Why We Hired a Film Crew Whose Showreel Includes Guinness and Sky

Every restaurant owner has a folder of photographs that should never see daylight. Ours contains a pizza photographed from directly overhead under a ceiling light, which makes a very good margherita look like a manhole cover. There is also a video in which you can hear the extractor fan, two conversations from the next table, and the sound of somebody breathing into a phone held at an angle normally reserved for ransom notes.

So this is not a lecture on the importance of video marketing. It is a confession, followed by a decision.

What we actually needed

When we finally stopped pretending that a phone propped against a pint glass counts as production, we wrote a list. It was shorter than you would think.

Somebody who can film food without making it look like evidence. That sounds flippant and it is not. Food is unforgiving on camera. Nearly everything that makes it look appetising in a room, the warm light and the steam and the movement and the plate that has just been set down, is exactly what a phone destroys.

Somebody who understands that a working kitchen is a workplace and not a set. Our kitchen is roughly the size of a large wardrobe, and at eight o’clock on a Saturday it is not a place where you can stop and reset a shot because the shadow is wrong. Any crew that needs the room emptied and a day of closure is a crew we cannot use.

Then somebody has to carry the whole thing. Concept, script, filming, sound, edit and grade. A restaurant owner has no business project-managing a production schedule, and the last thing you want is to be the person chasing a freelancer for a hard drive in November.

And whoever it is, the work has to pass an outside check. Broadcasters and large brands do not accept “we will sort it in the edit”. If a company’s films have gone through that filter, the fundamentals are handled long before the creative conversation starts.

We also ruled a few things out early. A friend of a friend with a drone is not a strategy, and neither is waiting for a customer to film their dinner and hoping they tag you. We had already tried the second one. The results are in the folder.

Who we chose

We went with Collective Films, who are based in Dublin and work at https://cltv.film/. The reasoning was specific rather than a matter of taste, and it is worth writing down, because these are the questions any small business should be asking.

They have been making films in Ireland for ten years, with the same crew and the same creative partners throughout. Their own line is that most of their work comes back to them from people they have already shot with. Restaurants understand that better than anyone. A regular is worth more than a review, and a returning client is the only endorsement that cannot be written by the person asking for it.

The showreel is an intimidating mix. Brand and commercial work for Guinness, Sky Ireland, the National Lottery, Carlsberg and Clare Island Whiskey, alongside documentaries and campaign films for organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières and the Irish Wheelchair Association. The second half of that list is the half that mattered to us. Ten years of films for charities and public bodies means ten years of making something that has to move a person before it can ask them for anything, and that is a fair description of what a restaurant video has to do as well.

Their documentary background is the reason the kitchens work. They describe that side of the business as long shoots, real access, no reconstruction. For a restaurant that is the entire game. A video that has been staged to look like a restaurant reads as staged, and most of us working a Friday night do not need a film crew’s polished version of it. What we want is the real room, at real volume, with the real noise.

The Dublin address nearly put us off, and it turned out not to matter. They shoot across Ireland from Cork to Donegal, and travel further when a story needs it. Cavan is not a hardship posting for a company that already spends its year on the road, and nobody treats the N3 as an expedition.

What their work actually looks like

The easiest way to explain a video company is to stop talking and show you. These are films they made, embedded straight from their own site, so you can judge the standard for yourself rather than take our word for it.

CMAT, Have Fun!. A pop video with a plot, which is harder than it looks, and a good example of why editing is the part nobody budgets for.

Pillow Queens, Hearts and Minds. Shot and cut by the same crew. Nobody in a music video has time to do a second take, which is a useful thing to be good at.

A.S. Fanning, All Time. Slower, quieter, and the sort of film that lives or dies on the grade. Ours comes out looking like a security camera.

Sky Ireland, OUTBELIEVE. Brand work, eighty-two seconds, broadcast spec. This is the half of the business that matters most to anybody selling something.

One of those is on Vimeo rather than YouTube, which is worth knowing if you are choosing a production company yourself. Most of their brand and commercial work sits on Vimeo and most of the music work sits on YouTube, because that is where each audience already is. Ask any company you are considering where their films live, and ask whether you will own the edits when the invoice clears.

What it means for you

Mainly it means you will see more of the food, and see it properly.

Video is how people decide things now. Somebody choosing where to eat on a Friday wants to see the room at eight o’clock, not a photograph of an empty table at four in the afternoon with the chairs already stacked. They want to watch the dough go into the oven, and the cheese do what it does in the last thirty seconds. None of that survives a handheld phone and a bad angle.

So the plan is straightforward. Better footage of the food, the oven and the room, cut for the places people actually watch: social, and YouTube, where more and more people go to find out what a place is really like before they book it. Same kitchen, same pizza, considerably better cameras, and somebody else worrying about the colour grade.

In practice that means shorter pieces for social, where a pizza going into a stone oven holds attention for about eight seconds and no longer, and slightly longer films for YouTube, where somebody will happily watch four minutes of a kitchen at full tilt at eight o’clock on a Friday. Most restaurants get that balance backwards. We would have, left to our own devices, and the evidence is still sitting in that folder.

Three things we learned the hard way

Salt is not a prop. It is a small pile of white powder, and on camera it photographs as a small pile of white powder.

The cheese has a window of about forty seconds. It comes out of the oven looking magnificent, and by the time somebody has found the phone, unlocked it, opened the camera, moved a glass out of shot and said “wait, do that again”, it has settled into something that resembles a paving slab.

And the single biggest upgrade to a food photograph is not a better camera. It is a window.

What has not changed

The dough still proves for seventy-two hours. The pizza still goes into the stone oven. The burgers are still ours, and the menu still says what it says. Nothing about a camera changes what comes out of the kitchen, and no crew on earth can make a mediocre dinner look worth the drive.

If you would rather judge it in person than on a screen, start with the pizza or the burgers, or have a look at what is on for takeaway. Directions and opening hours are on the site, and the party page is worth a look if you are planning something for a crowd.

Photographs are a poor substitute for dinner, and no camera we could hire would fix that. The only reliable way to find out what the food is like is to sit down in front of it and get on with it. Ideally on a Friday, ideally hungry, and ideally before somebody at the next table starts filming their own pizza.