This Whole Recipe Video Is Only Six Seconds Long

Recipe videos. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Right? The overhead cam, the shots of the hands doing what they need to do — it’s all elementary at this point. Well, food artist and director David Ma is out to flip that whole concept on its head, all in a matter of six seconds.

Introducing, “The Six-Second Recipe Video,” a re-imagination of the typical recipe video through slick presentation, state-of-the-art technology, and simply playing with your food.

“As a director in food, it’s not just my job to make people hungry. I want to make people feel differently about the everyday things we do and to look at these objects from a new perspective,” said Ma. Re-tooling perspective here was successful, as a recipe video’s typically functional and formulaic nature took a backseat to presentation, fun, and creativity. Here, the mundane becomes dynamic — washing bok choy becomes poetry in motion, stir-frying veggies in a wok becomes ballet, and slicing ingredients looks more fitting in a Kill Bill sequel. But to do this all in six seconds? That’s where the tech comes into play.

Ma described the process of filming it all in one take, “We worked with the team at Camera Control, a motion control studio that provided the specialized arm you see swinging our camera down the studio. While the video itself only took six seconds to film, when we slowed the footage down in post to 1000 FPS, what we saw was a beautiful one take, with seamless camera movements leading us from one step to the next.”

Can this be the future of recipe videos? Might not be a bad evolution, really. Especially since technology and ingenuity and vision can harmonize this beautifully to humanize the end result.