THE GREAT FOOD RACE LAUNCH

Adventure NOT Food

The New Zealand TV market is saturated with food shows. Between My Kitchen Rules, Masterchef, Hell’s Kitchen and about a dozen other cooking shows, TV3 needed to carve out its own niche in this cluttered landscape. The point of the show was as much about the adventure of cooking as the cooking itself. The show’s conceit was to combine The Amazing Race with My Kitchen Rules. So, I developed an idea to focus on the adventure angle of the contestants because seeing people cook had been done to death. Since none of the on-air talent were well known, the spot itself would have to generate interest in the show. The storyboards presented with the pitch can be seen here:

Animatic

After settling on our contestant archetypes (Skydivers, Motorcyclists, Horse riders, Snorkelers), I pulled clips off the internet to build a rough animatic to see if the timing would work in the edit. I also needed to know how much I would need to shoot with each of my “contestants”. I knew we wouldn’t be able to get the skydiving stuff, so we’d have to use a little editing magic to combine stock footage with some green screen wire work. The horse work was done with stunt riders and we shot it in a trail car as we sped down the beach. We were able to secure Bethell’s Beach and lucked out with a beautiful day during the five day shoot. Here is the rough animatic cobbled together from random bits of video:

Final Spot

The final edit took awhile to come together because we had to finish the compositing and special effects to create the skydiving illusion, as well as colour grade the footage so that five different days of shooting, with five different types of weather, all looked like they were happening on the same day, at the same time. I cut it all to a classic piece of orchestra, In The Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg. Here it is after tying all the pieces together. Plus, a couple behind the scenes pictures of the shoot.