Tradición a domicilio

The warmest category in Spain

Rice delivery sits between two exhausted looks. One is the platform look: an appetising close-up on white with a price and a button. The other is the heritage look - sepia, terracotta, a grandmother's hands, a sunlit terrace. Paella advertising has lived in the second for forty years, so every competitor's thumbnail arrives at the same temperature.

On a shelf that is a nuisance. In a feed it is fatal, because a feed is scrolled at speed and the only thing that stops a thumb is difference. A brand that looks like the category is invisible in the one place it is actually seen.

Cold ground, warm food

So the ground is a deep violet, and nothing about rice is violet. Everything laid on it is duotoned into green and purple: the skylines, the hands over the pan, the table seen from above, the glasses raised. The colour is drained out of every photograph in the piece.

Which leaves exactly one thing in full colour. The dishes arrive inside circles, saturated yellow against a screen with no other warmth in it anywhere. Every frame hands the viewer one thing to be hungry at and turns the rest into graphics, so appetite lands precisely where the money is.

Duotone as a discipline, not a filter

The reason to duotone everything is not that it looks good, though it does. It is that a delivery business goes on shooting new dishes forever - on a phone, in a kitchen, at whatever quality the day allows. Any brand that depends on beautiful photography breaks in its first week of trading.

Duotone means a photograph from any source at any quality drops into the system and belongs. The rest of the toolkit is just as cheap to run: a circle mask, an acid green burst, and a thin white line that snakes between scenes so the eye is handed on without a cut.

Even the proof is cheap. The provinces arrive as three words - Valencia, Alicante, Castellón - set plain and underlined. Not authentic Mediterranean flavour as a claim, but three place names, which is the only proof a rice brand actually owns.

The ending that isn't there

An intro is a piece of design whose entire job is to arrive somewhere. Twenty-nine seconds of build exist to hand over cleanly to a mark in the last two, and everything before that is written backwards from the handover.

The brief was exactly that: animate the approach to a logo the client supplied. The client then rejected the logo, and the animation lost the thing it was built to arrive at. It never ran.

What is published here stops at the last frame before the handover, which is also the honest place to stop. The system is the work. The sign-off was never ours to show.

What it comes down to

Twenty-nine seconds that do everything an intro is meant to do except the last two. The client rejected the logo, not the film - which, on this evidence, was the right call.

A pitch that was not adopted, made for a real rice delivery company and shown here with the client removed. The brief was to animate an introduction to a mark the client supplied; that mark was later rejected, and the film is published cut at the frame before it appears. The company is not named, and nothing shown here was approved or published by it.