5 tips for making food look great on video
When you think of great food-based video content I’m sure your mind wonders over to the mouth-watering adverts from the likes of M&S and Waitrose - where the standard Sunday roast looks like it belongs in a Michelin starred restaurant. And as a result of us all becoming so familiar with these nostalgic moving images, the expectation of brands (many with smaller budgets) to create similar content has risen drastically.
The intention of food-based video content is to strike a cord with the viewer and evoke an emotion; usually creating excitement or desire to taste a product. It can be healthy, inventive, indulgent, creative, the list goes on. Working with the likes of Asda, Yo!Sushi, Pilgrims Choice and Kerrygold, we’ve been creating food video content for a number of years and thought we’d share some best-practise techniques that help make it pop (or ping 😉).
In no particular order, we’ll start with:
Lighting
Good lighting is crucial to bringing out the colours, textures and juices of great food. There are numerous ways to light food content depending on the style and themes you’re going for. You may want strong sun beams gleaming in to express positive summer vibes. You may want bright, clean and shadowless looking content to be used all year round.
We like to light food from one side or slightly to the back. This is using one light source and we’ll often bounce a little light back on the other side using a poly board or reflector. This creates a pleasing and well-exposed image that’ll make your audience’s mouth fill with water.
We use a variety of sources of light including LED panels, natural daylight or big HMIs. We use the Aputure 300D as our main key light. It can be used as a directional beam of light or fired through a some diffusion to soften the shadows. It kicks out the equivalent of 2K (meaning it packs a punch but can be easily dimmed down).
2. Macro
You want to excite your viewers and show them something they don’t see every day. One way to do that is to get extremely close to the subject matter using a macro lens. A macro lens is a specialist bit of kit which allows you to focus the image much closer than traditional lenses. Imagine if you held your hand a few centimeters from the lens, you’d likely be able to focus on individual hairs - that’s how detailed we’re talking. When it comes to food, those juicy, sparkly or in this case fiery shots up close and personal add huge amounts of value to a film.
3. Stylist
A good food stylist is a key ingredient to every shoot. We all fancy ourselves as cooks, but this is a different ball game. As well as cooking the food to perfection, they often bring specialist tools, props and utensils that help bring a boring drab shot to life.
They also come with a handful of tricks up their sleeve, which when needed, can really save the day. Take the ‘tampon trick’ for example... Dip a tampon or bit of cotton wool in water and place it in the microwave for a minute. The resulting steaming wool can be hidden in shot providing the illusion of piping hot food for an extra few minutes
Stylists also have a detailed understanding of food and the way is behaves over time. Some food can last a long time under lights as you’re prepping a shot, whilst others begin to age and dull quickly. Food stylists plan ahead meaning the schedule is maximised for the day and people aren’t standing around waiting for the cake to rise. Big Tip: If you’re extra nice to them, they’ll often give you the leftovers
4. Slow Motion
We having a saying in our office that “everything looks better in slow motion” and this phrase is particularly pertinent when talking about food video. We often shoot in 100 frames per second (4 x slower than real time) to give the viewer time to really focus on that creamy pour or fiery steak sizzling. Some of the more specialist cameras offer frame rates up to 1000 frames per second (approx 40 x slower than real time). This gives a perspective that can’t be accessed any other way and truly helps the food content stand out.
5. Backgrounds
Pay attention to backgrounds, foregrounds and textures. We have a selection of vinyl textures that we bring along to shoots that can be placed down to change up any surface. It’s much cheaper than bringing a couple of marble slabs to every location and gives everyone the ability to have an input creatively on the shoot day.
Et voila… 5 top tips for cooking up a storm with foodie video content. Whilst this isn’t the definitive list of everything you need to know about crafting great food videos, it gives you an interesting insight into some of our processes.
To learn more about how we craft our food video content for brands and agencies visit here
Keep an eye out for a future blog where well be sharing more tips including recipe creation, prop sourcing, and landscape vs portrait formats.
View some of our latest foodie content here:
Pilgrims Choice
Recipe Video
Rainbow Cake
Recipe Video