How robots made this food commercial look effortless

For beautiful food, sometimes you need a robot.

Creating the perfect food commercial isn’t just a matter of great styling and a mouthwatering dish. As the above video shows, sometimes you need a robot.

Steve Giralt is a “visual engineer” who makes commercials and occasionally teaches the method behind his madness.

Giralt began his career as a stills photographer, but he saw potential for more thanks to his hobbies in engineering. A new discipline was born: visual engineering, using robotics, advanced camerawork, and a lot of creativity to create moving images that have never been seen before. His s’mores have lit up Times Square, and in the video above, you can watch how he uses trial and error (and more than a few robots) to drop the perfect lime.

Giralt’s toolkit includes Arduino programming, Maya, welding, epoxies, super-expensive cameras that can shoot incredible slow motion, and a lot of elbow grease and ingenuity. This form of commercial art shows how technology can make amazing images happen — and you don’t always need computer graphics to do it.

Watch the above video to learn just how hard a simple-looking shoot can be.

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