Choreographing physics: Directing liquid in tabletop

You don’t direct liquid. You set physics in motion and hope it performs.

In tabletop and beverage work, movement is the story: pour, splash, swirl, fizz, condensation forming in real time. In that sense, directing liquid isn’t so different from directing a dancer. You shape timing, rhythm and impact, and let the performance emerge.

When the star of a film is liquid, the task becomes choreographing physics, designing conditions where motion behaves consistently while still feeling alive.

Shaping Motion

There’s a misconception that tabletop filmmaking is mostly technical, that with the right camera and the right liquid, everything will fall into place. It doesn’t. Every decision, from how high to pour to how long to let the shot breathe, alters the rhythm and trajectory of motion. It’s as much intuition as it is control.

Technically perfect shots can feel empty without a sense of physicality.

Sometimes that raw physicality is the point. In First Taste for Diet Coke, I had to physically capture what it feels like to taste it for the first time. That edge of intuition versus control came into play when we agitated the soda to explode, pop, fizz and bubble, the same sensations and visuals you’d immediately notice if this were the first time you’d ever had a Diet Coke. We controlled what we could, like the temperature, which got us some natural condensation, and let the liquid take centre stage in hero shots that were cinematically specific while being true to the wild nature of carbonation.

Technically perfect shots can feel empty without a sense of physicality. The elements around the liquid matter. Condensation, the way ice shifts and collides within the glass, these details create a physical experience in the viewer’s brain. That’s what moves an image from “that looks nice” to “I want that”.

Above: First Taste for Diet Coke captures fizz, condensation and impact in-camera.

Observing Motion

To understand what makes a liquid shot compelling, you have to pay attention to real life.

The best ideas don’t come from watching another director’s work. They come from being present in an ordinary moment and seeing how it unfolds. Pour yourself a glass of water and actually look at it. Have a beer with a friend somewhere with nice light and notice what the glass does, how the condensation builds, how the light bends through it. These are the moments that make a shot feel real because they are, and you’ve seen them.

The best ideas don’t come from watching another director’s work, they come from being present in an ordinary moment.

From there, it becomes experimentation. Gravity controls everything. It interacts with viscosity. Honey behaves nothing like water. Surface tension, air resistance, how droplets hold and break, these forces play out in microseconds. You focus on what you can shape: timing, rhythm, conditions.

You can even expand the scale you’re working in. The waves of Corona I recently created for La Playa Awaits were made in large containers that were manipulated to cause a reaction, creating waves that looked like you could surf on them. We split the frame to play these waves of Corona against actual surfable ocean waves. The parallels were as undeniable as they were natural. 

This wasn’t AI, this was real liquid in motion.