How to Make Cooking Videos for Social Media

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There really is nothing more wholesome than food. Everyone eats it, everyone loves it. And even better, people love to try out new recipes, styles and techniques. It’s no surprise that cooking content always does well online through popular cooking and food prep videos.

 

 

So, if you’re looking to put your favorite family dishes out there, or hoping to become the next Guy Fieri, here is a quick guide to making quality and helpful cooking videos that will do well online and the video gear you must have.

Before we even start shooting you need to :

Plan and Script Cooking Videos

When creating cooking and food videos, by far the most important aspect of production is the planning and scripting. This pre-production stage is essential for lining up not just all the ingredients you’ll need for your recipes, but also laying out how you’ll present each piece of information with a script and a shot list.

One thing to keep in mind though that you’ll experience on cooking video sets, is that while a recipe and the steps are exact, many hosts like to work “off-the-cuff” as they go through their explanations. To keep things free-flowing and organic, encourage improvisation, but only as long as things stay on track.

Personally I write down all the frames that I'm planning to make and I put the notebook next to me so I avoid forgetting filming any frame.

The second important thing is to write down by order all the recipe ingredients and steps one after another, so already when you are ready to shoot make sure you have next to you all the requested ingredients with the exact measurements needed for the recipe.

Making an order in the pre-shooting stage will save you a lot of time believe me, I'm telling you from personal experience.

Find your best shooting location at home

Now that you have ready all the ingredients next to you , you need to create your video shooting location. I shoot all my videos at home next to a big window, so you need to check at your place where is the best light source you have and this will be your shooting location. We are not going to talk today about any artificial lights, this topic will discuss in a separate blog post. You can see in the photo below that my perfect location is my bedroom ( yes! I shoot there most of my videos).

 

Create your shooting set up by having the following video gear

Checkout the video gear you need to start shooting your next food video,

• Camera with video option ,or a high quality camera in mobile phone. My favourite camera for video shooting is this Sony RX100
• White cardboard : you need it so it could drops some light on the dark shadows from the side where you don't have a natural light source. The white color is a must.
• Backdrop , you can buy a backdrops, this is my favourite brand and if you are looking for a low budget backdrop simply buy a sample of kitchen or bathroom marble block , it really costed me only 2 Euros and any store similar to Homedepot in your country should have it.
• Tripod : since we are going to make food video shooting you need to consider that your tripod should have the layout from above shooting option, I have two tripods, this C stand and another one Manfrotto Tripod. The decision which one to buy depends on what you need, if you are looking for light portable tripod then Manforotto tripod is the right choice and it has also the overhead shooting option.
• Memory card, for videos it is a must, at least 64MB with the number 10 at least. Personally I advice having two.
• Light diffuser , so when you have a strong light from the sun side you add it and it softens the light .

Important notes:

• When you start shooting video, make sure you set up your camera correctly : Shutter speed, ISO, Aperture!
• Make sure that you are RECORDING ! Nothing is more frustrating than discovering a shooting that the camera was NOT shooting.
• Don't shoot one frame all the video, make every frame 20 seconds, so in the next step when you edit the video you don't have a heavy file to deal with.