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I recently did a video shoot for Oh Yeah Creamery about how to make a "Spundae." Working with food was a very new thing to me but I had a lot of fun producing this video.

Below is a transcript for the video above.

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Shooting a video or commercial with food is already really hard because of continuity. And shooting with ice cream is even harder because, well, if you didn't know ice cream melts, and having a food artist is a way to get around that because they make the ice cream look like ice cream, but it's not made at the same materials. So I'm gonna show you how I did a video for an ice cream shop without a food artist.

So a few weeks ago I did a video for an ice cream shop and I had a blast doing it. They wanted me to make a video on how to make a “Spundae”, which is their version of a Sundae. And they gave me a lot of visual freedom.

For the video they just asked that I make sure that the entire process is shown and some key components were shown in the video as well. After a quick call with the owners I immediately started jotting down some ideas. I had a lot of good ideas come to mind and one of them was doing a seamless video, almost like a one shot but with cuts.

And it didn't come out exactly as I expected it to, but it still came out pretty similar and I'm pretty excited about how it turned out. So for this main shot I wanted to have kind of an interesting background. They have a really cool textured wall, so I wanted to use that to my a. But I don't wanna shoot up against the wall or else the image kind of looks flat.

So instead what I did was I took one of the tables about four to five feet off the wall, and then I used some RGB lights to bounce some color onto the wall and I wanted to make sure that the colors were part of their store logo colors. So to light the main object or the ice cream, I used a key light and also a backlight just to add some separation from the background.

And what I used for the backlight actually didn't put any sort of diffusion on it. I just had hard light and it definitely made the object pop a lot more in my opinion, and added more separation from the background as well.

So, funny enough, I actually didn't even have enough C stands to hold all the lights. I thought I had enough, but apparently I didn't, so instead what I did was used my 60D light with its NPF battery V mount holder, and added two npf batteries to it and laid it sideways so that it was at least off the ground a little bit or off the table, and I pointed the light at the object and it was perfect. It was exactly level with the ice cream, and it couldn't have worked out any better.

That's pretty much what the main shot looks like. Like I said, I wanted to keep it in one location and keep it consistent in the video, and this is what we came. There was another scene, another shot that we did that I couldn't use the same shot for because they have a machine that's already hooked up and we couldn't move it. So that is the only other scene in this video that is different from this main shot.

So the process for making a spun day was pretty simple and I wanted the person viewing the video to feel like they're the one sort of picking out the ice cream and it's coming to alive and they're choosing their own flavor and making their own.Which is sort of the whole point of their concept is to make your own flavor of ice cream and then add your toppings onto it after. So we started with choosing the ice cream base and you either get vanilla or chocolate. So I had her pick vanilla, put it in the center, and then we were able to choose our mixings.

For this entire video, we ended up going with one of their signature ice creams that they already have pre-made, I think it's called the cereal monster. I could be wrong, I'll put it on screen. But we were using cereal, so I wanted to add a little bit of a fun aspect to this and throw the mix-ins at the ice cream.

And this took quite a bit of tries to nail the amount of time that the mix-ins were in the air versus when it hits the table or making sure they actually hit the center, because there are plenty of times where it did not hit the center. We were getting kind of frustrated, but we kept going and we ended up getting some, I thought was pretty cool.

So after you pick your mix ins, it is going to be put into this mixing machine, which they have. It's a really cool machine. You ended up putting your ice cream, the mix ins in, and then you end up with your own flavor of ice cream because it's all blended together. It's almost like a smoothie. So after your ice cream is mixed and you have your new flavor, you can now pick your toppings and you have created your own “Spundae.”

Like I said at the beginning, shooting with ice cream is very hard because of the continuity problems. Ice cream melts very fast, and which means it's not all gonna look the same. So what I did was every time. We ended up changing a section in the video. From the process, I would either punch in or I would zoom out. So if it was already zoomed out as far as it could, I would punch in and then if it was already punched in, I would zoom back out. The reason I would punch in and zoom out is so that it would sort of deceive your eye and take your eye off of the ice cream. And you would see more happening and it wouldn't be as noticeable unless you're just staring at it.

If you're just staring at the ice cream trying to nitpick at it, then of course you're going to see it. But this is just a little trick that kind of helped cover up some of the problems I had with the continuity of ice cream because of how fast it melted. So for audio, they actually didn't even need any sort of audio for the main video because it's gonna be played during the store while it's open, but I wanted to give them a version for social media that they could. So I use Envato elements for some music and some sound effects, and then I also created my own sound effects for some other aspects of the video.

That's pretty much it for this breakdown. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you leave a like, comment and subscribe and I'll see you guys in the next.

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