I made a $1,000 Froyo Commercial

Have you ever eaten a frozen yogurt and thought, "Wow, this is amazing. I want to make a commercial about this. " Just me? Okay. Well, in today's video, we do exactly that. And the best part is I lost all of my behind-the-scenes audio on the first day of shooting, which is why I'm narrating the video like this. This microphone isn't even on. Just kidding. It is. My good friends over at Yogenfus asked my director friend Matt to create an aesthetic food porn style video for their social media. Now, Matt is a very talented filmmaker, but he hasn't done a ton of food projects or tabletop work. So, he reached out to yours truly to see if I would be interested in collaborating with him on this project. And you know what I said? Sure. We had a Zoom call with the client to kick off the project. They explained to us what they were looking for, and we told them some of our own suggestions as well as what our process looks like. — This is And after the call with the client, here is what we know. This video will contain three flavors of fro yo. We've got mango, we've got blueberry, and strawberry. Yum. The final video will be about 10 to 15 seconds. And we're going to do this in 9x6, aka vertical, for social media. Like I said before, they want a quick food style video. Sexy macro shots, that mouthwatering ASMR type of content. They don't want the video to feel like your quintessential ad or commercial. So, we're going to have to figure out a way to tow the line between that and something more organic. And lastly, it is very important that we show real fruit because the fro yo is made with real fruit. At this point, I'm feeling pretty good. I've shot enough food content where my confidence is high and my stress level is only a 3 out of 10. Not bad. To celebrate the call going well, I ventured out on a walk to get a slice of pizza. And I was very pleased to see that the sun had finally come out and the snow here in Toronto is finally starting to melt. And that was when the realization hit me. Now, here's the thing you might not have realized about frozen yogurt. It's frozen. That is until it's not. Upon the realization that it would only take a matter of minutes for the fro yos to melt while we're shooting, my stress levels understandably began to rise. Now, unless we figure out a way to shoot this video in a giant freezer, we're going to have to find another way to keep that frozen yogurt frozen. So, I had my friend Dennis come by the studio and we spent a few hours experimenting with frosting and icing sugar, trying to see if we could come up with a fake fro yo that looked convincing. It wasn't convincing. So, naturally, I hopped on another call with the client to ask them how they typically go about shooting their fro yo products. How do you typically go about shooting your fro yo products? So, they invited us to their test kitchen to give us a full rundown on how they make their fro yo products in store, as well as how they prepare them specifically for shooting content. Now, I can't give away all their secrets, but it's pretty cool to see how the sausage is made. I mean, it's not literally sausage, but — this message is brought to you by Sausage. Sausage, a good thing to have when you feel like having sausage. Great news. They said the food technologist would come to the studio on the day of the shoot to prepare the fro yo for us. And hearing this, let me tell you, this brought my stress level from an eight all the way down to a much more manageable four. In the following days, Matt came over to my house to start working on a storyboard to show the client. Both of our minds work in the way where we want to see the process of how it's made, but the client like specifically wants just sexy product shots. — It doesn't hurt to have some shots chronological, but it doesn't mean the video has to show the whole process of making a fro yo. — To make the storyboard, we started by grabbing frames from old videos of ours as well as images off of the Yogenfruit websites and socials. From there, I pulled them into Higsfield and transformed them into these handdrawn watercolor sketches using Nano Banana Pro. From there, I made other tweaks such as turning these jalapenos into strawberries and then these tomatoes into blueberries. I love using Higsfield for pre-production because let's face it, I'm not really an artist who can draw storyboards by hand. So, instead of searching for the exact reference frame that I'm looking for, I can simply just create one. Better yet, you can take things a step further and animate your creations using Higsfield, but we'll talk more about that in a bit. You can get all of these tools and more over at higfield. ai. Link in the description below. And thank you to Higsfield for sponsoring this video. Here is the final story board we shared with the client. The storyboard was mainly created to show the client the general direction we were heading and some of the shots we were going to try. That said, the storyboard was not just helpful. It was actually needed because the shots that are marked with a red line are the ones that we would need the food technologist for to make the fro yo so that we're not wasting their time. And the ones marked with a green line we could do on our own. Fast forward to the morning of the shoot and Matt picked me up in his car and to my surprise, he was drinking coffee out of a ceramic mug while driving. Not relevant information, but information nonetheless. Moving on. I spent the first few minutes of the shoot trying to find the center of my turntable, and Matt posted this video on his Instagram story, which was really embarrassing for me. We started by shooting each flavor on a turntable using my Edelchone slider. And I thought this would be a good time to go over the setup for these shots. And this was our setup. Feel free to take a screenshot if

