Our latest collaboration with The Balvenie, ‘The Craftsmen’s Dinner’, is a six-part YouTube series in which the two Michelin starred chef, Michel Roux Jnr sets off on a mission to find six craftsmen whose passion and dedication to their craft has produced outstanding results. His aim is to unearth the beauty behind traditional craft.
What was it like working with Michel Roux Jnr on this series?
Filming with Michel was a huge pleasure. He is one of those heartening people who demonstrate that you can be both exceptionally talented and exceptionally nice. Being a top-tier chef, he is an incredibly hard worker, always immaculately prompt and not scared of long hours – all very useful qualities when filming.
Can you talk about some of the visual aspects of filming The Craftsmen’s Dinner?
The Craftsmen’s Dinner centres on the beauty of traditional craft, so I wanted the films to have a sumptuous visual look. Michel has a fantastic sense of the theatre; he knows that it’s never just about what’s on the plate, but the whole atmosphere and visuals that surround it. We wanted to bring that sensibility into the films by giving them a heightened look. One of the big challenges of the project was shooting the final dinner. In the last episode of the series, Michel brings together the craftspeople he’s met in each episode and cooks them a dinner using contributions from each guest. The dinner was a celebration of all their hard work, and we wanted the viewer to feel their excitement as Michel served them a meal made with their own creations. At the same time, we wanted to give a sense of old world drama to the occasion – to make the audience feel as if they were stepping back in time to a kind of Victorian banquet. The solution was to light the dinner with just ten strategically placed candles. This meant not only that the dinner scene feels very intimate, but also that the contributors were far less conscious of the filming process than if we had adopted a more studio approach with electric lights standing in the corners of the room.
‘In the film about Ferraby knives, we had a challenge in that we were asking the audience to get excited about something that’s quite hard to show on film: the way in which a hard-crafted knife is – to the trained chef – noticeably sharper than its machine-made equivalent. We couldn’t simply show Michel chopping with Will’s knife and commenting on how sharp it was, because to the viewer it would look just the same as if he were chopping with an ordinary knife. To get round the problem, we devised a ‘knife-off’ in which we would show that – while a tomato might simply ‘bounce off’ an ordinary blade when dropped from a height – a Ferraby blade would slice clean through it in mid-air. To do this, we had to use a macro lens placed directly beneath the knife, separated from the camera by a sheet of glass. After a few takes, we finally got the tomato to slice in two perfect halves – each falling either side of frame. It was a visual way of showing a distinction that would otherwise have been invisible.’
Rogan Productions have worked on a number of films with The Balvenie that centre around the theme of craft, what was it like working with The Balvenie on The Craftsmen’s Dinner?
As a client, the Balvenie were fantastic to work with. One of their strengths as a brand is that they know they don’t have to be brash with their marketing, because the quality of their product speaks for itself. So although The Balvenie features in the series, it never feels like something that’s being forced. The Balvenie understand from their own work the importance of handcraft – their respect for traditional methods really shines through in the way they worked with us throughout the filmmaking process. It’s a good lesson for branded content: sometimes, the less you shout, the more people listen
