SAUCY
SAUCY is a 30-second speculative commercial for TOMA, a fictional Italian tomato purée brand created specifically for the project. It combines Italian food culture with camp humour, surrealism and a playful queer sensibility.
Creative Strategy
TOMA was built around the familiar codes of Italian tomato brands: authenticity, home cooking, ripe tomatoes and uncomplicated pleasure. SAUCY takes those reassuring conventions and pushes them somewhere far less predictable.
Destiny, a glamorous drag queen, is making ragù in her nostalgic Italian kitchen when opening TOMA triggers a fantasy: Mario, an impossibly handsome tomato farmer, materialises from a heavenly golden glow.
Flirtation follows. Then a cat ruins everything.
Rather than making queerness the message, SAUCY simply makes it part of the world. The humour comes from the collision between familiar Italian domesticity, heightened characters and an increasingly absurd fantasy.
Beneath the chaos sits a very simple product truth: great tomato sauce starts with great tomatoes.
Smooth. Red. Saucy.
Visual Direction
The visual language draws inspiration from Pedro Almodóvar’s saturated domestic worlds and Martin Parr’s playful observation of everyday life, filtered through the exaggerated optimism of 1950s food advertising and Hollywood melodrama.
I developed a palette called “Cherry Formica”, built around saturated tomato reds, warm cream, brass, faded greens and honey-toned wood. The retro kitchen references mid-century Italian interiors, creating a nostalgic world that feels tactile, seductive and deliberately heightened rather than perfectly polished.
Soft filmic textures, warm shadows, subtle grain, halation, cooking steam and exaggerated golden light gradually transform an ordinary kitchen into something almost celestial.
Direction & Cinematography
The camera remains slightly alive throughout the film, using subtle handheld movement and gentle push-ins rather than perfectly static compositions.
Movement follows the comedy: slower and more seductive during Mario’s appearance and the flirtation, then quicker and sharper when the fantasy collapses.
The edit moves between sensual food photography, character reactions and precise comedic beats.
There is no music. Dialogue, sizzling ragù, pouring sauce, fabric, kitchen sounds and one strategically timed meow keep the surreal fantasy grounded in a recognisable domestic world.
AI Production
SAUCY was conceived and directed as an exploration of AI filmmaking as a complete creative production process, from concept and character development to world-building, product design, image generation and motion.
For the project, I also created TOMA as an original fictional brand, including its visual identity and packaging, allowing the product to become an integral part of the film rather than an existing brand placed into it.
The main challenge was not generating individual images, but directing a coherent 30-second world: maintaining character identity, environment, product, performance, dialogue, cinematography and food photography across the entire narrative.
30 seconds. 12 shots. One very saucy kitchen.
