French Butter, a food and beverage production company, has signed tabletop director/DP and still photographer Jennifer Davick. She brings not only a finely honed flair for evocative visual storytelling but also access to her fully-equipped Los Angeles production facility, Ingredient Studios, to the French Butter fold.
With an eclectic background that includes significant magazine editorial experience prior to her segue into motion work, Davick has a showreel with work that strikes an a balance between dynamic food photography and buoyant lifestyle vignettes, spanning such brands as Starbucks, Fresh Direct, General Mills, Hillshire Farms, Williams Sonoma and others. Prior to joining French Butter, she had most recently been represented in the commercialmaking space by Backyard Productions. Davick’s short film documenting the sumptuous black sesame dessert at San Francisco’s culinary hotspot Lazy Bear won both the NYC Food Film Festival’s “Best Food Porn” award along with “Best Film Short” in the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Awards.
French Butter’s founding director Brett Froomer said, “Jennifer’s eye and aesthetics focus on modern sensibilities towards people and food, and her fresh and enthusiastic personality allows her to approach what’s in front of her lens with a distinctly feminine signature. She’s the entire package–director, photographer, DP and a bright, intuitive character.”
Davick said she’s looking forward to being at a food-focused boutique that’s working at the cutting edge of production. She’s bid against French Butter, a WBENC-certified company, in the past, and was introduced by a mutual producer contact. “And it just felt like a good fit,” she remarked. “We both have a lot of drive, and work really hard. I see a future for us where we’re setting the standard for innovation and creativity, and adding a sense of emotional resonance to the work we produce.”
Davick’s career has taken her from posts in Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, Tel Aviv, New York and Birmingham, Alabama–where she developed a love of Southern cooking–to her final stop in Los Angeles. At each step along the way, she was introduced to new people, new flavors, new tastes and new ingredients; all of them have contributed to the mosaic of styles and influences that drive her career as a filmmaker and photographer. Her transition from stills to motion started during her tenure as sr. food photographer at Time, Inc., working at the lifestyle magazine Southern Living.
“I was really interested in that type of storytelling, these feature articles on food, they spoke to so many layers of what I enjoy doing,” Davick recalled about her intro to directing. “And there was this complexity to motion that I really enjoyed as well, so the progression felt truly organic.” She described her work as “comfortable and approachable, sometimes even magical. I fervently believe that food has the power to connect people.”
“Adding Jennifer to French Butter is a tremendous boost in more ways than one,” said executive producer Irec Kriske. “Not only is she supremely talented, with an air of sophisticated confidence about her, but she’s also an amazing entrepreneur: building out and managing a studio space, as she’s done on her own at Ingredient Studios in L.A. With her on board, French Butter adds a West Coast studio to our infrastructure, in addition to our 20,000 square foot Pilsen Studios in Chicago. It gives us tremendous range when it comes to meeting clients’ needs, whether those be creative, budgetary or technical.”
Davick savors the possibilities, too. “I joined French Butter to be part of a team, and I think theirs is particularly strong, while also feeling more intimate. I love the fact that I will be a part of this wonderfully talented roster including Brett and Etienne Proulx. And I think I’m going to thrive in this environment. We all share values but offer distinct differences in our approach, which will let us overlap as a team and support each other. This means our clients are going to get really good results.”
