About Studio Ballena
Advertising visuals for food, drinks and products — built on craft, precision and 15 years of tabletop experience
Studio Ballena is a Belgian advertising photography and video production studio specialising in food, drinks and product visuals. Based in Welle — centrally located between Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp — the studio works with advertising agencies, brand teams and production companies across Belgium and internationally, delivering photography, video and motion-controlled visuals for advertising campaigns, packaging, social and brand content.
The person behind the studio
Studio Ballena was founded by Bert Balcaen, a photographer and director with over 15 years of experience in advertising and tabletop production — but his route into photography is less straightforward than most, and that background is a big part of what makes the studio work the way it does.
Bert studied industrial product design and graphic industry management, which gave him an early grounding in both the manufacturing and visual side of commercial production. That translated into a career in the family business — a flexible packaging production company — where he spent more than a decade as plant manager. Running production at that level means understanding quality control, tight deadlines, technical precision and the reality of what it costs when things go wrong. Those aren't lessons you learn in a photography course, and they show up every day in how Studio Ballena is run.
After 5 years working alongside a mentor in the photographic industry, Bert set up Studio Ballena in Welle about 15 years ago — making a deliberate move to building his own studio with a clear focus: high-end advertising photography and video for food, drinks and products.
The background in packaging and graphic production turns out to be unusually relevant for this kind of work. Understanding FMCG brands, what a brand manager or agency creative director actually needs from an image — that's not just photographic intuition. It's industry knowledge. It means conversations with clients start from a different place, and briefs that might seem technically complex are often familiar territory.
What Studio Ballena does
The studio specialises in three interconnected areas of advertising visuals production.
Photography and video production is the core of what Studio Ballena does — from clean packshots and hero product images to full advertising campaigns with food styling, set building, and cinematic video. The studio handles the entire process from concept and pre-production through to final delivery, or works as a specialist production partner within agency or brand workflows.
Motion control and special effects is where Studio Ballena stands apart from most Belgian production studios. The studio operates Robbie, a CRX1440 robotic motion control system, alongside a suite of custom-built special effects rigs for triggering liquids, powders, ingredients and products with frame-accurate precision. This makes the studio particularly well-suited for splash shots, ingredient explosions, slow-motion pours, multi-pass compositing and repeatable camera choreography — the kind of work that demands engineering-level control as much as creative direction.
Studio and equipment — the 180m² studio in Welle is built specifically for tabletop photography and video production, with a 3m x 5m infinity wall, blackout capability for controlled lighting environments, multiple simultaneous set build zones, high-speed cameras for slow-motion work, Broncolor and ProFoto flash systems, an 8K RED cinema camera and EMBER slow motion camera for video, and a full complement of grip, rigging, props and surface textures.
Who Studio Ballena works with
The studio and equipment are also available for rental, with or without crew, making it a practical option for directors, DOPs and production houses looking for a well-equipped tabletop studio in central Belgium.
A studio built around the brief, not the other way around
Studio Ballena doesn't operate as a generalist photography studio that occasionally shoots food. The focus on tabletop — food, drinks, products — is a deliberate and sustained one. That specialism matters because tabletop advertising production has its own technical language, its own timing challenges, its own demands around consistency and repeatability. Agencies and brands that bring complex briefs to Studio Ballena aren't starting from scratch with explanations. The studio understands how advertising shoots work, how agency workflows operate, what creative directors are trying to achieve, and what the production realities of a shoot day actually look like.
That seriousness about craft doesn't mean the studio operates without a sense of play — quite the opposite. Some of the best results come from being willing to push past the safe, predictable version of a shot and see what happens when you try something that probably shouldn't work. The unexpected liquid arc, the ingredient explosion that lands better than anything in the brief, the lighting setup nobody had thought to try — those moments don't always happen by following the script too closely.
There's a genuine belief at Studio Ballena that the best work gets made when the people on set are actually enjoying themselves. Not in spite of the technical complexity, but alongside it. Getting the engineering right, the timing precise, the motion control path perfectly calibrated — and then watching it all come together in a single frame or a five-second slow-motion clip — that's genuinely fun. It doesn't get old. So while client projects are treated with the full weight of professionalism they deserve, there's always room on set for curiosity, a bit of controlled chaos, and the kind of creative momentum that only happens when a team is pushing limits and having a good time doing it.
Based in Belgium, working across borders
Studio Ballena is located at Regentiestraat 145, B-9473 Welle (Aalst), approximately 30 minutes from Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp by car. The studio's central Belgian location makes it a practical base for productions drawing crew, stylists and clients from across the country, and equally accessible for international agencies and brand teams working in the Belgian market.
That said, Studio Ballena is not a studio-only operation. Productions regularly take place on location — and the full capability of the studio travels with them. Robbie, the CRX1440 motion control robot, is compact enough to fit through standard doors and elevators, runs on a standard 230V supply, and is quite comfortable being packed up and taken on the road. The result is that the precision and repeatability of motion-controlled tabletop production isn't tied to one address. Whether the shoot is in a Brussels agency studio, a brand facility in Amsterdam, a production house in Paris or anywhere else across Europe, the same level of technical capability and creative control comes along for the ride.
Work with Studio Ballena
Whether you're an agency looking for a specialist tabletop production partner, a brand team planning a product campaign, or a production company in need of a well-equipped studio and motion control setup, Studio Ballena is straightforward to work with and built to adapt to your workflow.
Contact Bert directly to discuss your project, timeline and budget.