Step into the ConFRESHional Booth in this fun man-on-the-street style production with Kroger.
What’s your crazy food combo?
When we came together with the Kroger team for a creative meeting we talked through their ideas for three episodes of their new ConFRESHions series. ConFRESHions is a YouTube series that explores various food combinations, recipes, and experiences shared by customers in a confessional booth.
“It’s always great to work with clients that want your creative input,” says episodes 1-3 Director, Emily Payton.
The Kroger team knew Emily would be a perfect fit as the director for this project after our first creative meeting. She brought her own anecdotes to the mix and was able to truly bond with each customer.
“The whole pitch kind of centered around these crazy food combinations, and my mother when she was pregnant with me craved pickles and grits. It was like her pregnancy snack, and as a kid I wanted pickles and grits…still to this day I eat it. And I told them this story and the sentiment behind it is that it reminds me of my mom, and I think they liked that idea. Not just eating weird combinations because it’s weird, but because it’s a combination that takes you back to a certain place or reminds you of someone,” Emily explained.
After we ironed out the details we got everything together to create the booth in our local Kroger store. With celebrated Production Designer Sam Carter of Müelworx Fabrication leading the charge, we made the Kroger team’s dreams of a ConFRESHional Booth a reality in no time at all. Well, at least some time: as in, it was a late night ahead of Day 1 for some of the team. But the results were well worth it!
ConFRESHIONS, On Aisle 3
Over three days we corralled customers to come chat with us, share their stories, and try some of our crazy combos. We were very lucky to have MKT Crafty with us as our do-it-all food team: not only did they handle all food styling, they also sourced all the ingredients from the Kroger store on the fly, and kept the crew fed. This allowed us to add another crazy moving part to our man-on-the-street production. As Emily spoke with our customers our producer team relayed food options to MKT and they did a “supermarket sweep” to get dishes out to us.
“A BIG shout-out is deserved to MKT Crafty for fielding our weird-ish request and a) Making some beautiful food and putting their food styling skills on display, and b) helping keep our crew fed,” said Jordan Nowlin, Producer.
Running food wasn’t the only challenge throughout this process, afterall, we were filming in a store during business hours.
Matthew Harriott, Production Sound Mixer, gave us some insight to what it sounds like to film in a store, “Filming [ConFRESHions] in a live grocery store posed a few unique challenges for our team; we had to film around the intercom system and lean into the diegetic sounds of customers shopping in the background.”
Since we wanted to be quick, nimble, and as unobtrusive as possible with participants, we chose not to lav any customers. Instead Matthew set up double boom mic coverage; one boom mic above participants and one below–all out of frame, of course.
Overall this was not only a fun challenge to gather authentic stories from our unsuspecting customers, but this was a great production for everyone involved. From peanut butter and pickles to “healthy” cola, we tried some of our new favorite snacks and know the ones that we will definitely stay away from for eternity. Tune in to check out all of the crazy foods and genuine reactions as customers give us their ConFRESHions