The Clean Plate | Amazon Prime Cooking Show

A producer I frequently work with recruited me for a passion project for his friend, Mandi Pimental. She runs a food blog with her family centered around common food substitutions for people with food allergies. The two of them wanted to produce a pilot season of a TV show version of her blog and had a connection to Amazon Prime that was interested in picking it up if we could get it shot.

I agreed to do the show with a close partner of mine, Nero Manalo because we are both avid foodies and love eating and traveling together in between working on set as a team behind the camera. We were interested in the experience and enjoyed Mandi’s energy when we met her. We were given a budget for the project that allowed us to pull off the look we were going for and have multiple cameras. We were also working with a director who’s another long-time collaborate, Jonathan Millard, who was live-switching using a Sling Studio system connected to all five of our cameras.

The plan Nero and I came up with was to get a clean, modern look that felt like you were walking into someone’s bright, inviting kitchen lit by the warm morning sun. Of course, we aren’t ones to ever trust the actual sun and opted to create our own by creating a booklight. To accomplish this, we bounced an Arri M18 HMI light into a 4x4 ultrabounce that we were just barely able to rig in the kithcen. That bounce then went through an 8x8 half-silk to create a lovely, soft look that we thought supported the name “The Clean Plate”. We also knew this would help with lighting the entire kitchen with minimal shadows, keep the food color accurate and appetizing, and make everyone’s skin look beautiful and alive.

One challenge we faced was we wanted to have two overhead cameras, one above her prep area and one above the stove. After some careful rigging that involved multiple steps of safety and cushioning to keep from ruining the wood of our location, we had a stable, controllable setup made up of clamps and magic arms.

We shot this project on the Blackmagic Pocket 4k, four Panasonic GH4s, and a Sony A7sII. We used Rokinon Cine DS and Sigma Art lenses. Audio was captured by our Sound Engineer.

Post-production was handled by veteran editor Jonathan Millard and talented colorist Dallas Campbell.

The Clean Plate’s pilot season is available now on Amazon Prime Video for free if you have a subscription to Prime.

Assistant Camera/Camera Operator: Nero Manalo

Key Grip: Alexis Vigil

Director: Jonathan Millard

Producer: Cassidy Torey

Creator: Mandi Pimental

Production Assistant: Sean Howard

DIT: Mike Lopez

Sound Engineer: Joshua Martin