Smoke Sessions
Smoke Sessions is a collaboration between Masterbuilt, Home Depot and Kingsford which highlights the use of their products to create great dishes. Rasheed Philips returned, for his second year in a row, as a featured Pitmaster. Shooting for this series took place over three days and was yet another opportunity for me to work with some of the best in the business.
My main objective for these three days was simple:
Get as much BTS content of Rasheed as possible.
This particular shoot involved working with two other creators; a videographer and photographer. These two were present on behalf of Masterbuilt and Home Depot, as contractors who were tasked with shooting the footage and photography for the Smoke Sessions project. They worked closely with the grandson of the Masterbuilt founder — a key consultant, and the director for the project. As Rasheed’s photographer, I had access to see the way these teams worked together to make intriguing content in a way which would advertise the various brands.
The brands rented out a lake house on Lake Lanier in Georgia as the shooting location. The home was the perfect scene for what was advertised as a “summer shoot”, although the temperatures were far from warm. Shooting started promptly at 10:00 AM and lasted until the sun went down — around 5:00PM.
Rasheed was tasked with creating three dishes. We were tasked with getting content of the preparation, explanation and actual cooking of the dishes. Much of the time was spent asking Rasheed to make certain movements which highlighted and accentuated his cooking. Much attention was paid to ensure the Pitmaster included certain phrases and showcased particular projects through the process of his cooks. I could tell how much of a benefit it was to the camera crew to have someone like Rasheed, who has worked many of these projects, as their subject. He generally knows what to say, emphasize and what shots the crew will ultimately want, which really helps the crew out.
The final day of shooting took place at a local Home Depot store, where we got some images of him picking up supplies to perform the cook. Obviously, this was not in the normal order of operations but it worked out in the final edit. Although I was shooting content Rasheed would use, rather than for the other brands, I wanted to make sure to keep those brands in focus. The intent being to have reference material for Rasheed which could then be used for his own media outlets.
We were able to get shots on-site which worked well when putting together a short recap story of the cook. This was a small portion of the overall project and proved to be more valuable to the BTS portion rather than the other brands. Ideally, this content could be used by Philips Barbecue Company for promotional and documentary purposes. This portion of the shoot had one final benefit — another tomahawk steak for yours truly!
As I alluded to in a previous post, the final product you see on YouTube, Netflix and television is MUCH different from how the actual filming played out. Shooting took a total of nearly 30 hours but the final product will be less than ten minutes. Much of our time was spent pre-staging food, grabbing the same shots multiple times, with slight variations to achieve the vision the brands have in mind. The magic of editing is used to create the final, polished product. This leaves a lot of content on the cutting room floor. Luckily, that is where I came in with the behind-the-scenes content!
