Mariposa, Konstantinos Chatzimichail

Brief

A restaurant on Rhodes needed a site and a set of moving pieces to run alongside it. I took the whole thing: the website, the film, the scripts and the stills.

The realism standard was particularly high. Everything I made had to survive a customer sitting down and being handed the actual plate.

Constraint

The restaurant already had photography of its own, shot on the terrace under real light. It covers part of the menu and no more, and it is honest work, which sets a floor that anything generated has to clear without announcing itself.

That floor is the hard part. A generated plate that looks better than the kitchen is a lie, and a plate that does not exist on the pass is worse than no picture at all. The work was making images of these dishes, at this restaurant, that a diner would recognise when the plate arrived.

What I built

A Next.Js site, built and shipped. A ninety-second VSL script. Short vertical pieces for social, including an establishing film, a run of plate close-ups. Generated stills covering the dishes the camera never reached.

The film went the other way. It is drawn: a garden, a fire, a plate and a long day by the water, in the warm palette the room already has. A restaurant film that tries to look like the restaurant invites the comparison every second it runs. An openly illustrated one is free of that.

The frames below run in two sets. The first is from the film. The second is the restaurant's own photography, which sits in the case study because it is the reference: the crockery, the plating, the pomegranate on the salad and the quality of the light on that terrace. Every generated frame was measured against it.

logo, photorealistic

A slice of moussaka on a white plate, photographed on the restaurant terrace in daylight with a wine glass behind it. — reference plate, shot on site

Shrimp on a saffron risotto in a dark bowl, topped with basil and cracked pepper, photographed from above. — reference plate, shot on site

Beef stifado in a dark sauce in a metal bowl, under a nest of shoestring fries and a sprig of rosemary, a long slice of grilled bread beside it. — reference plate, shot on site

Grilled cheese over rocket, tomato and pomegranate on a wide white plate, photographed at the table. — reference plate, shot on site

Grilled octopus curled over yellow fava purée in a stone bowl, topped with pickled onion and dill, photographed at the table at night with a glass of white wine behind it. — reference plate, and the dish the drawn octopus was measured against

2 films from this one

A frame from the 360 plate move: grilled octopus curled over yellow fava in a stone bowl on the terrace at night, a glass of white wine and lit planting behind it. — Grilled octopus over fava, shot once on the terrace at night. The camera in this clip never existed: the orbit is generated from that single still, which is the test the master plate has to pass before any of the menu work starts.

A frame from the showcase: the Mariposa terrace from above at dusk, laid tables on dark decking around a mature olive tree. — The terrace at dusk, built out of the restaurant’s own photography and its map imagery rather than a set. The tables, the decking and the olive tree in the middle are where they actually are, so a diner who has eaten there recognises the room.

How I built it

Phantom Set, which is the pipeline I use whenever the subject is a real object that somebody can hold up against the picture.

One master plate per dish, locked first: the crockery, the garnish, the light, the angle. Every later frame gets generated from that plate instead of from a fresh prompt, so the plating cannot wander between shots. Two gates do most of the work. The label gate means zooming to full resolution and reading every word on anything printed in frame, and a fail sends the shot back to the master plate instead of into a retouching tool. The silhouette gate means laying the render over the master plate at forty per cent opacity, where any shift in the outline of the plate kills the frame.

The last gate is not technical. Somebody from the kitchen looks at the dish and says whether it is theirs.

Stack, stage by stage

Master plate: Nano Banana Pro
Variations: Nano Banana 2, image to image from the plate, ChatGPT Image 2
Motion: Higgsfield Cinema Studio
Cut: CapCut
Site: Vercel, Figma, Claude Code, Sanity

Where it landed

Live at mariposa.restaurant, site and film together.

mariposa.restaurant