Creating meals footage with a 360 spinner

Taking pictures meals footage has all the time been altering. Except for getting the framing, lighting, and basic composition proper, you additionally want to ensure the meals appears to be like good. And if you wish to add movement to the shot, it provides one other layer of complexity.

We took the DigitalFoto 360 spinner for a experience and discovered fairly a couple of issues about feed images alongside the way in which, here’s what we discovered:

Lighting is Key

As with every meals shot, lighting is essential to get a great shot. There are a lot of methods to mild meals, however as a basic thumb rule, the larger the sunshine supply, the simpler your work can be. We tried a couple of issues and selected the Smallrig 450, with the biggest modifiers they had as a key mild (reviewed right here). For fill, we used the SmallRig 220.

Comfortable mild from a giant mild supply helps convey out the main points, even in case you are not an professional in meals images. It’s only a protected shot.

Spinning issues + sluggish movement = win

If you happen to take a look at sufficient high-end meals commercials, you’ll see that sluggish movement is king. Meals cracking, flowing, melting and transferring round simply look good, supplied the suitable mild and a few sluggish movement. That is the place the DigitalFoto 360 Spinner got here into play.

The spinner is an attention-grabbing gadget. it appears to be like like an everyday round plate the place you’ll be able to place meals. But it surely additionally has an prolonged balanced arm for a digicam. When you place the digicam on one finish of the arm, and stability the opposite, you’ll be able to spin the digicam across the plate.

It’s that spinning skill that we used all through the shoot to create attention-grabbing footage.

Reflection administration is a nightmare

There are two methods to mild a spinning shot like this. A method is to put the sunshine on the spinning rig. This offers you even lighting through the spin. The opposite manner is to put your lights on stands, and the sunshine modifications relying on the place the digicam is in relation to the thing and light-weight through the spin.

There is no such thing as a proper and flawed right here, and that is an inventive choice. For our shoot, we lined having the sunshine in a set place because it created some play on the scene.

That stated, between the transferring digicam, the transferring object, and the angles altering on a regular basis, reflection administration is tough. We determined to keep away from the issue altogether and used a matte wood bowl.

Cables are your enemies

If you happen to’re used to capturing with a monitor, powering your digicam with an exterior battery, or having any sort of cable going out of your digicam, this might want to change.

Any cable that goes out of something that’s on the spinning rig will get tangled. We swapped our common monitor setup with a Mars 300. No wires, no issues.

Spinning is just not sufficient

Whereas spinning is nice for creating curiosity and movement, it’s not all the time sufficient to inform a narrative. We used two further parts in our shoot. One is sliding pictures with a Laowa probe lens. The opposite is a humorous shot of the assistant taking an enormous byte from the dish. Between these three varieties of shot, we have now sufficient footage to compose a whole story.