What Cooking Tutorials Would Look Like if Famous Directors Were Behind Them

They’re quick, practical, clear and always save you from spending too much time finding recipes to impress friends by making something delicious and pretty, but we can all agree that the one thing cooking tutorials tend to do wrong is that they all look the same!

Thankfully, young director David Ma, who aside from being a talented filmmaker is also obsessed with the aesthetic of food (just check out his Instagram account for proof), decided to change that by infusing some cinematographic style to the art of cooking.

And for his first attempt, Ma had the funny idea to draw inspiration from renowned moviemakers like Michael Bay, Alfonso Cuaron, Quentin Tarantino, and even Wes Anderson in order to demonstrate a new, artistic approach to cooking videos.

 

“Whenever I shoot food, I’m always looking to come at it from an unexpected angle or to shoot something differently than what is being done,” said Ma during an interview with the magazine Fast Company. “That’s not to knock these videos [cooking tutorials] – I think that they are very hypnotic. You look at those videos and you just want to share them with your friends. They serve a very functional purpose, but a little bit of the art gets lost in there.”

 

It only took Ma about 2 days to film what he calls his Food Films series in a Brooklyn studio with the help of friends. But to render his creative vision possible, his crew had to face many technical challenges.

 

“It really challenged my prop master to figure out a way to bring these things to life without it feeling fake – and we didn’t have a big visual production budget,” continues Ma. “We kept a lot of the effects practically in-camera and that involved getting creative with building a latex trampoline that would launch things in the air for us to shoot at 2,000 frames per second and then reversing the footage so it looked like it was floating. Or ripping off the speaker lining of a subwoofer, pouring maple syrup into it, and playing dubstep so that we can capture these streams of syrup coming up into the air.”

If – just like us – those stylish tutorials make you want to jump on your cutting boards, the good news is that Ma is currently working on the second season of Food Films. In the meantime, you can always visit the director’s official website where superheroes like Iron Man will teach you how to make a good steak!