Cooking in Comfort

I found making this feature challenging. However, I learnt a lot from doing so. I feel our concept was strong and one that would appeal to a lot of people. After all, restaurants can be expensive and cooking isn't always very easy especially if you want to tuck into luxury food. Despite this, Zoe and I felt we could prove that you can create exactly that, in the comfort of your own kitchen without much effort. We decided to give ourselves a budget of just £12. With this we wanted to create a three course meal that would feed four people. Now that works out at just £1 per course per person. Perfect!

Or so we thought...
We severely underestimated the time that would it would take to not only cook but prepare and film the food. On our first attempt we felt that one camera would be enough, but without a camera man it became extremely difficult to capture good, interesting shots whilst also being the ones doing the cooking. We spent the best part of four hours, trying to solve the problem and eventually we gave up. Disappointed and £12 lighter.
To top this all off, one of our microphones let us down meaning that not all of our audio was picked up and the parts that were picked up were not the best quality. We decided to do the whole thing again.

Attempt #2
THIS WENT SO WELL. It's amazing, what planning can achieve. Note to self* Always plan each feature in great detail before filming. We started the day nice and early, we also had our ingredients delivered meaning we didn't have to do the horrible uphill walk with five heavy shopping bags. So far, so good. We also changed location and I know this sounds silly but I really think it helped us have a much more positive attitude towards filming. It felt like a new start and unlike last time, I really thought we could do it. This time, we filmed using two tapes, we had back up headphones and microphones. The very definition of organisation. At last, everything was running smoothly. By the end of our third course, we were exhausted but we realised that benefits of re filming.

I learnt a lot from the experience, one actually being the point we were trying to prove. Our food was delicious (even if i do say so myself) and I've been asked by a few people if they can borrow our soup recipe!
It just goes to show that you can have nice food at home, you can stuff your faces for very little money and above all, do not give up. Just stop when things go wrong, take a break and come back to it. If you do this, things will improve. I have to say I think it was the most stressed I have felt so far, but strangely it was the feature I have most enjoyed filming.

Take a peek below at our work: