How to Film Low Budget Chef's Table - Canon C200 and EOS R (BTS)

My name is Chef Rosie. I'm the executive chef for Calamigos Ranch. I love colors that pop on a plate. It can never be under one dimension and one tone. Having the garden, the resort, just changed my whole perspective of cooking. What better thing to have Calamigos and all this ranch space and being able to like grow all this amazing produce. My goal is to make sure flavor presentation and I like to put a little bit of that one wow factor that people don't expect. I don't explain to my guests what specifically they're having because I want to put the dish down on their table and see that reaction to what they think of the plate. I want guests to leave here and the food be definitely a topic of conversation. My main goal is to make sure we give them the best experience they can have. Alrighty, welcome back guys to another video here on the channel. My name is Alex Chung and today we're going to break down the commercial that you just saw that was inspired by Chef's Table. For this commercial our client wanted to do something more elegant and since we were highlighting their wedding side of their business they wanted Chef's Table and like how the whole show was shot and edited and you know just it's so beautiful and like who doesn't like Chef's Table. And so we sat down with Chef Rosie who is the executive chef at Calamigos Ranch and we did the interview and also followed her and her team around the kitchen as they prepared food for a tasting session for a guest. So let's jump right into it and let's start by talking about the interview camera setup. Now for the actual Chef's Table show they were using Red Epic Dragon cameras with Leica Summicron like beautiful, beautiful lenses and like awesome cameras which obviously you know is way over our budget and our expertise. So we're using the Canon C200 along with the EOS R with a couple Tamron photography zoom lenses. But really quick if money was not the problem what camera and lens combo would you use for this interview setup? Our C200 was on the wide-angle shot and then the EOS R was on the tight close-up angle. But in the final video we actually only ended up using the wide-angle shot. We had a lot of b-roll that was covering the audio edits and also the different cuts. When we're looking at the final video we didn't feel like we needed to cut to the second close-up angle. On the C200 we had the Tamron 24-70 at the 25mm focal length and on the EOS R we have the Tamron 70-200 at the 70mm focal length. And because both cameras have dual pixel autofocus we set both of them on autofocus so we don't need to focus on pulling focus. What? Okay, that was that was terrible. Sorry, that was just terrible wording. So I'm gonna quickly transition into how we did the interview lighting setup. The key light that I'm using is the Godox VL-150 and I mentioned it on the previous video for the low-light video that we were shooting for Calamigos as well. It's a really nice key light that really provides a clean strong output and I put the little comb reflector thingy on the light so that we control where the light was spilling. Now the reason why I set up the Godox light on the left side of the frame was because there's a huge window of light that was coming in. That way I'm not competing with the natural light that was already in the room. What I want to do is really emphasize and highlight and what is it amplify? I want to amplify the light that was already in the existing room and I don't want to create new light if that makes sense because that would look really distracting and it might not look as natural as I want it to be. To diffuse it, we initially used a 4x4 butterfly frame with some 216 diffusion cloth on it. But as we were setting up the shot, the sun actually came up and over the roof. The roof had some windows up top and the sun was actually shining through and through the trees and we could see the patterning of leaves on Chef Rosie's face and that was really distracting for her to do the interview with. And so what we did end up doing was putting the 4x4 butterfly frame to kind of like block out a lot of the light on her face and really soften that up so you don't really notice the really harsh sunlight. And instead for our Godox VL150, I put one of those diffusion umbrellas, like the photography diffusion umbrellas on top of it so that we also get a really nice soft key light. And so that way we avoid changing, you know, the entire setup and the entire location. We don't have to move around constantly to like fight off the sun. That way we just stayed in one spot and actually was very efficient that way. Now we only used one light to light our entire scene and I know that a lot of people would have maybe wanted to bounce in some fill or like had a backlight to kind of like separate Chef Rosie from the background. But when I was doing some research on Chef's Table, like the behind the scenes of how they actually shot it, they actually used as little lights as possible and relied heavily on using natural light, directing it, reflecting it, diffusing