These Food Films Mimic Famous Directors

Anyone living in the year 2017 has probably seen their fair share of recipe videos on the Internet. These quick and easy productions have taken over social media, entrancing viewers everywhere in clouds of flour and heaps of cheese. But as helpful as these videos might be when looking for dinner inspiration, we won't pretend their cinematic style is anything to write home about.

Food artist and director David Ma had a different vision for what a food video could be, and was determined to inject style and intrigue into everyone's favorite recipes. The results are four unique and gorgeous Food Films based on the cinematic stylings of some of Hollywood's biggest directors.

We're talking a punchy, campy bloodbath of spaghetti and meatballs à la Quentin Tarantino; a Wes Anderson-like whimsical take on s'mores; an explosive, action-packed waffle sequence as an ode to Michael Bay; and a gorgeously ethereal take on pancakes in the style of Gravity's Alfonso Cuarόn.

"As a director in the food video space," Ma says, "I'm always trying to have fun with food, seeking to show recipes in ways viewers wouldn't expect. Food Films gives a few of my favorite foods the cinematic love and over-the-top look of a Hollywood set, shot on kitchen countertops."

A completely self-funded project, the Food Films were shot within a three-day span on a Phantom Flex camera. "There was a lot of preproduction planning, from storyboarding, set design, surface selection and prop styling, to give us the pieces we needed to make four very different worlds," he says.

Ma explains that all members of the team contributed to the ultimate success of the project. "Our prop master, Brian Haimes, built a trampoline to launch pancakes in the air, rigged ramekins full of flour to explode, created a squirting-blood tomato that would spray when sliced—and did this all with real food. Our culinary and prop departments worked closely to ensure we could pull off epic stunts using delicious-looking food," he says.

The results speak for themselves. Before you decide to spend your hard-earned money on a ticket to another iteration of Transformers, consider getting your cinema fix from this delicious project instead.