Case Study: FUSIAN
FUSIAN works like a Chipotle for sushi lovers. You walk in, you build your roll exactly how you want it, and you leave happy. The challenge? Getting it on camera in a way that actually did it justice.
FUSIAN had already been working with The Media Captain, a digital marketing agency based in the heart of downtown Columbus at 394 E Town St, Columbus, OH 43215. They worked with FUSIAN to manage their advertising campaigns across various digital channels. The Media Captain reached out to our team at Actuality Media to help with videography and editing video assets for their digital ad campaign.
The ask: create a video that showcases FUSIAN's mobile app checkout experience while bringing the full customer journey to life. From the moment someone walks through the door to the moment they're sitting down with a finished roll in front of them.
We filmed the video at FUSIAN's Grandview location at 855 W 5th Ave, Columbus, OH 43212. From the moment we walked in, it was clear the space was going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The glass-walled dining room, the clean lines, the warm natural light flooding in. It's the kind of environment that's genuinely a joy to work in. Some locations you have to fight against. This wasn't one of them.
To assist with telling the story, The Media Captain brought in a small team of actors to move through the FUSIAN experience exactly as a real customer would. That meant walking in off the street, scanning the menu, building their rolls from scratch; picking proteins, veggies, and toppings just how they wanted. They would move through the checkout process using the mobile app, and finally sit down to eat. The mobile app checkout piece was an important beat to hit, so we made sure we focused on it, while keeping the overall feel of the video about the experience as a whole rather than any single feature. This way, this video could be remixed for a wider range of different ad types.
The goal throughout was authenticity. Not over-produced, not over-staged, just a real, welcoming experience.
Here's where things got interesting: we filmed while the restaurant was open.
That's not always the simplest scenario to navigate, but it's one Actuality Media is well-equipped to handle. We scheduled the shoot for morning hours to keep foot traffic as light as possible, but this is a working restaurant. Customers were still coming through the door. Honestly, that wasn't entirely unwelcome. A little real-world activity keeps things feeling genuine rather than clinical.
The bigger challenge was the lighting setup. In a live commercial space, you can't walk in with a full studio rig. We needed an approach that was intentional and polished but never so intrusive that it got in the way of the business, or made customers feel like they'd wandered onto a film set. We brought a key light that we could reposition throughout the space as we moved between shots, added a hair light where it made sense, and leaned into handheld work on the Sony FX6 with DZO lenses to give the footage energy and movement that matched the brand's personality. It was a disciplined and efficient setup.
When editing wrapped, we had a 45-second brand video that was a tight, complete narrative arc that walks the viewer through the full FUSIAN experience from start to finish. From there, we cut the footage into a suite of shorter pieces, giving The Media Captain a range of options to A/B test across their digital ad campaigns for FUSIAN.
We also produced social-first versions of the content. These were reformatted and optimized for vertical viewing on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The full package was built for flexibility: one strong story, cut and shaped to work across every platform and ad placement.
The Media Captain and FUSIAN were very happy with what we put together. The video captured exactly what the brand was after; an inviting, fun, crave-worthy experience anchored by a modern checkout process that makes ordering even easier than it already is.
It's a good reminder that some of the most effective brand videos aren't the most technically complicated to produce. It just requires a clear brief, the right location, and a team that knows how to work efficiently in a real-world environment. FUSIAN had all of the above.
