Cost effective food shoots without sacrificing quality? Do tell.
Article by Morgan Myer
Producing and directing food shoots efficiently to boost sales
If you want your audience’s eyes exploding and taste buds tinglin’, you’ve got to make the food in your video look so good you can practically taste it. It’s one reason why food shoots have maintained higher budgets over the years… the food can’t be visually compromised. With food shoots, QARP (“Quality at Reasonable Prices”) is really tough to pull off. Here’s how we do it.
1. We help Strategize to Achieve Your Marketing Goals
We’re creatives first, but we know that you can’t have good execution without a rock-solid strategy in place. We’re all about collaborating to find efficiencies that improve the process and elevate the work. We look at food shoots as an opportunity for you to 1) entertain 2) educate 3) inspire 4) or some combination of the above. So if you’re trying to push a product’s key tech features, we’ll spend more time on R&D to keep production days in check. If content is needed across both broadcast and social, we build multiple sets and shoot simultaneously to utilize the most out of the approved food styling and props. If the creative idea is everything, we need to allocate more iterative time to concepting and post-production. Give us a backstage pass to your strategic goals and we can save you time and some coin, too.
2. We Help Find Your Hero
The Hero (the buzz-wordy term you probably know and love) is a visual representation of your offer. It could be a perfect plate of food, a product (“e.g.” an oven), a setting, a creative conceit, or your on-screen talent. One of the very first things we do to help our clients is identify the true hero (sometimes it takes a little digging underneath the mashed potatoes to find it!). Then we roll up our sleeves and dive head first into finding that magic sauce that will push the needle for your product or service. Oh, and one quick side note: you don’t want to have more than one hero. It’s soooo tempting to jam more than one key offer into a short video but you’ll get better ROI and your audience will respond positively to your message if you simplify. We want to avoid diluting your key offer.
3. We Help Find Your Kitchen A-Team
With p3, you always get a consistent, core team on every project – start to finish. But we are only truly successful when we add specialized collaborators to the squad. For example, do we need a food stylist, a chef, or both? There’s a distinct difference: a stylist is a perfectionist who prioritizes every last detail of how the food looks; a chef prioritizes timeliness. For our typical food shoots, we need to manage a day with 10-12 recipes and make the food look awesome. Our go-to collaborator is a kick-ass Maine restaurant veteran named Chef Derek Bissonette – dude has major executive chef chops, and knows what it’s like working under intense pressure. Plus, as a budding photographer himself, he knows what it takes to make food look great for the camera. We called Derek and we asked him to give us one hot take for how to deliver awesome results for reasonable prices.
Need help cooking up a plan to keep your food shoot sizzling and on budget?
We’re here for you.