Dinner with Nate

This one was super fun. We were just asking: how can we sell the kitchen? We all got together as a marketing team and came up with an idea. We would invite some hand-picked prospects over for a nice, fancy dinner at one of the model homes, cooked by the chef, an incredibly talented cook. We'd film it, and show how he uses the kitchen to make an awesome meal, because what we were selling was a professional-style kitchen with big burners and everything.

Filming him making this dinner was the starting point. But how could we make it more? We wanted it to feel fun and interactive, not just a boring cooking video. It helped that the chef was actually cool. We were good friends, and he was willing to play around with us while he prepared.

He cooks and preps a lot of his food well before a dinner, so we were there with him from about noon. We had him walk us through the whole menu and every finished dish.

We came prepared. We had this awesome piece of plexiglass. We set the camera up on the ground, laid the plexiglass out and treated it as the island he was working on, so we could see straight through the counter while we filmed. That's how we got him cracking an egg as he made pasta. It was just a really fun idea, and he was down to do it. We probably could have used it for more things, but it was just a fun thing we had.

We also had a slider and a Lazy Susan, and I believe we still had a macro lens, maybe the one we'd been renting for a car shoot. There were two of us on the crew, so we split it up. While he was cooking, I filmed him finishing the final dishes and shot them on a little Lazy Susan to get those nice slow-mo spin reveal shots. My teammate filmed the guests eating their dinner and having a good time.

Then we combined it all into a really awesome little cooking film. It was also some of the best food I've ever had. He really was an incredible chef.