Always Recipe Test before the Real Wrap
by Jeremy Pang
The top-down videography made all food, no matter how difficult, seem accessible and ‘doable’ to any Joe Bloggs. However difficult a recipe may actually be, if the video production is seamless, and the step-by-steps are sped up a little for some shots, and slowed right down for that extra linger on a beauty shot, or the right positioning is thought out with an eagle-eyed focus on the food and nothing else, the right combination of visually pleasing food shots create an allure that makes you want to watch more.
At Curious Crab Productions, our food filming shoots always start with the core recipe, as they should. If you’ve ever been on a recipe video binge on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok or You Tube whilst sitting in bed or whiling away your time ogling the tasty treats on the commute home, you’ll be well aware of the best food content creators out there who are masters of bringing out the ooze factor with simple, fun and inventive cooking techniques, making everything look completely achievable at home. Which, if we’ve done the hard work of testing the recipes for you first, of course, they will indeed, always be completely achievable.
Our jobs with our clients aren’t just filming jobs, more so, it’s our no.1 priority to help take care of filming projects from start to finish, when our clients are just too busy in their own marketing worlds and need to rely on a sturdy, yet specialist video production company to do as good as job as they do at making this complex process look simple to the viewer. And who better to ask, than a company like ours who know and love food more than anyone.
Food video shoots, always start with the recipes, and recipes need to be tested. Sometimes, recipe testing can take 3-4 attempts before we are satisfied with the process, but even then, each time you follow the same principle by getting the core ingredients ready and prepped, and then following on from there to get the finish that you want. But just having a well written recipe doesn’t necessarily always work, for example, if you are starting off with a block of cheese, and want to get the ultimate cheese pull right, the melting of such cheese doesn’t always listen to you or follow the ‘recipe’ for melty cheesy goodness on camera; you can’t tell a cheese pull which way or how much to actually pull – you just have to go for it!
Recipe creation and development is crucial to the end shots looking their best, but also tasting their best. Every dish or recipe we come up with for clients, needs to be 100% edible and worthy of a taste test. If there are leftovers of a dish that we have just shot a video for at the end of the day, and no-one wants to take it home to enjoy with their families, then we know we’ve done something wrong. But the recipe development is just stage one in the video production process. In fact, if you want to know more about the ‘real work’ that we do, there’s a blog post about that too just here.
Honestly, this is real work; as real as it gets and the absolute right way that filming good food should happen. Recipes need to be tried and tested, not just for the taste itself, but more importantly from a video content perspective, for the visual allure to be just as flavoursome as the recipe and so oozy that you just want to dig in right here, right now. The whole process of our food filming shoots shouts out what we do best.
If you are a food brand and ever need help developing recipes for digital content or short, sharp, fun food videos, please do get in touch and let us know… we do it all, properly.
