P.F. Chang’s Asian Table is a highly-regarded restaurant chain featuring authentic Asian cuisine. This year, Bold Content had the opportunity to film several videos at P.F. Chang’s London location.
We were approached by the client with the intent of creating a fast-paced documentary about their branch in Leicester Square, London. One of our in-house directors, Ben Wilkinson, took charge of this project. We asked him a few questions about his experience with this piece.
Bold: Was this your first time filming food?
Ben: ‘This wasn’t my first time filming food. The first time I filmed food was for our Trafalgar projects in 2015. I wanted to capture the food in a more interesting way than just macro close-up shots, that’s why you’ll see that we have moving food shots, some close ups, stabilized moving shots of the food, and wides [shots]. I really wanted to be able to cover the food in plenty of different ways because it makes editing easier due to the fact we have so many different angles.
Bold: What was your process writing a shooting script for this video?
Ben: Firstly, I sat down with Adam [our Managing Director] and discussed the brief with him. We decided that following a comedic route would be advantageous for this video; this was because we watch lots of documentaries with similar topics and they’re all very serious. We wanted to make it a more light-hearted experience, which parallels the environment of the restaurant: smart and sophisticated but not pretentious.
Ben Wilkinson, Director
With those thoughts in mind, I felt it would be a good idea to follow a voiceover-led piece, where the audience builds a rapport with the voice-over artist, who cuts in throughout with funny asides and explanations. We then worked on what we would like each speaker to say. We wrote out questions that would shape their answers in order to fit our guidelines without explicitly asking them to read a script. This meant the answers were constructed, but still very natural.
Bold: Did the stairs cause you any trouble when filming?
Ben: The stairs were a bit of a pain to film, due to being the only way to the customer toilets, downstairs seating area, and the dessert bar. This meant that when we went for a take we were limited to a few seconds at a time before someone walked into frame. Due to these limitations, we only got a few shots on the stairs. The shots of the mural being created were done before the restaurant was open.
Bold: What was the overall shoot day like?
Ben: We filmed across four shooting days. These started very early in the morning, and ended in the mid-afternoon, as we weren’t allowed access to the restaurant after lunchtime since it gets much busier. This had its own issues; however, it did mean we had to be very efficient with the time we had. I scheduled each shot I wanted very precisely in order to make sure we got all the content we needed within the time required.
You get can more information on P.F. Chang here: https://www.pfchangs.co.uk/