In my documentary excerpt, Home Cooking, I intended to capture what brings almost everyone together. In this case, it is cooking. I wanted to display that home cooking is a way to connect with others and build relationships. Whether it's cooking with family members or sharing a meal with friends, food can bring people together. This being that no matter where you are, the taste of a home-cooked meal can bring you back to a place you hold close to your heart.
The entire series that my excerpt is based on aims to cover home cooking on many different levels. Furthermore, every episode displays a unique household that possesses different cultural traditions and beliefs alongside different social economic statuses. I believe that my documentary has the potential to represent these different social groups and certain social issues in various of different ways. To start, I can shed light on the diversity of food cultures and the significance they have on the traditions and values of different communities. This can be done by featuring dishes from different areas of the world and emphasizing certain techniques and ingredients used for each dish. This can help my audience understand the cultural significance and impact of food while also being able to appreciate the process and background of each dish.
My documentary can also address various amounts of social issues that correlate with food. These are social issues such as accessibility to nutritional and affordable meals, food sustainability, and mass food waste that is happening in the world. Showing the various amounts of healthy but affordable ingredients in each meal can help show that eating healthy doesn't always mean paying a large price. In my documentary, my mother Melissa Handley who is the home cook chef cooks herb-crusted sea bass with potatoes and haricot verts. Although this is more of a special dish that requires the price to be higher, the difference in price from having this at a restaurant vs. at home is extremely large. The meal Melissa cooked in the documentary would be around fifty-five dollars per person in a restaurant. But to cook at home, the total would come out to be around 55 dollars for an entire family. I do understand that this can still be a bit pricy and that is why the different episodes in the docu-series would aim to cover other social economic statuses. But the money you save by knowing how to cook this at home vs going to a restaurant is undeniable.
In my documentary, the elements of my productions all come together to create a consistent and cohesive brand that aims to project a warm feeling that brings people together alongside giving a very “lively” feel. To begin, my logo for Home Cooking is mainly an orange color. I used warm hues in the logo to emphasize the warm feeling that I wanted to display. One of the first things that come to mind when I think of home cooking is a dish that brings you back to a place of childhood, family, and love. A home-cooked meal made with love and passion is never going to be cold and passionless, it is going to be warm and vibrant. The first bite of that meal is supposed to feel like a warm welcome to a place that holds a deeper meaning in your heart. To continue, the auditorial decision I made in my documentary helped to represent one of the major elements of my brand. The element being: extremely vibrant and lively. When picking music I went through a variety of different genres such as upbeat, lo-fi, jazz, etc. But for most of these except jazz to an extent, I felt as if they didn't match the culinary vibrant feel of my brand. For this, choosing music that is derived from the Bossa Nova genre (60’s Brazillian Jazz) for my documentary helped amplify the vibrant feel of my brand. The visual element, of course, is one of the most important factors that represent my brand. When filming and editing, I made sure to put an emphasis on the bright and colorful elements of the dish. From the bright greens of the herbs and haricot verts to the rich reds and oranges of the potatoes, all of these elements work together to represent the overall goal of my brand.
My project can engage with the audience in a plethora of ways. To begin, the overall brand of warmness and overall vibrant nature can help create an emotional connection between the piece and the audience. Two common feelings people associate home cooking with are comfort and nostalgia. By tapping into these emotions throughout the production of my brand and the usage of various sound and visual techniques, I am likely to capture the attention of my audience and create a source of engagement. My documentary also engages with the audience by presenting personal stories and memories that are present in the interviews of Melissa and Seth within the five-minute excerpt. This will help create a sense of familiarity and relatability within the audience which in return creates more engagement. The implementation of my social media site also helps engagement with the audience. Posting teasers, pictures, behind-the-scenes footage, and more all help to interact with the audience and keep them up to date with the production of the piece. Lastly, my magazine article serves as an additional tool to engage with my audience. By showing behind-the-scenes pictures and sharing the experiences of each member of the production, I am giving the audience a deeper understanding of my vision and the creative side of the project.
My research played an extremely important role in the making of all portions of my project. Through research, I gained a much deeper understanding of the conventions of cooking documentaries, magazines, and social media sites. For the interviews in my documentary, I decided to prioritize the emotional conventions commonly used in many other documentaries. Some food documentaries that inspired my production were “Cooked” on Netflix and “Paul Hollywood Eats Japan: Complete Series (Food And Cultures Documentary)” By Real Stories. Both of these documentaries helped me by showing me multiple different types of conventions used in the documentary world and specifically the food documentary world. I also skimmed through many different magazines to see what conventions are commonly used within magazine articles that I can implement within mine. Conventions such as numbers on the bottom of pages, the enlargement of certain quotes, and more can be seen in my magazine article were inspired by my research.
As my Aice Media A-level portfolio project comes to a wrap, I can confidently say that all components of my project help capture the true meaning behind home cooking and that cooking can truly bring people together. I believe my project also effectively maintains engagement within the audience, represents social groups and issues, and displays a consistent brand all while challenging the common conventions of documentaries and news articles.
