Real World Experience in Food Video Content Creation

This was a project I did back in April 2022: Produce 15 videos for 15 restaurant brands in just 3 weeks. Here is how I got it done.

The equipment: https://kit.co/tungle20/cinematic-food-videos

Monitor+ App: https://monitorplus.cc

Books I recommend:

Mastery by Robert Greene: https://amzn.to/3YxznVl

How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie: https://amzn.to/3YSfJmO

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray: https://amzn.to/40Tax3J

My color grading LUTs: https://prre.me/lut

2 years ago my producer asked me about Daniel Schiffer's famous EPIC B Roll food, product and restaurant videos, I told him: "Yeah, it's cool... But people will get tired of it." Fast forward 2 years later and we have seen these EPIC food videos all over the internet. A simple bowl of noodles could be made EPIC by raising the tripod and tilt the camera down. What's once EPIC isn't so "EPIC" anymore, especially when it doesn't get you clients. Sure you can get some money from AdSense and Sponsors like Schiffer did, but how many of you realistically?

The lesson here is simple, if you are making videos for a living, you will need clients and agencies to survive. I call them BRANDS. Brands just want their products to be CLEAN and CLEAR. The so called EPIC-ness in your videos is rather achieved by ways of lighting, composition, sound, editing, camera angles, camera lenses, timing, camera positions, colors, the props, costumes, the location, the sound fx, just so many elements to it and especially in food videos, creative ideas are much more valuable (like the 2 French guys of foodfilm: Michael Roulier & Philippe Lhomme) NOT by ways of transitions or camera movements alone. even camera movements have their own meanings: what directions, the shapes in the frame and so many kinds of transition: matching audio, visual match cut, disrupted match cut and there are so many kinds of motion as well.

So I hope in this course, you can have a better understanding of what it is that you are actually doing.

Why should you care to make your food videos cinematic? You could make it flat, you could use the probe lens (like everyone else) to get the miniature push in shot. In my case, I found out why in March 2015 when I first saw 12 things you can do with an egg by Food People Places. It was visually and rhythmically stimulating, unlike a TV commercial which is often too short and has the same formula as one another. It was the first time in my life I realized it was possible for me to create such a work of art without having an enormous budget. So in the past 8 years, I have made more than 200 cinematic food videos for many restaurant F&B brands locally and internationally. I'm going to share with you both the technical and the business side of making cinematic food videos for a living. I live in Vietnam, so the laws and taxes here might be very different from your country but the principles of working with agencies or clients will be the same. It’s important to listen to and respect them always.

Making food videos is not hard, don't believe me? Just go on Youtube and TikTok, you can easily find countless numbers of food videos. These videos are valuable for their information and educational value. But let’s be honest, they don't look very pleasing, they don't intrigue strong emotional responses from the viewers. I want to show you how you can make your food videos more visually appealing, attention catching and emotionally intriguing.

First is backlighting, I was taught very early on by Rob Grimm to always backlight but I did not do it at first. It took me a year of making boring looking food videos until I tried it the first time in 2016 and the result looked amazing. The reason why backlighting works is because when something is lit from behind, it seems to have a religious feeling to it, a sort of halo of light surrounds the subject like in the old paintings of Titian. So this lighting makes the food more respectable and heroic.

Second is shooting at a low angle. There is no definite answer to at what angle exactly because it depends on the shape of the food. Sometimes I would go as low as 10 degree or 0 degree but other times I have to go up to 60 degree in order to see what’s inside the pot.

Third is shooting macro, in addition to backlighting and going low, a macro lens is very important to create that awe, that emotional pause when a viewer looks at something they don't often see. Because in the basic of cinematic storytelling, Extreme Close Up (or macro) shots are used to heighten the audience's emotional response, these types of shot tell the audience: This is important, pay attention to this.

If you look on instagram or other social media, people don't often take macro shots of their food because well, first they can’t, their phone only have wide angle lens, if they try zooming in, the image would be pixelated. 2nd and more important, they are greedy for more stuff in the frame. This is helpful to convey information NOT to intrigue emotions from viewers about the food itself. You can also see this in most corporate images, they don't dare going macro in fear of something “not safe” something unfamiliar to the customers’ eye. Therefore you often find these images to be flat and lifeless because they are trying to sell you something, maybe a lifestyle or a product NOT to make you feel mouth watering or empathize with the one who made these images, these beautiful foods in the first place. If you take your food videos seriously, use a macro lens for its full potential and take your viewers to a whole new world. Here is the secret to Chef’s Table signature shot = macro lens + a turntable.

Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll: https://amzn.to/3Wq4qjV

The fourth technique is making your videos look warm by raising the temperature of your light. I often use orange gel over HMI light and dial down my camera white balance to 4800K or lower. The LED lights nowadays often have this ability built in to make it either warmer or cooler. This warm tone can make your videos look more pleasing, welcoming and most importantly delicious. Why? Because it mimics the lighting at dusk when you are relieved from work and ready to head home for supper and rest. This is deeply ingrained in human psychology for thousands of years, it’s something very primal at the subconscious level.

The fifth technique is to ask your chef or food stylist to prepare the best looking ingredients, a lot of them. The advantage of this technique is that you DON'T have to reshoot a lot because the whole video could be ruined because of one single ingredient that looked ugly or not ripe or badly damaged. In traditional TV commercials, they use fake foods. I’m not a fan of fake food, because my production is very lean so I can shoot very fast without worrying about the food might sink or turn ugly while waiting for approval or something. But you do need to prepare extra ingredients so you don't have to hold production to go to the supermarket to grab extra onions. That would be very unprofessional but I have seen it happened a lot. The same can happen to kitchen equipment, better have them in advance and the best looking one. Usually the food stylist will handle this but you can be extra careful by preparing them yourself. I would bring my travel gas stove which I bought from Japan, my cast iron skillet and a few other items which I think can improve the outcome of my videos. The downside of this technique is: it costs a lot. Not just money but time and energy to bring and manage them on set. Sometimes client or agency won't appreciate your effort and it will be counter-productive. So it’s better to communicate with your chef, food stylist and client to avoid any misunderstanding.

The 6th technique is to work with a competent chef and a team of support, they are crucial for the success on set. The chef should be very well trained and supported otherwise you will waste valuable time on set because he/she keeps making mistakes and you have to reshoot and wait which is very problematic on set. I suggest you work with the chef to prepare in advance certain portions not yet finished so if for some reason either from his/her part or your part, you will always have at least one backup. Don't work with someone who is not well prepared: ingredients, equipment and portions before the shooting day.

The 7th is always have the best quality of light as possible. The subject of lighting can be a course of its own because lighting is so primal to human, to any organism as the matter of fact. The color of light, the diffusion of light, the amount of light, the angle of light, the direction of light, the fall off of light, so and so, can affect the mood and emotion of viewers when looking at just about anything. This can only be learned by experience because the sheer amount of combinations of the factors I just stated above are limitless. I have learned lighting through painting. I was deeply impressed by Caravaggio’s paintings. They are so harsh and cruel and straight to the point. Rembrandt’s paintings are very similar in that they are dark and moody, yet they look so real, so brutal and honest. Maybe because of these qualities that I found myself deeply connected to this way of lighting in my videos. However I can't always do that. Because I have to satisfy my client and agency’s need as well. They want their product to be visible not necessary “real”. So I always try to balance both worlds. Sometimes I went to far in my urge to create images like Caravaggio and Rembrandt, I displeased my agency so much that they didn't hire me again. So in Vietnam, where I’m currently working, people in the video and photo business have a saying goes “Bright Faces Win Money”. And I found it to be true most of the time. People just want to see their faces or their products clean and clear. So without telling you specifically how to set up your lights, the goal should be to have your subjects as clean and clear as possible. The way I do it is with 3 HMI lights, I prefer HMI to LED because the fall off of these lights are further than LED, so I can have long shadow and strong halo for my subjects, though they can be super hot to work with. I would have the classic 3 light setup: 1 diffused key light, 1 back light and 1 fill light hitting the ceiling. I do carry a few LEDs for tight spaces and Extreme Close Up shots.

