Work / Case study
MIXT Lobby Lounge
A hotel lounge photographed as somewhere you choose, not somewhere you settle for. Film and stills captured together in the room, on the same lighting design, with the same talent — around live service, with the kitchen plating to camera.
- Format
- 4K UHD · 30p
- Deliverables
- Promotional film and a stills library
- Crew
- Four, plus four talent
- Conditions
- Live venue, mixed practical light, active kitchen
MIXT is the signature food-and-beverage outlet inside the Sheraton Vancouver Guildford. Like every lobby-level restaurant attached to a full-service hotel, it carries a structural disadvantage: guests read it as an amenity rather than a destination, and locals rarely think to walk in at all.
The room, the kitchen and the bar program were all operating well above that perception. The job was to close the gap between what the venue actually is and what its photography implied — and to do it as one production, so motion and stills could roll out together across the website, the property listing, the reservation channels and social with no visual seam between them.
Lit like the room at its best hour
Warm, low-key, tungsten-led. The room’s own amber practicals carry the grade — deep charcoal and graphite in the architecture, warm gold in the highlights, tight bokeh off the backbar. Nothing is lit to look like a studio; it is lit to look like the room on its best night.
The brand’s gold does the signposting. The illuminated martini-glass mark is treated as a hero subject in its own right, a slow reveal against the laser-cut screen, and the wordmark lands the film on black. The identity opens the piece, punctuates the middle and closes it.
Prove the kitchen
The single biggest barrier for a hotel restaurant is the assumption that the food is institutional. So the food is shot as craft rather than as menu: plated dishes held on slow moves with rack focus instead of static beauty frames — seared salmon and scallops, seafood risotto, rack of lamb, tuna tataki, dessert.
Cut against the live line — flame at the range, tongs lifting noodles, a spoon finishing a sauce — the argument makes itself. This is a kitchen, not a hotel steam table. That single edit is the piece’s whole strategic thesis.
An empty restaurant photographs as an empty restaurant
Casting talent into every occasion the venue actually serves sells social proof, and lets both audiences find themselves in the frame: the in-house guest deciding where to eat tonight, and the Guildford local deciding whether this counts as going out.
Four talent were recombined across configurations — a couple, a foursome, a second pairing, plus hand work for the food and cocktail frames — so a single call produced date night, business dinner, friends’ drinks and a solo arrival. Four faces, four occasions.
A library, not a campaign
The stills split into three deliberate registers. Product — cocktails isolated on the bar top against a defocused backbar. Occasion — talent in the room. Table — overhead and 45° scenes with hands in frame, branded napkins deliberately visible, food shot as it is actually eaten.
The cocktail hero setup was built as a repeatable system, so the bar program can be re-photographed against the same look as the menu evolves. That is why the archive spans more than one shoot date and still cuts together as one body of work.
If your room is better than its photography, the call is fifteen minutes. Tell us about the project.
Credits
- Creative direction, photography
- Kevin Cruz (@cruzkv)
- Production
- Gestalt Media House
- Video production
- Hira Vin
- Director of photography
- Yin Mei
- Production assistant & digital tech
- Chloe Timmins
- Talent
- Margo Gangalo, Camille Cutler, Luis Carbajal, Darin King
- Location
- MIXT Lobby Lounge, Sheraton Vancouver Guildford, Surrey, BC
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