Video 1: Meatloaf

The 1st video I attempted to shoot was a Bacon Wrapped Meatloaf. I wanted to shoot this in a Tasty format with a birds eye view of the bench. I wanted everything to be shot quite tight and for the bowls, tins and pans to take up most of the screen without too much negative space. I chose a recipe that is reasonable complicated, especially compared to most of the other videos of this format. The meatloaf is also quite fatty and contains allot of the ‘key’ ingredients that I feel stand out to people. These include, bacon, beef, sausages, bread and cheese. I used various ellipsis tools in this video including foreshortening the footage via fast forward, as well as cutting from before to after shots and removing the middle part of the cooking process. I was worried that the latter would look disjointed but I think it worked okay. An example of this is the sautéing of the onion. I showed myself stirring the raw onion, then stirring the semi cooked onion and lastly stirring the finished onion and removing it from the pan. Although the movement is not continuous and my hand does jump from one side of the pan to the other I don’t think its too jarring on audiences. I believe that this ellipsis, although not completely smooth is probably more engaging then showing the full process, I feel that audiences would favour the ellipsis over the real time take. One problem that I encountered on this shoot was trying to achieve the birds eye view. I wanted to fill most of the screen with the bowl without cropping it. It was difficult to achieve this without getting the tripod legs in the bottom corners of the frame. This was especially difficult when I was filming over the stovetop as it was difficult to position the tripod legs around the other gas burners. There was an overhead fan/vent, which restricted my tripods vertical movement. I also had to balance the camera so that it wasn’t too top heavy for the tripod and so it didn’t tip over. Another consideration was the steam when cooking the onion, I had to turn the fan on and cook the onion slowly in order not to fog up the camera. The use of multiple bench spaces provided further difficulties for this film. It was a challenge to move from the bench, to the stovetop and back whilst trying to maintain the same composition so items didn’t jump around in the shot. I could have tried using marks to reposition the camera in the same shot.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *