Grade: Katherine Jamieson
The challenging brief grade wise for Jamie’s Quick & Easy Food was to be both natural, fresh and yet have that high end slick aesthetic.
We wanted the light in the kitchen to feel natural and not studio lit like so many other cooking shows. However when it came to the food we treated it like a food commercial, the food had to be dripping off the screen and make peoples mouth’s water. Finding the balance between these two contrasting briefs was a challenge but one I think we successfully achieved.
To start with I created a natural, fresh tonal palette with subtle shaping around the room and Jamie himself. Then I built on that layers to specifically highlight the food by using a combination of keys, shapes and tracks to roto-scope the food and ingredients to bring them out and make them as much the star of the show as Jamie.
It’s a fast paced energetic series but we took the time and effort to make every shot look the best it possibly could and the final results really paid off, I’m so proud of how it all looks.
Online: Rob Grainger
The brief was to make the food and Jamie look as great as possible, using a multitude of techniques I was able to improve and remove various imperfections that food has naturally without drawing the eye towards it, with a heavy amount of work done on the inside of the oven cams.
Having to work within brand guidelines limited what we could do regarding fonts and how to implement them but we managed to come up with playful ways of bringing the words on screen which delighted the series producer.
Mix: Sam Castleton
For this series we had a strong DJ scratching theme, with shots that would jolt and reverse to the sounds. DJ MK supplied a toolkit of scratches and loops and we added scratch effects for the recipe cards and ingredient text movements. This resulted is bold, quick and quirky interludes which punctuated Jamie’s dialogue sections to emphasise the ‘Quick & Easy’ motif.
As with most cookery programmes, we had location recordings with different cooking noises or tones (such as frying or boiling), we had to supplement and delicately blend these with FX in order to create one cohesive passage of time. In this series we had to use iZotope RX very frequently to remove things like loud or out of place chopping, utensil scrapes and plate/pan noises.