Matinal Creative Content

Matinal gave us a line. "Começo por mim" — I start with myself.

A small private decision somebody makes before the day starts, before anything else asks something of them. The question was what to do with it.

The temptation with a line this concrete is to make it literal. To show it. But what makes it work is exactly what gets lost the moment you do that so that it belongs to whoever is reading it.

The moment you explain it, it stops being theirs.

So the direction was construction. Images that are clearly built, that have wit and intention in every element. Not just a visual mood around the brand but visual argument about what the brand is.

What most people don't see is that the shoot day is almost the end of the process. The work starts weeks earlier when we work on the concept, references, the long conversations about what the brand is asking its audience to feel. By the time we're in front of the camera, the props, the light, the rhythm of the frames, all of it is already decided. The narrative is in the details, and that's where preparation and execution finally meet.

What they also don't see is what the room looks like on the day. Everything in these frames was made, not sourced: the tulip-shaped bread baked specifically for the shoot, the Matinal name pressed by hand into a block of butter, the logo drawn directly onto the surface in milk, plates and props laid out on the floor beforehand so we could see the whole session before a single frame was shot.

Ana art directs and set designs, but on shoot days we are all in the room, solving problems together. Something doesn't work, we figure it out. Something needs to exist that doesn't exist yet, we make it. That's not a production methodology. It's just how the work gets made when everyone in the room cares about the same thing.

We've been working with Matinal across multiple sessions now. The brief doesn't change. The visual language was established early: same lighting, same logic of construction, the same wit. And each session builds on it rather than starting over.

What changes over time isn't just the images. It's the relationship.

After a while, we stop working for Matinal and start working with them. We know the visual language well enough to push it. We know what the brand would and wouldn't do. The brief gets shorter because it needs less explaining, the understanding is already there.

That's a different kind of creative partnership than a one-off shoot. The work gets better the longer it runs, because every session builds on the one before. The images accumulate into something that has a logic to it, that a new frame either belongs to or doesn't.