10 Tips for Filming Food Videos to Make Mouths Water

How to Plan Food Videos

If you want to take your food videos to the next level, some careful planning has to go in. What are you going to make? How are you going to show it? Do you air on the side of entertaining or informative? Let’s find out.

1. Choosing a Recipe

One of the first things you should consider when planning your videos is what you’ll be cooking. You want to create something that visually looks delicious so that it’ll come across from behind the camera. You’ll also want it to be involved, but not overly-complicated so that you can easily show the steps of the recipe.

2. People or No People

There are different ways to showcase the making of the recipe. You can either go with the overhead, quick-cut look or with the head-on, “person making a dish” kind of view. The biggest difference between the two is whether you want to show the person making the food. 

One will place heavier emphasis on the ingredients and showing exactly what you have to do to make the dish. The other will show a person making it from scratch. This method is more personal but can be less instructional. Which one will make your audience drool more? 

Both will get the job done, as long as the person doing the cooking can turn the delicious looking ingredients into a delicious looking meal.

3. How Much Do You Show?

This is the age-old question when it comes to food videos. Do you show the whole recipe from start to finish, or do you skip the boring bits? 

Our advice?

Show the viewer how to do everything involved in making the recipe, but time-lapse things that take a while, like chopping, whisking, and cooking. You can get your point across without showing every second of the cooking process.

How to Make Your Food Videos Pop

Now that you’ve planned out how to make a quality cooking video, you need to figure out how to make them look great. You can’t have a next-level cooking video unless you have some wizards behind the camera, lighting rig, and soundboard. 

4. Camera Technique

How you utilize the camera(s) will depend on which type of cooking video you’ve decided to make (as we discussed in number 2). If you’re going with a simple, “just show the ingredients”, kind of look, you just need one overhead camera. 

If you’re showing a chef making the magic happen, things will get a little more complicated. To really make your videos visually pop, you should try using more than one camera.

A close-up shot in addition to a wide shot will allow you to get good shots of the ingredients being utilized, while still maintaining the personality of the video with the chef in view.

5. Lighting

Lighting is a huge part of what the finished product will look like. First of all, if you ignore the need for lighting in your studio kitchen, your videos will probably turn out dull. Natural light simply won’t do, so go out and get a good lighting rig and someone to help you use it. This is what will make your video look professional.

Before you start filming, you should also make corrections to the brightness on the camera. While this doesn’t completely have to do with the lighting, it’s important so that your food looks exactly how it looks to you in the studio. Do this by putting a white piece of paper in front of the lens and adjusting the hues to get a true white.

6. Sound

It seems like a simple enough concept, but how you approach sound can make a big difference in how your food videos turn out.

If you’re going with a vocal-heavy video, with the chef explaining what to do or a narrator behind the camera, then make sure that you have good microphones to capture the voices. It’ll ruin the experience if the sound is blown out or inaudible. 

The other direction you could take it is with a non-verbal, but music heavy approach. Choose music that is light and laid back. Jazz works well in food videos, as has been evidenced by many cooking shows and channels over the years.

7. Editing

Getting a good editor to piece the final product together is the most important part of this process. You can everything else right, but if it’s not edited smoothly, people aren’t going to watch your videos.

All that you have to do is make sure that cuts are coming at the right time, shots aren’t lingering for too long, and the time-lapse parts are the right length. There are lots of examples online on how to properly edit a food video. Do some research and find out the best way to edit the type of video you’re making.

Getting Attention for Your Food Videos

Having great videos is fine and dandy, but if people aren’t watching them, it was all for nothing. Here’s how to get your videos in the public consciousness.

8. Video Tagging

Using the right tags for your videos will help the right people see them. If it’s a recipe for beginners, make sure that the word “beginner” is in the tag. If it’s a Christmas recipe, make sure that the word “Christmas” is included in the tags.

This type of optimization will help your videos stand out to the people that want to watch them. If you improperly tag videos, you’ll get a lot of partial views, but few return viewers.

9. Keep It Focused

When it comes to cooking videos, you don’t have to set things up very much. Keep your videos focused on the task at hand and you’ll see lots of return viewers. When people are learning how to cook, they just want instruction, not preambles or asides.

The quicker that you can teach people how to make a recipe, the happier that they’ll be watching your videos.

10. Create a Community

All the most popular food videos online have a culture surrounding them. This isn’t easy to do, but by creating a community around your videos, you can grow your audience quickly. How do you develop a community?

Create social media accounts and a website to help promote your food videos. Then, engage with your audience. People appreciate someone who creates great content and pays attention to the people paying attention to them.

Take suggestions from your audience, shout them out in the videos, and always try to entertain them as best you can. Once you’ve developed a community around your videos, all you’ll have to do is post and watch the views roll in.

Start Your Food Video Enterprise Today

Now that you know how to plan, create, and promote your food videos, you can get started. If you’re a great cook and teacher, start showing the world what you can do.

There’s nothing people love more than for their mouths to water from watching a great food video. And, there are no limits on where you can take your videos once you’ve got an audience. Get your equipment and a few friends to help you, and start making mouth-watering food videos today.

For help with video production and animation, visit Viva Media. We’re a Toronto-based production company that can help you with every step of the video production process.

Or view our portfolio to see how we can help you, too!