Candy - Candy Making Documentary Film Directed by Michael Firus. Produced by Visia Studios

After traveling the world learning the secrets of candy artistry, Pascal Menezes created the Red Balloon Candy Artisans in 2005. Since then, Pascal and is team have been satisfying Melbourne’s sweet tooth with hand-made candy creations of amazing complexity, quality, and taste. Documentary by Visia Studios. For distribution inquiries visit our website: www.visiastudios.com/
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- My name is Pascal, I began walking into a candy store and getting a free test taster from another business. The next thing I knew I was talking to the boss and he asked if I wanted to work for a part time position. That led into full time, led into management and the next thing I knew, I somewhat knew too much as an employee, so I decided to venture off in a small business, and create The Red Balloon Candy Artisan's back in 2006. The last design that we did was a picture of Santa Claus. It's coming up to Christmas now. It's just a process of cooking up all your rock candy in your ratios of sugar, water glucose. We boiled that up on big strong burners and got it up to a rock temperature of about 160 degrees. We then added flavors which have no color. We then added colors, which have no flavor, according to the design. And from there, we're just kind of cutting, pulling, stretching, shaping, molding all by hand. So obviously there's no machines, it's all 100% hand crafted. So yeah, we're just building up the eyes, now we're going to put the little, little cheeks, cheeks, under the eyes if that makes sense. And then we're going to put the nose in between the cheeks. And we're going off a design, so we have something in front of us where we're looking at, and we're looking at that design, but are we building it three-dimensionally in a three dimensional form out of the candy, so it's like a jigsaw puzzle and that process took us about one hour which is a very complex design. So yeah, it's an interesting trade. Well it's not really a trade it's just, there's no schooling for this style of product. And you kind of end up getting a lot of sort of overseas people going 'We want to do what you do'. Because there's not a big industry for it. Five, 10 years ago, there was nothing. It was old. It was that traditional sort of Blackpool Rock, Brighton Rock style of business. You're building eyes, nose, rosy cheeks, beard, the hat, the pompom, the ears, the outline. And you're building that design in about 12 kilos of candy. From there, you extrude it, it's still warm and soft. And from there, it cools down into long rods. And then from there you chop it into small bite size pieces. Artisan, I think, is just a really nice sort of descriptive word of what we do. It's making something by hand and a craft by hand. We branched out into, probably, I would, I would say maybe over 50 products that we do and another 50 up our sleeve.