Behind the Scenes – SousVideTools.com
Is this really work?
There’s a funny cliché image that I often get if I think New York, it’s cops standing outside their cars, leaning on their sirens with a coffee perched on the roof and doughnut in hand. When it comes to camera crew like ours, especially with these two – Arthur and Lee, it’s camera equipment perched on a bar, and casually digging into a high-end meal cooked perfectly for them by only the best of chefs in the industry. Cocktails on the side of course – they’ve just been hidden… or the video was shot way later than we think.
The perfectly cooked meat isn’t just from the knowledge and care of the chefs from Social Eating House, but driven by their love of our Curious Crab Productions client: Sous Vide Tools. Sousvidetools.com is know their stuff when it comes to ‘cheffy’ equipment, and have recently kitted Jason Atherton's restaurants out with the top of the range kit, from sous vide baths, to commercial quality induction hobs, all of which are used on a regular basis by some of the top chefs in London.
The Curious Crab team stopped by a few weeks ago with a tight creative brief and even tighter time frames to get the job done. We had just 1-2 hours in each of the 3 venues, to get as much video footage, b-roll, interviews and photography of the food and chefs as we could to create some slick, yet informative videos about the partnership between Sous Vide Tools and Social Eating Company. Not dissimilar to the way our customers, this time, the chefs had to work, we had to have a clear process. Clients don’t always understand what videography entails other than pointing a camera at something or in someone’s face and getting them to smile. To us here at Curious Crab Productions, it’s different, we look at creativity in a systematic way; our producer Clare (who lives far far away in a land unknown to anyone), runs through the creative brief with our customers to see what the end deliverables are, and then liaises with all those who need to be on site on the day, to make sure everything is aligned, with an agreed format of the videos, frame by frame structure of every shot and a shot-list for our camera crew to tick off as we go. Having simple, yet fun and informative questions ready for our interviewees also helps them keep their own answers concise.
Not to say the camera guys don’t do any work, but the producers often get by-passed and forgotten about, especially when they live in lands far, FAR, away… And when they see behind the scenes footage of their teammates tucking into a plate of Michelin-esque food, we often ask – is this REALLY work? But of course, the only way to get good food footage is to love the food first…
