McDonald’s: Prosperity Burger

McDonald's wanted one for the Prosperity Burger's return at Lunar New Year. Food is the hardest thing to fake, because everybody already knows what a burger looks like.

Scanned from the real thing, then modelled back up from the scan. A raw food scan is not an asset: holes where the light did not reach, noise across the flat surfaces, the room's own lighting baked into the colour.

So the scan becomes the reference and the model is built to it. That keeps the scatter of the sesame and the egg sitting off centre, and throws away everything that was only an artefact of measuring it.

Shot on location in Chinatown on an iPhone 16 Pro Max. The footage was tracked so the camera move could be rebuilt in 3D, then the food was relit to sit inside the festive lighting rather than on top of it. That join is what people notice when it is wrong and never look at when it is right.

Social, vertical first, through the Lunar New Year window. Shooting the plates on a phone was the point rather than a compromise: the piece had to look like it belonged in a feed of other phone footage, and a cinema camera would have given it away.