Navid Gornall is a creative technologist at a London advertising agency, which means that he gets to play with cool toys and make movies. That also means that he spends his every working hour trying to explain tech to non-technical audiences. Which is why he was so clearly happy to give a talk to the audience of hardware nerds at the Hackaday Belgrade conference.
After a whirlwind pastiche of the projects he’s been working on for the last year and a half, with tantalizing views of delta printers, dancing-flame grills, and strange juxtapositions of heat sinks and food products, he got down to details. What followed was half tech show-and-tell, and half peering behind the curtain at the naked advertising industry. You can read our writeup of the highlights after the video below.
Hacking Mayonnaise
The client comes up to them and says, how can we make mayonnaise cool? So Navid’s job was to come up with a bunch of novel ways to make summer grillouts more fun. They started by mashing up a bunch of trends, and came up with “Burger Selfies” — a 3D printer that could take your picture and draw your face on a burger.
If you’ve never printed mayonnaise selfies before, you haven’t encountered half of the difficulties that Navid has. The issues started with getting a good outline of a person’s face suitable for mayonnaise portraiture. You know how you spend all your time levelling your 3D printer’s bed, and getting the first-layer Z-axis height just right? Navid was doing this with hamburger patties. They were aiming for a fully-automatic app-based solution. They ended up with a semi-automatic system where a skilled operator could make some tweaks along the way.
Needless to say, you can’t just go out and buy a mayonnaise extruder head. So Navid had to hack his own up (in a weeks’ time!). It turns out that mayonnaise is a non-Newtonian fluid, getting more viscous the harder you try to shove it through a tiny nozzle. Lesson learned, and a wider paste output solved the problem.
They chose a delta-bot because it features the client’s mayonnaise bottle dead center. It is an advertisement, after all. Much tweaking and learning to work with the material ensued. In order to get consistent prints, Navid cooked up ten burgers per day and re-used the flattest among them for his printing surface — washing it in the bathroom sink and then re-greasing it between attempts. (And you think it’s bad to have to wipe down your bed with acetone every now and then.)
With each iteration, the faces got more and more face-like. The bot was installed in a food truck, and they filmed it. All this work for a 30-second spot. But it looked great.
Jar-BQ
Then they had three days to create a demo of a custom mini-grill that would sear the manufacturer’s logo into a single burger while it’s cooking. Starting with a spray-painted 3D model, and fit with a custom grill built from what looks like brass tubing, they made a plausible fake. The client bought it, and it was shot. In the end, though, this project was more faking it than making it — the grill burned incense for the shoot, and the burger had the logo spray-painted on. But whatever works, right? And as a strange twist of fate, they may end up manufacturing the pint-sized grills later on.
DJ BBQ
Inspired by the Pyro Board, a variant of the Rubens’ tube, they decided to put the sweet flame display to good use, and grill some burgers, naturally. With multiple solenoid valves driving flame jets and some filtering and an Arduino, they got reactive flames, and got their footage shot.
Of course, the flames were way to high for reasonable grilling. While it may have looked great for the video, it “burned the shizz out of anything you put on it”. Of course, that’s nothing that a well-trained food stylist can’t handle, and they had a never-ending supply of non-burned “hero corn” they could throw at the shoot. Nothing’s what it seems, but everything looks good. That’s advertising!
The Takeaway
We’re not sure why we’re suddenly hungry. Maybe there is something to this advertising after all. Anyway, thanks to Navid for giving us a look behind the scenes. What looks glossy and too-perfect in thirty-second spots turns out to have a hacky underbelly. Who knew?
It would be pretty interesting if a porn or adult company approached him for his next demo. Could go the cliche hot dog food porn route instead, maybe a 3D printed WAM niche, or something else entirely? One would think that adult companies would be at the forefront of this type of marketing, but you rarely see it. I wonder why?
