Do THIS When Shooting Food

this is a look at the cinematography behind a series of food ads for meal kit brand gusto hi internet my name is Scott Peters a director and sometimes cinematographer based in London England and on one such shoot recently where I was both directing and playing the role of cinematographer a few of you asked how I lit it the brief was Winter evenings when I spoke to gaffer Charlie on the phone about it I said something along the lines of lots of Hard light Long Shadows and will incorporate some practicals in the background to give the wider frames depth I wanted to rip off basically my favorite food ad reference but it was a little bit too bright for what they wanted we were working in the awkwardness of a 916 image so I found composition tricky in this but I had been given storyboards from the in-house team so I was trying my best to stick as close to them as possible within the space we were shooting for memory lighting was as simple as one big key light one spot with Cutters for the background a bunch of practical lights and some negative fill but I thought it'd be best that I check in with the man that actually lit it get for Charlie can you even remember what we did we had a 1200d through a 150 softbox which is the really big one the Grid on that and the strongest diffusion we then put a 4x4 diff frame that was full diff in front of that with a grid on that then we had a 300D the frenelum barn doors and that was coming in as more of a sort of edgy backlight two or three floppy camera left to stop the return from bouncing off the white wall in the cupboards and we put a couple of fairy lights in the background and uh used a couple of dados to slash down the background wall and the um Cupboards in the background see I can entirely forgot about the backpack I've like done a whole diagram of everything and I I just not even put that in there um well that's good that we had this chat then the key light on this shoe in question was the aputure 1200d it was double diffused when possible with a grid on it to stop the light from spilling outside of the subject the food why the need to shoot something so powerful so close to the food the need for so much power was because we were shooting a lot of high frame rate stuff some around 240 frames per second but some as fast as 480 frames per second and more frames means we need more light when shooting action like the impact of an egg into flour or the pouring of a liquid and you want everything moving in the image to be sharp you need to either decrease the shutter speed or decrease the shutter angle this is a semi-good example of where the shutter angle was not as small as it needed to be for the level of frames per second that we were shooting at I think we just about got away with it within the motion of the shot but if I pause the frame here you can clearly see that the image is not entirely Sharp obviously some parts just aren't in the focal plane but the parts that are within the focal plane could be sharper but we just didn't have enough light the key is at 100 as close as possible out of frame with minimal diffusion and the iso setting on the camera is higher than I'd typically be comfortable with but in summary the smaller the shutter angle the less light gets to the sensor so the more power we need to light the thing there's a great video explaining the intricacies around this that in-depth cine coincidentally released just the other day I'll leave a link in the description below for anyone that wants to learn more so our key light the 1200d was actually not quite powerful enough for the higher speeds with all the diffusion we'd weakened its strength with so on certain shots we had to lose one if not both the laser diffusion and often the grid as well also for these shots we had to swap out the existing practicals just standard cheap off-the-shelf fairy lights and swap in some aperture b7cs that could give us some more output and wouldn't appear to flicker on camera when shooting at the higher frame rates on other food shoots depending on the brief and the overall look of the ad and perhaps the Brand's sensibilities you might have swapped out the negative fill we used for either some bounce or even a more powerful fill light so the contrast ratios wouldn't have been quite so dramatic and Moody this would have given it less shape but that's not always a bad thing and shape or contrast is definitely not always what the client wants so that's how we lit these social spots Augusto and the kit if you're interested this was shot on the red V Raptor using cheapest chips when it comes to cinema lenses Mica full frame lenses or maybe that's my key not really sure and they're even harder to pronounce slower Pro Blends for a couple of shots the pro Blends makes things even trickier because that particular lens is F14 when wide open so you need a lot of light even when you're not shooting slow motion I'm pretty sure on the camera with strength one of a Hollywood black magic filter to take the edge off the sharpness of everything but it may have been less sometimes I do have a tendency to maybe overcook it a little and choose too strong a filter I normally always shoot with some sort of filter in front of the lens but this does depend of course on what sort of thing you're shooting I tend not to talk a lot about the actual cinematography on a lot of my shoes even when I am dping as I feel like the internet already offers so many great resources teaching people how to create beautiful images but if this is something you'd like me to share more of in future breakdowns then please do let me know in the comments section for more tips and tricks on how to light food make sure to watch this video from my very first McDonald's shoot with a far more experienced food DP than I and if you haven't already subscribe for more semi-hubble tips and interesting Insider industry knowledge

Channel: Scott Peters

Views: 52,309

Keywords: cinematography, cinematography tutorial, cinematography breakdown, food cinematography, cinematographer, dop, director of photographer, filmmaker, filmmaking, director, slow motion food, how to film food, how to film slow motion food, how to light food, food photography, cinematography style, director of photography, cinematography techniques, film, commercial filmmaking, commercial cinematography, studio cinematography, scott peters, no film school, film riot, danny gervitz

Id: qAa0n-Qxmng

Length: 5min 21sec (321 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023