David Ma seduces your taste buds with 6 (drawn-out) seconds of food porn

For Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we are featuring great moments in the creative careers of AAPI talents in the industry. Today, we are thrilled to present filmmaker and food artist David Ma. Ad Age's Creativity first met Ma, who is Chinese-American,  during his former life as a creative at agencies including Droga5, TBWA/Chiat/Day and 360i. A few years ago, he made the transition to directing full tine and now makes audiences drool with his unique, fanciful and fun approaches to capturing culinary creations. He’s also generous with his method, sharing about his creative and filmmaking process on TikTok and Instagram, where he has more than one million followers. His creativity has also graced campaigns for brands including Apple, McDonald’s, Lay’s, Daring Foods, Pepsi, Chevrolet, VOSS and KIND.

Here, Ma looks back on one of his earlier projects, the “Six-Second Recipe Video,” for which he leveraged specialty rigs, a robot and camera tech to create a gorgeous piece of film encouraging viewers to soak in all the work that goes into creating a special dish. 

 

A lot of the commercial work I do shoots high speed with a phantom camera and motion control (robotic arms) to create a super slow-mo look. A few years ago I teamed up with my friends Rich and James from FoxDen LA to shoot a recipe video in six seconds as a one-shot using the phantom and robot. The recipe was shot in six seconds flat with the camera mounted on a Bolt Robotic Arm that flew across the studio capturing each step of the recipe in slow motion.

I came up with the idea because so many of the “hands and pans” recipe videos we see online are functional and sped up, there’s never enough time to really take it in. I challenged myself and my crew to still use hands and pans, but find these singular moments of beauty and suspend that moment so that each step could shine cinematically. 

 

I did this by having six hand models, each representing a step in the recipe. It was challenging because we had to program the robot to move at exactly the right points and sync our timing and performance of the hand models so that they all worked in one take. (I think we did 17 takes that day and dozens of rehearsals.) 

I chose a vegetable stir-fry I grew up eating for the recipe because I wanted to put a little of myself and my culture into the film. Visually, the dish lent itself to bold, visual moments I could capture for a split second and turn into beautiful, cinematic vignettes with fireballs, knife slices and liquid splashes.

This film was important because it allowed me to rethink a category of food filmmaking, applying an innovative method of shooting that made viewers rethink what a recipe video is. The film furthered my signature of creating conceptual, visually-stunning food moments all using practical effects.