A Barcelona bakery asked us for reels. Not one nice video: several, with an idea inside them, the kind people save and forward.
That brief has little in common with a product session, even when the same things get photographed. The unit of work changes: it isn’t a day, it’s a rhythm. And nearly everything that makes it work is decided before the first shot.
Before the price, understanding each idea on its own
When a list of references arrives, the useful answer isn’t an immediate figure.
Two videos that look equally simple can differ in hours, props and editing in ways you can’t see by watching them. So each reference gets analysed separately: what has to be built, what gets solved in camera and what in the edit, what needs space or a particular machine.
And when an idea depends on the client’s own premises — a bakery kitchen, a shop — that place has to be seen before it’s promised. A shot that needs height or a particular surface is decided by looking, not by imagining.
The real format of the project comes out of that, not the other way around.
The shift: content with a rhythm, not an event
One big session leaves material for a moment. A fixed rhythm leaves presence.
For a food brand this weighs more than in other categories: the business lives on seasons and marked dates, and a single shooting day never lands on all of them. Working at a cadence means each season arrives with its material already thought through, instead of being solved at the last minute.
It also changes the economics of effort. Building a set, balancing the light and finding the tone takes time, and when several pieces share an approach, that work is spread across all of them instead of starting from scratch each time. Not always: if two ideas call for opposite lighting schemes, each needs its own. So the pieces that can share a setup get grouped into the same session.
A style is a set of decisions made once
What makes ten different videos read as one brand isn’t the product: it’s everything else.
Light, palette, editing rhythm, the kind of sound, how pieces open and how they end. Those decisions get fixed at the start of the project and then held, with small deliberate variations.
The practical benefit shows after a few sessions: those decisions are already made, and the conversation concentrates on the idea for each video instead of redefining the tone again.
The ideas come from the studio too
This is the real difference between executing and accompanying.
In a continuous project, proposals can’t depend on the client having an idea every month. The studio arrives with scripts: stories that fit what the brand already means to its audience, seasons, local customs, gestures of the product itself.
Three examples from this series:
The box that opens. The first brief started from an unboxing reference: the cake box opening on camera. An everyday gesture of the bakery turned into the centre of the video.
The autumn pumpkin. A script written by the studio: through smoke, a hand in the brand’s corporate green rises from the ground and breaks a chocolate piñata. Shot with several cameras and edited from there.
The Castanyera. For chestnut season, a video built on the Catalan legend and her “seven secrets”: the brand talking about a custom its audience celebrates, rather than about itself.
And when there are two possible routes, the studio says which one it prefers and why. A client asking for ideas needs a point of view, not a menu.
Where AI generation comes in
On some shots, generating beats repeating.
The clearest example is the cake being cut. Every take of that gesture costs a whole cake: if the knife goes in crooked or the slice collapses, there’s no second chance with the same piece — another one has to be baked. Multiplying takes means multiplying product, kitchen hours and set time.
After the first session two edits of the same material were prepared: one built only from the footage, and one with the cut generated from those images. The second one worked.
The rule we apply: the generation sits on top of real footage shot beforehand, it solves a gesture that costs product to repeat, and it doesn’t stand in for the product in the shots where the product is what sells.
On where it makes sense and where it doesn’t, we wrote this.
What the brand has after a few months
A library, not a folder.
Pieces that resemble each other just enough to be recognised, that cover the dates of the year, and that can be reused: a shot made for one season later serves a listing, an ad or a carousel. And a way of working where the brand stops commissioning one-off videos and moves to continuous production.
Does your brand need video every month, not once?
Tell us what you publish and how often. The format gets built around that.
