Advertising · TV commercial · Lavazza coffee
Lavazza commercial.
For the Lavazza commercial we built a dreamlike world: suspended golden bells, giant cookies, white trees with coffee beans hanging like grapes, oversize tagliatelle.
The official set
The commercial on cyclorama:
stills from the set.
The four official photos from the Lavazza photographic set — the liberty tree with coffee beans, the snow floor, the green and pink butterfly benches, the penny-farthing.
Behind the scenes
Giant food is sculpture,
not a blow-up.
The challenge of giant food on TV isn't the size: it's tactile credibility centimetres from the camera. If the cookie looks like painted polystyrene in close-up, the commercial is dead. Three techniques held together: sculpture, fiberglass, layered patina.
Hand sculpting
The cookies start from high-density expanded polystyrene blocks rough-cut with a hot wire. The scalloped shortcrust edge, the central crater where the "jam" will go, the slightly uneven surface of the bake — it's all sculpted by hand with scraper, half-moon knife and sandpaper. Each cookie is a unique piece because real pastry is never exactly the same twice.
The fiberglass skin
On top of the polystyrene, a fiberglass skin with glass mat and polyester resin seals the piece: it gives it rigidity for the crew's hands, protects it from knocks, lets it hold thick layers of paint without the colour "drinking" the polystyrene. Under the skin the piece stays hollow and very light — a forty-centimetre cookie weighs less than five kilos.
The layered patina
The paint is laid in three or four coats of colour: first the pastry-yellow base, then the gilded bake-tone on the edge, then the jam red at the centre in two successive glazes — the first for the matte material, the second for the gloss highlight that makes the cookie look fresh out of the oven. The camera light reads it as caramelised sugar.
~40 cm
diameter of the cookies, sculpted one by one
~2 m
height of the golden bells suspended above the table
3-4
coats of paint per cookie, one for the final gloss
Second life
The food stays in the workshop.
The commercial runs for thirty seconds. The shoot, two or three days in the studio. And yet the cookies, the tagliatelle, the golden bells are still all here, kept in our workshops: the fiberglass makes them impervious to time, and every few seasons they come back into use for photographic shoots, trade fairs, special installations.
The techniques of sculpted giant food have entered our workshop vocabulary alongside the polychrome patina of TV show sets and the fake stones of Ancient Rome sets: three different ways of lying to the camera, each with its own rules.
The suspended bells — the iconic piece of the commercial — often come back into our portfolio when clients ask us for "something that works as a single photograph": objects recognisable at first glance, that stamp themselves into memory in thirty seconds of TV exposure.
Tech sheet
All production data
- Type
- Scenographic set for a television commercial
- Brand
- Lavazza
- Scenographic theme
- Dreamlike/surreal world · oversize giant food · Alice in Wonderland style with liberty details
- Elements built
- Golden bells almost 2 m tall, suspended, with side wings · giant cookies, round with central jam, sculpted in polystyrene + fiberglass and hand-patinated · oversize tagliatelle plates with each ribbon worked individually · white tree stylised into liberty curves with clusters of coloured coffee beans · vintage gilded penny-farthing · multicolour parasol · butterfly benches · polyester snow
- Techniques
- Hand-sculpted expanded polystyrene · fiberglass stiffening · hand polychrome patina (three to four coats of colour on the cookies) · gold-leaf finish on the bells · trompe-l'œil food
- Backdrop
- Night-blue cyclorama · photographic-set lighting optimised for close-ups
- Our role
- Full build of the scenographic set — all the dreamlike objects, the giant food, the suspended elements came out of our workshops and were installed in the studio for the shoot
- Legacy
- Giant food, cookies, golden bells, liberty tree kept in our rental catalogue for later shoots