How to Shoot a Cinematic Restaurant Video in 2 hours | Client Job Shadow

I'm Chef Wai. I'm an omakase chef at Mok Cook. I work in different countries so I absorb different kinds of experience from different chefs, different backgrounds. This is a daily fresh from the fish market. I don't choose the thing that is not in the season. Then to serve customers, it's based on what they have in the market, then I will choose it. When my customer happy, I am very happy that because I make some food that my customer like it. If you are interested at Mok Cook Omakase by Wai, please give Mok Cook a call or you can go to Mok Cook website. Hey guys, how's it going? We are back for another job shadow and this time we are doing a cinematic restaurant shoot for a Japanese restaurant in Sydney. Now this restaurant specializes in omakase and for those of you who don't know what omakase is, it's basically a full course meal where the chef decides what the menu is going to be. And because me and Jono are such big food lovers, we were super super excited to do this shoot. Now the brief of this shoot is pretty straightforward. We only have two hours to do this shoot before the chef starts preparing for his dinner service. So obviously we don't have a lot of time to shoot on the day. So what that means is we're gonna nail down our pre-production. For this shoot, we have a lot of creative freedom on what the style of video is gonna be and what the concept of the video is gonna be. So what we decided is that we're gonna capture the chef meticulously preparing each dish. We're also gonna capture the end product of each dish as well in a very beautiful manner. And lastly, we're also gonna do an interview of the chef just to add an audio component to the video. So based on what we want to shoot, we've created a schedule which we sent to a client. So for the first half an hour of the shoot, we're gonna do the interview. For the next hour, we're gonna record the chef doing prep shots. And for the last half an hour, we're just gonna focus on doing the product shots of the finished dishes. For pre-production, we do use the website platform called Minute Note. This platform is amazing for sorting out pictures, notes, and the best thing is once you've created a document on this platform, you can share it with your client. Next, I'm gonna start creating my shot list in Minute Note. For this shoot, I draw a lot of inspiration from Chef Table on Netflix. I honestly think that is the best food TV show out there and it has amazing cinematography. So in terms of creating the shot list, I went through some of my favorite episodes of Chef Table and screenshotted the shots that I would like to replicate or be inspired by on the shoot itself. The reason why shot lists are so important is that it will make your shoot a lot easier and more efficient. Alright, your shot list will dictate your lighting of your shot, how you're gonna direct the chef, and also what camera angle you're gonna do for the shot. So on the shoot itself, as you will see later, you're gonna see me constantly referencing the shot list between each shot. Now, the day before our shoot, you'll find me packing our equipment. For our main camera, we're using the Sony a7S III with a 35-150 mm Tamron lens. For our B-cam, which we're gonna use for the interview, we're gonna go with a two-camera setup. We're just using a Sony a7 III with the 50 mm f1.8 Sony lens. We're also gonna bring two lights with two C-stands for our lighting setup. For audio, we're gonna bring a boom arm with a NTG mic on the C-stand to record the interview. And lastly, we're gonna bring a... I'm not sure what to call it. I'm just gonna call it a motorized rotating thing because you can just put your foot on it and we'll just rotate the food and you're gonna get some really nice shots off of this machine. On shoot day itself, we normally arrive 30 to 45 minutes early. This is because we want to take time to set up for the interview shot so that when the shoot starts, we're ready to go for the interview. We're not wasting any time whatsoever. With the interview setup, this restaurant is super small and tight. So there's only limited spaces that we could play with. We really like the lights and the barstool for the Omakase station. So we've decided to shoot towards that background. Again, with all our interview setups, we chose to place our subject on the side with them facing the other side and not looking at the camera. With our lighting setup, because the space is so tight, we just opt to go for one key light, which is lighting up the subject. And as you can see from the interview setup, everything is tightly packed like a can of sardines. We only have two hours for the shoot, which isn't a lot of time, but thank goodness, when you do proper pre-production, you can make sure you can do a really good job in the least amount of time possible. So today, we've printed out the brief and the shot list. We go through it with the client beforehand so they also know what's going on as well. If you want to go check out our Freight Creator Kit, this contains our pre-production templates that we use for some of our past shoots. So go check that out, link in the description box down below. So Chef, for the interview, you can just look at me. You don't have to look at the camera. Okay, tell us, what is Omakase and what makes it so special? Well, as I understand Omakase from a long time ago, Omakase is normally done by one chef. You won't have an assistant. The reason is like you need to prepare everything by yourself from the morning to the end of the service. That's why this Omakase is really mean to me. That's why you can see my menu is Omakase by Wai, which is my name. I think that was really good. So right now we're going to move on to filming Chef Wai do some prep. As you can see here, we've got the shot list of our prep shots. I'm going to be referencing these shots while I'm filming the prep. In terms of lighting, we're going to draw inspiration heavily from the cinematography of Chef Table. I've opted to put a harsh back light behind and towards the left of the chef. And then I'll also have a less harsh, definitely more subtle key light just on the left side front of the chef. This is going to beautifully light up the things and actions that he's doing. You want to make sure that you have enough light so that it can bring out the colors of the food. But you also want to make sure that you don't have too much light that you're getting rid of all the shadows and not making your footage cinematic at all. Now, when you're dealing with chefs, they're normally cooking at a very high speed. But for the purpose of the shoot itself, you do want them to slow it down. When I get you to go, I'll probably give you a three, two, one. Three, two, one. Go ahead. And three, two, one. Go ahead. Once we finish with the prep shots, we're just left with the easy part, which is our product shots. In terms of the lighting setup, it's pretty easy. I've opted to use just one key light to light up the food. That's going to adequately bring out enough brightness and the colors of the dish. Good stuff, Jess. Well done. Good shoot. How'd you feel? That was great. It was pretty intense because it was only two hours, but we knocked it out. Yeah, knocked it out. Yeah. Yeah, I remember like when we first started doing these when we got started, it was like pretty nerve-wracking and I'd say the nerves don't go away, but definitely you're more experienced. You know, you have a shot list, you have the pre-production. So everything I feel like definitely goes a lot smoother and we definitely get some much nicer shots. Once we gave the video to our client, they were super happy about it. They were incredibly surprised by the quality of our work and they wanted to recommend us to other restaurant owners. So when you do amazing work, it makes it so much easier for the client to recommend you to the other people that they know so that you are able to acquire more clients at the end of the day. For those of you who's interested about our color grade, we are giving out our lot for free. So please check it out in the description down below. Please note that once you put in the lot, you still have to do basic color correction like adjusting your exposure and your white balance. For those of you who don't know, we went from complete beginners in videography in 2018 to running a full-time six-figure video production business three years later. So if you want to transform your videography passion into a full-time thing like us, our Filmmaker Accelerator course is ready for enrollment. In this online course, we'll show you everything that we did from the start of our journey until when we acquire enough clients to sustain ourselves and turn our passion into a full-time job. So if you're interested, check it out in the link down in the description below. For those of you who's searching for a more simpler way to learn from us, we do have the Filmmaker Starter Kit, which is a comprehensive PDF guide detailing the journey that we undertaken. It also contains our email templates, sale templates, and packages that we've used to sell to our clients. So that's it for today. I'll see you in the next video. Stay focused.