Friday, 5 March 2010
Cookery team filming day - 4 hours for a 3 minute instructional video
For this assignment, we were put into groups to make a 3 minute instructional video of how to do student-friendly cooking that is healthy, easy and cheap. Our group (Chloe, Mike, Tom and me) decided to do a healthy stir fry with peanut butter and sweet chilli sauce and lots of vegetables. We decided this because it contains 4 of the 5 a day, it's easy and cheap and we had the ingredients and appliances needed. We filmed in Mike's kitchen as he lives on campus and has a stellar wok from Ikea that worked perfectly for it.
Pre-Production
When we first arrived at 2:00 we started setting up Mike's kitchen for filming - cleaning, clearing space for the actual cooking, setting up lighting (we had to put up makeshift curtains to block the bright sunlight coming in from the side, as can be seen in the photo above) and making a living food sculpture to film the first shot of the ingredients, as shown.
We then had to set up the equipment, which included a Sony Z1, a Manfrotto 503HDV tripod and a Rycote pistol grip and gun mike.
After all the equipment was set up, we set up the white balance and focus, and then got the first shot of the ingredients over which we want to superimpose text saying how much of each ingredient is needed. We thought this would be the easiest to go with a voice over, which is how we want to present it. We then started the cooking, showing the chopping of the vegetables (with me and Chloe tag-teaming it) with the rest of our beautiful food sculpture in the background to make it a bit more interesting and less antiseptic-looking than just a plain white wall. While we're going to get the sound of the voice over later separately, we wanted to get the sound effects of the chopping and cooking to put in to make it realistic and to use these to support the visual.
So, after some chopping mishaps and falling veg and chicken but still getting a successful take of what we wanted, we went on to the stir-frying part of it. We fried the onions, making sure to get the sizzling sound effect, then added the chicken and vegetables. We were able to get some good birds-eye view shots by raising the tripod to its highest setting, as shown in the photo below!
After getting a wide range of shots of each step of the cooking, such as close ups, pans, wide shots, etc, we finished the cooking and all tried the final product, which turned out not too bad, if we say so ourselves! we were definitely all made hungry enough for it by missing lunch and waiting four hours longer than we thought we'd need to, but it was worth the wait.
A few things we would have done differently in retrospect might have been:
- Be more prepared, maybe make a storyboard and list of everything we would need. At first we did a shot of the cooking utensils we thought we'd need, but ended up using much more than we thought we would. This made the day longer than it needed to be because instead of being able to the shot of all the utensils before we started cooking like we wanted to do, we needed to wait for the food to be finished, eat the food, do all the washing up, dry everything and set everything up a second time with the added utensils we had forgotten about.
- Started earlier in the week. Trying to sort out all our schedules to figure out a time for us all to meet proved harder than we thought it would be, and it made us go behind schedule with editing. We also had problems logging and capturing it, which if we had given ourselves more time we might have been able to sort out before the lesson.
Overall though, we all enjoyed this project and it provided important experience in the technical aspects of filming, in recording sound using a boom microphone and knowing how much to prepare for pre-production. We gained knowledge and experience and we'll be beginning the editing process next week.
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Good reflection, well done for sorting out production stills. Lets hope the editing works this time!
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