The day we shot this episode, we didn’t run into any real problems except for the fact that it was a long day with a lot of down time. The beef stew needed a few hours to cook in the oven, but we needed to keep coming back to it to show it in different stages. I usually avoid slow-cooked recipes like this on purpose because I just want to spare ourselves the headache of worrying about filming all day. But this one was too good not to share.
In some ways it was kind of nice because it gave us a chance to breathe during the shoot, which helped us not to feel stressed. But the bad thing about it is that all that stopping and pausing made our energy levels drop too.
But we pushed through it and everything was fine until we got a knock on our door that interrupted us in the middle of filming. We live in a condo complex and the HOA decided to have the walls and all the doors of the outside hallway painted. This meant we had to leave our door ajar for 30 minutes, and if we recorded, it would pick up the sounds of the guys working, talking, laughing, and listening to their music. But things like this are expected.
What was not expected however was having one of our precious (and expensive) lights come crashing down like a tree. We literally saw it happen in slow motion but didn’t have time to react. We saw the top heavy light wobble on it’s thin tall stand and face plant with a thud… and a crash.
Luckily this happened at the end of filming but we didn’t even bother checking up on it until we were completely done. We didn’t want our sad and disappointed faces to show up on camera. But we shared it with you in our behind the scenes video of the making of our Beef Stew with Buttered Noodles episode. You can watch it below:
WATCH OUR BEHIND THE SCENES VIDEO:
I’m happy to report that after some shaking, disassembling, and vacuuming, we got all the little shards of shattered glass out of the light and everything seems to be working fine! This was the first time we experienced this kind of casualty with our equipment because Joe takes care of it all like they’re his children. So if he looks a little distracted and sad at the end of the video, it’s because he can’t hide his pain.
But other than that, the rest of the shoot was pretty smooth. I didn’t burn, mess up, leave out, or overcook anything and it came out really well. We even had time in the middle of the shoot to go work on other work, like work on editing our Season 1 eCookbook that will be coming out REALLY soon!
We also used it as an opportunity to make a shout out to our design line side business a lot of people don’t know about called Small Bites.
We haven’t been advertising it because we started this business and then got too busy working on our Youtube Channel so it’s sadly on pause for now. But this particular day, we received a surprise sale from London! So I had to package it up and of course we just worked it into our script!
Since it’s winter and the sun sets way earlier, we also had a problem with the food photography at the end. It’s not our best work but there was nothing we could do about it since we had NO natural day light by the time we finished. This is another reason I tend to stay away from longer recipes. But we tried our best and it all came out decently in the end.
But I think it was still a successful day because we didn’t argue with each other and we had fun while shooting and coming up with the story lines of this episode. Some days are definitely easier than others, but it’s kind of cool how each experience is so different! Hope you enjoyed coming behind the scenes with us. Be sure to watch our actual recipe video: Beef Stew with Buttered Noodles if you haven’t already, and let me know if you try it!
