days are a lot like research laboratories. There is plenty of extremely specialized equipment, meticulous attention to detail and cleanliness, and lots of experimentation. Coming up with new recipes is equal parts gourmand and mad scientist. It's true that for any type of cuisine there are approximately a kajillion options, give or take a zillion or two, and for Noodles and Co. that is at least partially due to the fact that listing all of the types of noodles out there is a feat you're most likely to see performed on one of those reality competition shows for bizarre talents, or read about in the Guinness Book of World Records.
For us, alongside Fortnight Collective, our "mad scientist" moment happened over a two-day studio shoot to create a series of commercials introducing Noodles & Co.'s new menu. Between the super slo-mo camera, the Fisher dolly, the probe lens, the grip jungle, several long tables of dishes and kitchen props, and eight different dishes prepared by the wizard food stylist, Gina Nistico, this shoot most definitely appealed as much to the eyes as it did the nose.
We'll spare you the trite metaphors about "adding a dash of this" and "a pinch of that," and all the other cheesy puns (ok, except for that one), and just say that in the end we all walked away from the shoot knowing the difference between "tortellini" and "tortelloni," and being able to say "chipotle chicken cavatappi" five times fast with perfect enunciation.
