An agency partner needed a film for their client, a Whitby fish and chip shop, that made the food feel like it belonged to the place it came from. We shot it the way M&S shoot food — slow, close, reverent, focused on the care the customer never sees. The agency’s reaction on first viewing was that they were craving fish and chips at nine in the morning.
Problem:
Mister Chips had never done anything like this. No previous film, no existing footage, no house style to work from — a first attempt at putting the business on screen. The positioning was clear and it was a good one: their food is the taste of Whitby. Not “we sell fish and chips” — that’s every business on the seafront. The claim was about provenance and authenticity, about food that could only come from there. The problem with that claim is that it’s very easy to say and very hard to show. Every independent food business in every coastal town says something similar, and words alone don’t carry it — customers have heard it all before and discounted it all equally.
Solution:
The obvious approach to a chip shop film is appetite: bright, hot, fast, hungry — the visual language of takeaway advertising. We went the other way, taking direction from how M&S shoot food. Slow down. Get close. Make it matter. A claim about provenance and craft can’t be made in the visual language of fast food — shoot it like a takeaway and it looks like every takeaway, and the authenticity claim quietly dies in the gap between what’s said and what’s shown. So the film was built around the things the customer never sees: not the finished portion on the counter, but the care that happened before it got there — the quality of what goes in, the handling, the unseen work that justifies the claim rather than merely asserting it. The intent was to make people stop and actually care about fish and chips, a food so familiar that nobody looks at it properly any more. Familiarity was the real obstacle, and slowing the viewer down was the way through it.
Outcome:
The film landed with both the client and the agency who commissioned it. Stephen, the agency partner, told us the standard exceeded what he’d briefed for, and admitted the film left him craving fish and chips at nine in the morning — about as honest a review as a food film can get. A fish and chip shop on the Whitby seafront got the same treatment a national retailer gets for a Christmas campaign. Big-brand thinking isn’t a function of big-brand budgets — it’s a function of deciding what the film is arguing before deciding how to shoot it. The claim here was provenance and care, so the film had to move like provenance and care, not like a takeaway advert.
Stephen, the agency partner who commissioned the film, said the standard exceeded what he had briefed for — and admitted it left him craving fish and chips at nine in the morning.
— Stephen, Agency Partner