Epic B-roll: Shooting Food Stop Motion Animation Daniel Schiffer shoots stop motion food video

On his recent video photographer, Daniel Schiffer decided to take a different approach to make an epic B-roll style video and shoot a mock food commercial using stop motion animation.

When shooting stop motion you typically work on creating a video based on a large number of stills images that are combined in post to create a video. This can be a great storytelling method, however, it can be very time consuming and it does require some planning, preparations and a lot of patience.

Schiffer, of course, didn’t invent the concept of stop motion videos and even in the food industry these go way back but you can always count on him to come up with some cool and creative ways to shoot a video. On this one, he plays with donuts and he demonstrates how he does some tricks with them both in-camera (like turning them around with a stick inside) and in post (copy and twist them to create a number of them turning together that do not look the same).

One interesting tip Schiffer has in the last part of this video and can be applied to other forms of commercial work is that if possible consider suggesting to your client a number of short (few seconds) clips instead of a single long one. This way you can have the part of each clip relatively low, but have the total charge for all the clips higher than if you were shooting a single long one (the client will have more content to put on social network and you will get more money for about the same amount of work).

As professional food videographers ourselves we have done several commercial stop motion projects for local clients – one of the most recent videos we shot included some funny sound design and quite a few different clips which we put together to tell a story.

A stop motion commercial we made for a local food box company Yoopi

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Bonus Video: Schiffer looking into some food advertising tricks – what works and what’s not

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For more epic b-roll videos – check out our new epic-b-roll list. Also, if you are into food photography and videography we have a special sub-section here on LensVid dedicated specifically to food photography.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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