Client work
Liquid Death · 2022
Mango Chainsaw
Client work
The key visual for Liquid Death's Mango Chainsaw launch. A brand built on aggression and humour needed a hero frame that froze an explosive, high-energy moment, mango, liquid, motion, into a single premium image. I created the KV; the brand ran it across their own formats.
Art direction, compositing, post-production. Key visual for Liquid Death.
The brief, decoded
Liquid Death was launching a new flavour, Mango Chainsaw, and needed a hero frame carrying the brand's signature menace: mango as the flavour, chaos as the mood. The target was premium aggression, golden, textured, kinetic.
The challenge was energy in stillness. A single frame had to imply violent motion without the blur reading as a mistake, and stay appetising while feeling explosive.
The idea and the obstacle
The solution suspended the moment at peak energy: debris frozen mid-air, liquid arcs caught at their sharpest, all lit to a hard golden specular. Composition keeps the can as the anchor.
The technical challenge was layering. Dozens of motion elements had to read as one coherent event rather than a collage.
The build, layer by layer
The build was compositing-led, done entirely in Photoshop: a layered assembly bringing suspended elements, liquid arcs and debris into one frozen event, each on its own pass for independent control.
Lighting passes drove the hard golden specular; grade and texture passes pushed the premium-aggressive look. The discipline of this layer-based thinking is exactly what later informed how I decompose generative renders.
Compositing Workflow
- 01 · Element prep
- Source: liquid, debris and product elements isolated
- 02 · Motion layout
- Composition: suspended trajectory mapping
- 03 · Masking
- Build: per-element alpha and edge work
- 04 · Light passes
- Lighting: golden specular dodge and burn
- 05 · Texture pass
- Detail: grit and spray micro-texture
- 06 · Final grade
- Output: premium golden grade
Conditioning Notes
Manual trajectory mapping to suspend debris and liquid at peak energy
Per-element masking to keep dozens of motion layers reading as one event
Lighting passes layered for the hard golden specular signature
Output Specs
- Lighting
- Hard golden specular, high contrast
- Color grade
- Saturated gold, crushed shadows
- Mood
- Premium aggression, suspended chaos
Layer Decomposition
- Product anchor
- Can held sharp and central
- Liquid arcs
- Frozen splash trajectories
- Debris field
- Suspended mango and fragments
- Specular light
- Hard golden highlight pass
- Color grade
- Premium golden aggression LUT
Final Output
- Lighting
- Hard golden specular, high contrast
- Color grade
- Saturated gold, crushed shadows
- Mood
- Premium aggression, suspended chaos