it, balancing it, and trying not to use any artificial lights whenever possible. I kind of ran with that with this commercial and I did the same thing where we only used like one light. Another thing that I wanted to touch on really quickly was how to choose your background when you are filming an interview. In the video, you see that we are in a room, but initially we wanted to go outside in the patio where it's like nice, you know, with the trees and the birds. And we ran into a lot of audio problems when we were scouting the location outside. There are a lot of, like I said, birds, a lot of construction actually that was going on. And so that would not have been very good to edit with in post. Like you'll hear like the hammering and the chainsaw and stuff like that. So that was a huge audio issue for us. So we eventually moved inside and when we were inside, we were able to use this glass window that could see right into the trees, the leaves, the beautiful sunlight. And choosing a shooting background might seem like very mundane, very trivial, like a small thing. But in reality, that plays a lot into how the final image is going to look. And in this case, we were able to stay on brand with Calamigos Ranch and, you know, how they promote nature. And we were able to deliver on that message. All right. And the last part is the B-roll. And this is B-roll in the most traditional sense of the word. Like this is documentary style B-roll where A-roll is the interview and then B-roll is like the person doing their thing. Right. And so this is not like the Peter McKinnon or the Daniel Schiffer style of B-roll. Not that there's anything wrong with it. I actually like both. Let me know in the comments down below which style you like better. Like you like the documentary traditional style or do you like the Peter McKinnon, Daniel Schiffer style of B-roll? Let me know down in the comments down below. And for this part, we were following Chef Rosie and her team around the kitchen as they were prepping the food and making it. And this is one of the big reasons why I chose to use handheld on the C200. It was because a lot of things are moving really fast in the kitchen. You know, the cooking and people moving ingredients and taking ingredients and, you know, cooking. I don't know why I keep saying that, but. And it really helped that I was on my feet manually focusing on the Tamron 24-70. And my wife, Mel Mel, was actually on the EOS R with the Tamron 70-200 zoom lens. And she was on a lightweight tripod so that she could stay further back. But also being able to quickly move the tripod around if she needed to. And one tip that I have for you guys is to try and get as many angles as possible in one single take. And here's what I mean by that. Let's say Chef Rosie, she's going to have one, two, and three steaks. And she needs to season it with salt and pepper. And if I were going to go in and shoot that on the first steak, I would zoom all the way out to 24 millimeters in order to get that wide shot of her bringing in the salt and pepper shaker or the grinder or whatever. And then just grinding the salt and grinding the pepper. We get to see the entire process being played out. And then on the second steak, I'm going to show a close-up zooming in all the way to 70 millimeters to show the salt and the pepper sprinkling really neatly on top of the meat. And on the third steak, what I want is to get a shot of Chef Rosie actually using her hands and grinding the pepper or the salt or simply sprinkling it onto the meat itself. So that way when you're editing it in post, you have three different angles that can seamlessly cut and stitch together. And this way you are able to do things a lot faster and a lot more efficient versus having to stop and start and having Chef Rosie pause and then do her thing. And then that makes you go a little bit faster. That makes the shoot a little bit more smoother. And that's what you always want when you're shooting documentaries. And when we were in the kitchen, we didn't have any lighting setups. We used whatever overhead light was available to us in the kitchen. In Chef's Table, they also don't bring in a bunch of lights into the kitchen because it might get in the way and it will get in the way of the chef's cooking. And so you don't need that many lights or any at all to make it look good. And, yeah, that's basically it. That's everything that we did on set when we were shooting this low-budget Chef's Table-inspired commercial. Let me know if there's anything else that I missed, anything that you want me to go over specifically more in depth in another video. And also let me know what kind of other breakdowns would you guys like to see from these videos, like editing breakdowns, maybe color grading breakdowns. I don't know, whatever you guys want to see. Leave it down below in the comment section. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you like this video, hit that like button. Make sure to subscribe. Hit the bell to get notified of every video that I post. Until the next one, my name is Alex Chung, and I'll see you later. Bye.