The 8th technique is: I shoot everything in 4K 50fps and some shots I ask the chef to do one or few more times to do slow motion. Slow motion is a lot more complicated than many think. It requires strong lights, lights that don't flicker because you will have to raise the shutter speed so you don't get too much motion blur. I usually x2 or x4 my fps for my shutter speed. For example when I shot 480fps on my Sony FS700, my shutter had to be at least 1/1000 to avoid too much motion blur. That’s just easy part, the hard part was focusing. To focus on something that was moving so quickly was extremely difficult. If I was to close down my aperture to F5.6 or F8, I definitely needed stronger lights or moving my lights closer to the action otherwise the output would be too dark. So there is a checklist of steps I need to do technically to shoot slow motion:

1. Raise my Shutter Speed

2. Close down my Aperture for easier focusing

3. Raise my ISO to compensate the 2 settings above

4. Switch my lights from 50Hz to 1000Hz to avoid flickering

5. Switch off all other lights in the room to avoid flickering

My advice for slow motion is you really need to plan ahead on what you want to shoot in slow motion and maybe do a demo before you get on set, otherwise, it would cost too much time and data. The use of slow motion clip in your edit should also be minimal because viewers got bored of it really quickly. I only learned this fact after 2 years of abusing slow motion for my food videos.

The 8 techniques above are what I consider essential for a good looking food video. My experience over the years has taught me a few other lessons: If I had a likable character with a back story, the viewers would be more emotionally invested in my video than just looking at food alone. The examples of Chef’s Table, Midnight Diner and A Japanese Youtube Channel would be perfect, though it’s hard to keep these kinds of videos shorter than 6 minutes. Actually I first got interested in food videos because I saw Jiro’s Dream of Sushi in 2011. It was a very life changing experience because at the time I was in Savannah, GA to pursue a major in Animation because I liked Ratatouille so much.

In recent years, I have tried to record clean audio on set but I found it to be very difficult but doable. I used to look for stock sound for my food videos and it’s such a lengthy and tiring process. I bought The MixPre-6 as recorder and Sennheiser MKH-416 as shotgun mic to record while shooting. I had to make sure everyone was silent (even the chef) which was very hard and time consuming. In post I had to sync all of my clips with that recording and edited from there which was another hassle. But in the end I found it to be very worthwhile. My food videos had more life to them than just pretty images and music playing in the background.

So, after all these difficult tasks the only and the hardest task of all is THE EDITING. But I find this task to be the most fulfilling of all because I’m now responsible for completing the creation of a work of art. And it’s also the most frustrating because I have to take feedback and criticism from clients and agencies before moving on to finalize my video and get paid. The process usually follow as these:

1. Structure my folders

2. Import clips to folders

3. Rename clips

4. Sync clips with audio records

5. Create project

6. Import Synced Sequence

7. Create my own sequence

8. Create Proxies

9. Start editing

10. Finish 1st edit

11. Look for stock music

12. Adjust my 1st edit to music

13. Render Version 1 with watermark

14. Upload to Frame.io

15. Get feedback and make changes

16. Render Version 2 with watermark

17. Get feedback and make changes

18. After client and agency confirm there will no longer be any change to the edit, I will add graphics and sound effects

19. Render Version 3 with watermark

20. Get feedback and make changes

21. Render Version 4 with watermark

22. After client say “ok” I will render Version 5 without watermark

When I started out, I did what most people do, I looked for music to edit on. This makes sense for beginner editors because to edit something on nothing is hard. But after 5 years of doing this, I found a fatal flaw in this way of editing: What if my client hated the music I initially chose? Then the whole edit was screwed and I got super disappointed because now the moving images were no longer in sync with the new music and I might have to start all over. So you can see, this approach to editing had caused me depression for years. Nowadays, I just edit without music altogether. I would listen to whatever music I like and edit the clips from that. This made it a lot easier to find stock music because I had looked through the clips and had a feel for what might be in the end. Of course, after finding the stock music for my 1st draft, I would need to adjust my edit a little to fit it. Now if my client hated the stock music, I would change without much emotional attachment to my edit. Music before or after 1st draft is totally your choice, if you don't have a client or agency to answer to, you can go with your initial choice of music.

It’s always better to have 2 camera angles to edit. I didn't know this in the beginning so my cuts always appeared jittery because it’s the same shot but different action. Later I learned to use this to fast forward my action without using Speed Ramp, it got much better pleasing result editing to fast paced music. I usually have 2 camera angles at least: LOW and OVERHEAD (or 90 degree) to cut in between. I find it better to rig my camera to an overhead slider for overhead angle and a studio stand for my low angle. In case a studio stand is too expensive or heavy to be carried around then a tripod would be enough though you might need someone to support you bringing it up and down for different angles. I find dolly and crane to be not necessary for food videos because the background is not super important in this case to be revealed by a dolly or crane. You could use a crane for overhead shots but it can be really difficult to frame and operate your camera in such a case.