Ten mistakes people make filming a recipe

A recipe films badly for reasons that have nothing to do with cooking. You are running a process that will not wait, with your hands full, in a room built for heat and noise rather than pictures, and every decision you did not make in advance gets made for you by the pan.

The short version: light the counter rather than the kitchen, put a second camera on the work even if it is a phone, switch the extraction fan off before you speak, film the small actions on purpose, and film the finished plate before anybody eats it. None of those is a skill. All of them are decided before the hob goes on.

Ten is the right length because the list belongs to one activity. A general list of filming faults runs out earlier. A kitchen adds its own: a process with no pause button, a running appliance in every direction, and a subject that changes appearance while you film it.

Why does a kitchen break the usual filming advice?

Because most filming advice assumes you can go again.

A piece to camera can be reshot until it is right. A roux cannot. Once the recipe is in front of you it moves at its own speed, in one direction, and anything you missed means shopping again rather than resetting. That is what makes a kitchen a planning problem rather than a filming one.

The other thing a kitchen does is make noise at you from three directions while you try to speak over it. That half is repairable afterwards, at a cost high enough to be worth avoiding.

The ten, in the order a shoot goes wrong

You light the kitchen instead of the counter and the pan

Overhead kitchen lighting exists so you do not cut yourself, and it does the one thing food cannot survive: it drops your shadow across the work every time you lean in. Move a single light to the far side of the counter, roughly opposite the camera, and the steam, the sear and the texture all pick up an edge. The rule for a face and the rule for a plate are not the same, and Where to put your light when you only have one is the face version.

One camera, so every process shot becomes a jump cut

With a single angle on a process that never stops, every shortening of a step is a visible jump, and a recipe is almost entirely shortening. The composition a cooking partnership settled on is two angles on the person and one on the counter, with b-roll, meaning short shots of something other than you, filling the joins. How many cameras do you need? works out whether that is affordable at your scale, and Giving every camera angle a job stops the third being decoration.

The extractor, the fridge or the oven runs through the take

Steady noise is free to remove at the source and expensive to remove afterwards, because the tools that take out a constant hum take a thin layer off your voice with it. Switch the extractor off while you talk and on while you cook, and open the fridge between sections rather than during them. If you silence the fridge by switching it off at the wall, give one person the job of switching it back on and keep the door shut; an hour is fine, a forgotten fridge is a food-safety problem rather than just a warm one. Hum, fans and the fridge explains what removal costs and carries the food-safety limit, and Can your audio be saved? is for footage already on the card.

Nothing is said out loud, so the footage cannot be navigated

An afternoon of kitchen footage with no landmarks has to be watched from the beginning by whoever edits it, including you in a fortnight with no memory of which take of the sauce was good. A cooking partner was asked to say the stage out loud while filming, on the recording rather than in a notebook, which turned scrubbing into scanning and saved editing time. What to say out loud while you film has the phrases worth learning.

Your hands leave frame at the moment that matters

The close angle is framed neatly for the pan, then you reach left for the salt and the half-second that mattered happens outside the picture. Set that frame wide enough to hold the reach as well, or bring everything the step needs inside the frame before you start. Giving every camera angle a job is the general form: an angle that only sometimes contains its subject has not been given one.

You film horizontal only

A wide frame cropped to vertical keeps your face or the pan, and in a kitchen the pan sits below you and off to one side, so the crop takes the food out. Either film the key steps again with a phone held vertically, or compose the horizontal frame with the action stacked up the middle so a vertical crop contains it. Cropping to vertical without losing the subject has the geometry, and Filming so you can repurpose later is the planning half.

No b-roll of the small actions

The pour, the chop, the sprinkle and the lid going on are what every join in the finished video gets covered with, and nobody films them, because they are not the recipe. Film them on purpose, straight after the step rather than during it, so they are clean and you are not doing two jobs at once. A b-roll list you can use again is written once and taken into every shoot after this.

The kitchen and what you are wearing change during one recipe

An apron that arrives halfway through, a tea towel that moves, a chopping board that vanishes between two shots of the same step: each is a join nothing can make invisible. Photograph the counter and yourself before you start, then look at it again after every break, including the ones you did not plan. Resuming a shoot after a break is the full procedure, and Why wardrobe decides whether a series looks like one is the version across several recipes.

The finished dish never gets filmed properly

The plated dish is the shot the thumbnail needs and the shot everybody forgets, because by then the filming feels over and the food is going cold. Give it its own small setup: clear the counter, move it into the light, and film it from more than one position before anybody sits down. Three thumbnails, not one explains why you want frames to choose between rather than the one you liked on the day.

You film the boring parts at full length

Peeling, waiting and repeating an instruction you have already given do not survive an edit, so filming them in real time is filming for the bin, and it fills the card somebody then has to work through. Do the step, film the beginning and the end of it, move on. Why your edit feels slow is what happens when that material stays in, and Should you cut out every breath is the honest limit on the trimming.

What is worth changing on the next recipe?

Two things, and they are the cheapest two. Move one light so it comes from behind the food rather than above you, and say the stage out loud before every step. Between them they fix the shot people came for and the work that happens long after the cooking stops.

Only one item here costs money, and it is the second camera. The rest is a lamp you already own being moved, a switch turned off, a frame set wider, or a sentence said into a recording running anyway. If you cook for a channel once a month, the camera is probably not worth it yet, and the nine free items will change more than it would.