Art Directing Appetite
Art direction, prop styling, and retouching of hero brand assets.
Art-direct and retouch a new product launch hero shoot for a new hop-topic food category. One day, seven dishes, 25 retouched shots. Under $5kAUD. Tudor banquet, not whitewashed stainless steel laboratory.
One day, under $5k, and the assets have travelled further than anything else we’ve made.
How it started
Cultivated or cultured (also known as lab-grown) meat has gotten a bit of a bad rap. Wherever you sit on the topic, we can all agree on one thing: it didn’t help that the category was promoting itself with sterile, clinical factory photography. No one looks at the way sausage is made saying yum.
How it’s going
Get Caught Up: Forged, a Vow brand and category-leader, was one of the first in the world to sell cultured meat. I joined just after they launched into Singapore in 2024, where top chefs and restaurants (like Fura’s Christina Rasmussen and Somma’s Mirko Febbrile), picked up our “new, deliberately different, and sustainable” meats quickly.
Before launching into Sydney in 2025, we had two product launches make waves: internationally, with the world’s first ethical foie gras, and locally with our edible tallow candles. When cultured meat was approved for sale in Australia, June 2025, we wasted no time in launching Forged into Australia in July. We moved quickly from fine-dining restaurants to casual premium eateries, then a cooler bag to your home, and now finally sit on store shelves.
It’s food, it’s emotive, and now it acts like it (looks like it too). With less than $5k and one day (plus a weekend prop shop), we shot the brand’s most-circulated assets in media to this day. These are the Forged assets that have been picked up the most, art directed and retouched by me.
Shoot the foie gras launch like a Tudor banquet: dark stone, fruit and silver, not a stainless steel lab. Seven dishes in one day.
Retouch for the press: horizontal and vertical crops that editors can drop straight into a story.
Make a candle you can eat: tallow candles that melt into a dip for the bread beside them, shot from first light to the last drip.
Show the spreads where they live: on bread, on a board, by the spoonful.
Take it to the table at Bar Somma: the dish, the room and the night it made Condé Nast Traveller.
Brand applications
Foie gras with poached pears on onyx.