Rogue and Lurpak Made Plant Based Butter “Rock and Roll”

When it comes to food ads, we’re a little bit used to stereotypes – the eerie eroticism that comes with ice cream ads, the now forever stuck in our heads JustEat tunes, or the idyllic family depicted in basically any breakfast ad. So, for its plant based edition, Lurpak is doing things differently.

With Rogue director Scott Lyon at the helm of the project, he knew that he needed to go against any preconceived notions or stereotypes about what ‘kind of person’ would choose plant based. So, he went metal on it.

The spot, named ‘Crush Expectations’, sees the main character create a dish in a rather chaotic way, chopping, crushing with his bare hands, throwing, and most importantly – using plant based Lurpak butter.

Music, of course, played a crucial role in the film. The track was composed mainly due to the length – the team wanted it to have the structure of a whole song, but fit in 30 seconds. Scott says, “The spot was shot like a music video to playback of the track. So, we wanted to cast a musician who had the ability to play along to all the different parts of the track and keep in time at different frame rates… which isn’t an easy task at high speed!”

He also reveals that all the food used in the spot is, in fact, real. Scott worked with food stylist Katie Giovanni to “take the original direction of the food and then think how it could translate to this being a musical film.”

The film was shot in Warsaw and the crew ended up using some old, large format photographic lenses that just so happened to be at the studio.

“Everything is in camera,” adds Scott. “It felt that the food needed to be totally authentic.” And it is, as one can tell when watching the protagonist dramatically wash a huge wad of kale. 

But there was also a fair bit of improv involved in the shoot. “Shooting food can be a bit random as things don’t always go as you think they will,” explains Scott. “Weirdly, the shot that took the most time was what you would expect to be the most straightforward one – spreading the butter on toast! In a macro world things can look very different, and it took a while to get right. And the most fun, of course, was blowing stuff up!”

As you’d expect with a piece of work like this, the edit was a huge part of the spot, and it was editor Hasani Franke that took lead on it. “We approached it exactly like a music video, having layers in the edit that picked up on certain moments musically. It was so fun,” says Scott.

Hasani adds that while the edit was important, the ad had to be creative, exciting, and engaging – “So, first and foremost was Scott and I knowing that it worked on a technical level. After that, I had a chance to play around and see what else could bring that rock and roll tone the ad is meant to capture.”

Hasani also credits the incredible footage he got to edit with, which allowed him to concentrate on how different shots can represent different moments in the track. “What speed ramps can I use to accentuate a shot as well as the music, and does that food shot scream Lurpak deliciousness? That was the fun part.”

This is where rice and wet kale both became a symbol for a crash, or the rising muffins became studio audio level lights or even a metaphor for a crowd jumping up and down to the music. Hasani leaves us with this: “There were always technical bones of this film that we had to nail, but at the same time, Scott and I both kept one thing at the forefront of this ad – it’s rock and roll!!!”