“The issues started with getting a good outline of a person’s face suitable for mayonnaise portraiture. You know how you spend all your time leveling your 3D printer’s bed, and getting the first-layer Z-axis height just right? Navid was doing this with hamburger patties.”
Try explaining that sentence to someone 60 years ago.
Yeah, right? I felt funny writing it. But I figure that enough of our readers can sing the bed-leveling blues along with me.
Fun fact.
A certain movie starring Anthony Hopkins was on tv last week, and the title of this article made me wince.
This reminds me of those face pancakes on AMC promos.
And Waterjet: adult cakes, they exist and I’m glad we don’t see them often. Uncanny Valley of body parts. Gross.
.
3D printed lunches for the future in our hovercars!
Soylent Green is people /obligatoryMovieRef
… and the taste of Soylent Coke varies from person to person.
Kudos to SupplyFrame for finding strategic partners who turn hacks into more advertising methods. There’s not still not enough ways to market useless consumer junk to me.
Yes, that’s right. We’re deep in the pockets of Big Mayonnaise.
ewww….
For these people, the hack would be to make real mayonnaise.
But if you are hacker you use consumer “junk” all the time.
[You’re Face]
*shudder*
Yeah I know… it kind of informed me what to expect next. :D
“It turns out that mayonnaise is a non-Newtonian fluid, getting more viscous the harder you try to shove it through a tiny nozzle.”
A property which can be tamed by mixing in a small amount of milk. During my teen years I worked a few months in fast food. It was standard practice at this chain that whenever a new bottle of mayo was opened, we’d scoop it all out into a big bowl, add milk (between 1/2 and 1 cup per gallon I think it was), whisk until blended, then return it to the bottle. It was all destined for various dispensers, and doing this ensured it would dispense easily. Especially for the condiment “gun” which dispersed its contents over an entire burger at once and with decent uniformity, with a pull of its trigger. If loaded with uncut mayo it was useless.
That is gross man.
Mustard Lovers Unite!
That would be fine if the commercial spot was for the hamburger, or the printer. But what ever food the commercial is for has to be shown as real as possible. That means real mayo for this one, real cereal in cereal commercials (but the ‘milk’ can be glue and water), real milk for the milk commercials (but the cereal can be something that doesn’t get soggy). Those funny “truth in advertising” laws.
“as real as possible” ? Well, except for the lacquer that keeps it glossy for hours under hot lights. While there are ” truth in advertising laws” there are numerous exceptions. Whipped cream is almost never actual whipped cream (it doesn’t hold up under actual filming conditions). There are reasons why food stylist is an actual profession.
I want one of those tiny grills-super cute. Fun to hear the tricks of the trade as well :)
I wonder if one of those grills comes with a stencil and a can of black spray paint. ;D
[Editors: fixed, via deletion. Was a completely unrelated link.]
^Don’t Click!^ ^Scam Alert!^
McDonalds Canadian division did a series of behind the scenes videos. One was on how they do photoshoots of a hamburger.
They take frozen beef patties then roll the edges on a hot griddle to sear and thicken them. The condiments are all carefully placed along the front edge and the top bun set back a bit so they show more. The final touch is carefully melting down the corners of the cheese with a heat gun. It’s exactly the same ingredients as used in the restaurant, just prepared with a few tricks to make it look better.
Adventure time reference on the first slide!
Modern advertisers are scum, manipulating the public, employing techniques of psychology to make people feel miserable and inadequate, just to sell a bit more useless crap.
But at least the mayonnaise company wasn’t mentioned, so HAD at least avoided serving them. In general, if HAD is gonna cover stunts like those, it would be good to do the same, keep the product out of it.
First slide says “You are face”.
He was tasked with making summer eating better, more exciting….
Food trucks + 3D printers + selfies =
He failed.
On a completely unrelated topic, anyone else feel the desire to buy and consume some emulsified dinosaur squeezings?
When I saw “eats his own face” I was assuming this was some ambitious tissue culturing of cheek cells into hamburger meat or something.