Instructional Video Filming

For the 4002 module, we have been asked to complete a short instructional video lasting aournd 3 minutes, aimed at students covering cheap and healthy eating.

I worked in a group with Ant, Harry and Simon, we filmed this afternoon in Ant's kitchen making a pasta dish.

The stages we went through in planning how to film the video was as follows:

• Break down the recipe
• Decide which order to film stages (e.g. all chopping to be done in one go)
• Pre-plan certain shots
• Work out timings of food being cooked
• Film!

The frustrating thing about trying to film a video cooking food is that either shots had to be rushed and several filmed in a short space of time or there is a lot of waiting around depending on what stage of the recipie you are at.
For example, we were cooking a pasta dish but preparing everything else within the recipe first, this meant that once we had done all the chopping and prepared all the sauce we had to wait just over 10mins for the pasta to cook before we could continue with filming. This does give time to review the work done so far but the waiting around can be annoying!

Also, depending on the type of recipe there is a pressure to get everything right first time. For example when filming ours we only had enough spinach for one 'batch' so if we had messed up or something had gone wrong with the shot of cooking spinach it would have proved rather difficult.

I have learnt that cooking videos are not as easy as they look and they take a lot of scheduling when you cant afford to or dont have the resources to make multiple versions of the dish. Programmes like Ready, Steady, Cook! and the live sections of Saturday Kitchen have the pressure of getting everything right for live audience, but a pre-filmed cooking video has the same problem and requires a lot more preparation than I originally thought.

Stick around for the edit!