Paleo Recipe Videos

Over the course of three years, I shot and produced over 100 Paleo recipe videos that amassed tens of millions of combined views and drove traffic to our website and cookbooks. Production spanned a half dozen locations, chefs, and editors, and established a unique education-focused style that was instantly recognizable to the brand. 

The project was initially content-focused, serving to drive traffic to the unique recipes on Paleohacks’ website through social promotion. Over time, as the company shifted its revenue generation toward exclusive cookbook sales, the recipe videos adjusted toward marketing and marketing asset generation. 

I selected early recipes by scouring through stats for popular recipes from our Facebook, Instagram, and site traffic data through Google Analytics but shifted toward choosing recipes from our upcoming cookbooks to maximize B-Roll and promotional potential.  

Regardless of the sales funnel involved, it was still important to be discerning when choosing recipes to shoot. First, and perhaps most obviously, was that they needed to be visually appealing and delicious looking. Next comes down to how practical they are to cook in the confines of a recipe shoot.  We shot four recipes in a day and filmed the actual cooking process from start to finish, so bake, freeze, rest, cool, and cook times all had to fit reasonably within the day. The last major consideration in planning a schedule is balance. Long and involved recipes need to be split with simple and quick recipes. Decadent chocolate recipes need to be countered with light fruity ones.

Once recipes are selected, they’re broken down into a custom shopping list I created in Google Sheets that totals all of the similar ingredients and sorts things into an easily shopped list by grocery store department. I placed online orders for special items and anything hard to find locally then, the day before the shoot, hit the grocery store for the rest.  

Since the video format was designed to make the recipes feel accessible to home cooks, it was important that we always keep sets that felt like real kitchens. In the early shoots I rented locations through AirBnB and personal contacts which often meant that I had to bring all necessary camera, cooking, and styling equipment and that load-in, setup, and tear-down all had to happen in the same day. As the project progressed, we moved into a shoot studio that allowed us much more time and flexibility. 

On the day of the shoot, I would start by talking through the recipes and deciding the best order in which to shoot them.  I liked to start with the harder ones and end the day easier to give the team more buffer if things went wrong and we needed time to fix them. Recipes with long hold times for baking, cooling, and such will be planned to span lunch or split up with other recipes in the middle.

Every recipe and shoot presented its own unique problems, especially since the recipes were being cooked for the first and only time while on camera. 

Through cheesecakes that wouldn’t set, breads with undercooked centers after hours in the oven, turmeric stains on everything, overhead cameras that overheated and shut off, and ‘yogurt’ that never came together, there was only ever ONE recipe that I had to abandon. 

The recipe format that I created for Paleohacks shows much more of the actual recipe creation than the popular Buzzfeed “Tasty” styled videos that are most often copied. Much of our demographic was cooking, or at least Paleo cooking, for the first time and needed content that offered more than just tempting images to ‘like’ and keep scrolling.

Editing for recipe videos was often passed off to freelancers and used to test their skills for more involved projects though I developed the format and edited a good handful of them myself.  A project like this usually takes between 6-8 hours from start to finish and my method involves breaking it down into passes.  A full breakdown of the editing process (and I mean FULL at over 4 1/2 hours) can be found here, for the curious.