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Love to cook and want to share your knowledge with the YouTube audience? Great idea! Start your journey here. In this article, we tell how to shoot food video that will make everyone feel hungry.
What do you like most about cooking? A particular cuisine – Italian, American, Peruvian? Or maybe you like exploring different kinds of street food from all over the world? Or, you’re most passionate about new restaurant openings and international bar ratings? Choose the one topic that inspires you the most and that you can talk about for hours. Otherwise, you’ll get tired of your channel after three videos.
On the other hand, don’t delay uploading your first video because you’re concept-searching. The best way to find your niche is by trying and experimenting.
YouTube is a place where you can and should be as creative as possible. There’s space for the weirdest ideas, and even the most absurd video will get views and thumbs up. This should make you think: does the world really need one more channel with the same old recipes? Maybe it’s time for something fresh!
See, for example, how the author of the You suck at cooking channel shows the process of cooking. Every recipe is spiced up with weird but still very funny jokes! These videos are interesting even if you’re not going to cook anything at all. They are valuable in and of themselves as great entertainment.
Try to replicate it. Make each video not just a simple how-to, but a short movie. This can be achieved with humor or offbeat shooting and editing, with interesting behind-the-scenes stories, poems or with all that mixed together. So, basically, be creative!
We eat first with our eyes, so you need to capture viewers’ attention right away. Therefore, when shooting a recipe video, show the finished dish first. Serve it fancily, make a beautiful background, and arrange the setting for the food in the frame. Use references: if you’re cooking Pasta Arrabiata, for example, place some red-hot pepper or basil near the plate, serve it with a glass of wine, find an Italian-style tablecloth… Show a delicious picture at the very beginning. Make your viewers want to create the same atmosphere, capture their attention with beautiful settings, and they will watch your video right to the end.
Talk a bit about the dish you’re cooking in general. Maybe it has an interesting origin and history. Maybe someone famous has cooked it, or it’s been mentioned in a movie or a book. hen you can list the ingredients – don’t forget to show them too, and specify the measurements.
Before you start the shoot, think about the stages of cooking that you’ll shoot close-up. Most often, bloggers make close-ups of the ingredients and then the finished dish. But maybe it’s worth taking in some details of the process at close range as well?
For instance, viewers may not understand what you’re doing when you’re kneading dough or what consistency they need to achieve when making a Bechamel sauce. Those things are easier to show than to explain with words. And that’s what YouTube is for! So, prepare a script for each video and mark all the points at which you’re going to take a close-up.
Your main goal is to make the video as clear as possible. Break down the cooking steps and explain every single one of them in detail. If the recipe contains rare ingredients, talk a little about them and give some suggestions about where to find them.
The easiest approach is to shoot with two cameras at once. One will be for the medium shot where you, your hands, and the food will be in the frame. The second is for the close-ups. But two cameras are not mandatory. You can still make great videos with only one. In that case, you will need a bit more time for the preparations and writing the scripts. Try different angles. For example, try using a wide-angle lens and place the camera on the table.
In addition to the camera, you will need a clip-on mic – this will help you record your voice without the inclusion of any unnecessary noise. Even a simple one will do.
Also, don’t forget about the lighting. If you have large windows in the kitchen and you’re taking the videos during the day, you may not need any extra light. In other instances, use table lamps and ceiling lights. Make sure you’re using light bulbs that have a warm white color. In the video, it will look much better than soft or cool white.
It’s not easy to keep the audience’s attention. People don’t like wasting time, so make sure every second of your video is useful, informative, and interesting. Nobody wants to watch how you chop the onion for two minutes or wait for your soup to come to a boil. So speed up or cut off these kinds of routine processes that do not require a lot of explanation. This is the least you can do while editing your video recipes. But it’s better to go further and use transitions between frames, add titles, stickers and other effects to make the video more eye-catching.
Choose a simple editing program that won’t require a lot of resources to learn. Go for easy and intuitively understandable software like, for example, Movavi Video Editor Plus. It contains all the tools you need for editing videos for your cooking channel, and you can add to it the Food Blog Pack with special food-related backgrounds, transitions, and stickers.
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Learn more about filming and editing a food blog in our video:
So, now the video is nicely edited and is ready to start collecting “thumbs ups”? Nope, not yet. First, you need to come up with a suitable title and description. Use an abbreviated version of the recipe and include links to an online store where viewers can buy the ingredients. Another good trick that the audience may like is a table of contents with links to the corresponding steps in the video. Learn how to do this here.
Create different content for your subscribers. Don’t limit yourself to just video recipes. Make a tutorial on how to select vegetables and fruits at the market. Tune some of the videos to holidays and explain how to cook specific dishes for those occasions. Shoot interviews with chefs or just talking videos where you express your opinion on trends and important topics such as food waste. Create ratings and summaries like “Top 3 Ways to Make a Caesar Salad”.
The basic videos will help you gain subscribers. Try things like “How to Cook Corn”, “How to Make a Poached Egg”, “How to Make Pasta Al Dente” and so on. If the concept of your blog allows it, you can go ahead and shoot such videos from time to time. The main thing to keep in mind while creating your videos: what may seem super easy to you may be harder for others. So take your time to explain everything clearly!