you want to take notes. Once we were happy with our coverage on these product shots, we moved on to the shot of the spoon going into the mango fro yo. This did take a few tries, but a nice smooth fluid head on the tripod made it much easier. Checking in on our stress level meter, I am now chilling at about a five for most of the shoot so far, but we did have a little bit of an uptick when moving on to our fro yo swirl shots. Now, normally in a yogen fruit store, they would use this big machine to get those swirls that you see in the cup here. But for the purposes of our shoot, we thought it would be much better to use a piping bag so we have full control over the speed. What I did not expect was how difficult it was to force the product through the nozzle. It was leading to a lot of shakiness and difficulties tracking the swirl in the frame. Not only that, but we also had to make sure we couldn't see the piping bag in the shot, which made it even more difficult. And if you couldn't tell by the expression on my face, I was pretty burnt out. Comment below if Daniel should suck it up and get one more shot. I feel like I'm being bullied. We in fact did not get one more shot. I went home, had some dinner, watched back what we shot so far, and this made me feel a lot better about where this video was headed. Looking back on it, the stress levels during the shoot were a lot more volatile than I remember. After a good night's sleep, the next day was dedicated to creatively capturing some shots of the fruit. We cut up some strawberries and experimented with a lot of different ideas and angles. Same goes for the blueberries. Have them today or be sacrificed to the volcano for a bountiful harvest. berries, blueberries. Same goes for the blueberries and of course the mango. So, here's what we're thinking for the mango shot. We're going to slice not in the middle, but close to the edge here. Yeah, it's really unripe. But for the real shot, we'll use a ripe one. And basically, what we're going to do is cut little lines. Then do the same thing this way. Now, we're going to want to use something kind of rounded like this. So that way when we place it on the table and we have that camera overhead, you can take the skin side, place it on here, and push down over the shape. It doesn't matter what you use. I just happen to have this old roll of gaff tape lying around, but if you have something like a tennis ball, that could work, too. We wrapped the shoot, and then it was time to edit. Most of the editing for this video was pretty straightforward, but I did have a few tricks up my sleeve for taking some of these shots to the next level. I was really happy with how the mango shot turned out. The way it fills up the whole frame looks really cool. the blueberry shots as well. Very satisfied with how those turned out, but it felt like the strawberry shot was just lacking the same energy. When we were trying to capture the strawberries, it felt like no matter what we did, we just couldn't get something that really stood out. And I'm not going to lie to you, my stress level started to rise a little bit again because I don't know about you, but for me, when I think of Fro Yo, I think of strawberry. And I just felt like we needed something more impactful for the strawberry shot. We had the idea to do a strawberry exploding toward the camera, but we didn't have the time or the resources to pull this off. So, once again, I headed over to Higsfield and using a freeze frame of the strawberry we shot, I was able to create this exploded strawberry. From there, I used both images as start and end frames and made the slow-mo clip of our strawberry exploding. Continuing on with other little things we sprinkled throughout the edit, I added reflections to the surface on our wide shots of the fro yo cups. I also mixed in some lens flares throughout the video. And on our swirl shots, which you might remember I was stressed out about, I ended up punching in a whole bunch. I'm talking over 200%. And this is starting to look good. Those stress levels are coming down a little bit. I continued editing this project on and off over the course of a couple days, and then I sent the edit over to Matt to get his thoughts. With Matt's approval, we were ready to send the video over to the client, and we anxiously waited for their feedback. They liked it. And now I'm not going to make you wait any longer. Here is the final Fro Yo video. Let me know in the comments down below what you think. Thank you to Matt and thank you to Yogenfruits for the opportunity. And I will see you all in the next