A frozen dinner every meal. That is the equivalent of convenience, low quality coffee every morning. Fresh and well roasted beans, a proper brewing method, and a passion for extracting flavor. That’s all that is required for better coffee. I have had coffee that is stale and burnt from beans coated in “Creamy Caramel Hazelnut Mocha” something or other. Coffee already has flavor, and different brewing methods and vessels will extract that flavor differently. Brewing coffee can be fun, and it can taste good. That is the message this video serves to communicate.

How it was made

It started with the beans. The idea behind the video was good coffee, so the beans had to look right. In my experience, lighter roasts tend to better preserve the flavors of the coffee, so I shot for a light-medium roast of coffee. After the beans, I needed some brewing methods. The video is in no way asserting that Chemex or Aeropress are the best ways to make coffee, but simply that they are two I have tried and liked. Aeropress is a very forgiving method when it comes to experimenting with different beans and methods and is therefore great for beginners. Of the many pourovers, Chemex is certainly popular, even if not the outright best. The takeaway from the video is that there are many clear wrong ways to make coffee, but that doesn’t mean there is a definitive right way. This theme is represented in the video by the formatting of the titles. The wrong ways that are featured are drip pots and single serve coffee makers. Setting aside the wasteful nature of plastic single serving cups, these methods are accompanied by old, pre-ground, and often over-roasted beans. Not to mention the very unscientific, brute force approach to brewing.

Style

The making of this video was fueled by coffee. The visual theme was: focused intensity, to emulate the effects of caffeine. This was achieved through fast cuts, high shutter speeds, motion, and close-ups.

Every shot has movement. There are very few frame here where something on screen is not moving. The shutter speed was increased significantly to produce a sharper image while decreasing motion blur, due to the increased movement. There is a large number of close up shots featuring movement, but everything needed to be immediately and distinctly comprehensible.

There is no hiding imperfection in a close up. Every shot is under a microscope. Especially considering the fast paced style of the video, this helps show what’s going on in detail.

This video uses a similar style to that of Edgar Wright’s fast cuts of close ups to satirically increase tension. However, the difference here is the lack of diegetic sound, or sound that originates from within the scene. The use of diegetic sound in Wright’s work helps add humor. I did not use any sound effects corresponding to the actions in the scene in order to avoid distracting the viewer from the focal point. Therefore, I simply used non-diegetic music to set a fast pace for the video.

Editing

Typically, it is common to cut on motion. If there is an action, especially fast paced action, it is helpful to cut to a different angle at the peak of a motion in order to make it clearer or exaggerate it. When doing this it is common to ignore continuity, adding a few redundant frames to the shots that help the viewer’s eyes reestablish the new point of view. However, I often removed frames in between cuts to create much faster action. Several shots even have frames removed from middle of a single take. Playing with time by lengthening or shortening it is also a common technique used to allow the pacing of a scene to be dictated naturally not literally. Therefore, this allowed for minutes to be condensed into seconds.

Light and Color

In order to sharply contrast the types of coffee, harsh, direct lighting was used in the beginning of the video with soft, natural light being used towards the end. In post, I attempted to strongly differentiate the actual coffee by using unflattering lighter colors for the bad coffee and darker and richer colors for the good coffee. In terms of color, I also reduced the saturation during shots featuring poor quality coffee, drawing a connection to the drained flavor.

Making pixels taste bad

During the first half of the video, it is important for the viewers to think, or even audibly state: Gross. The coffee had to taste bad. And in a world where Gene Wilder is an actor and Willy Wonka is a work of fiction, it is impossible to taste something through a screen. Therefore, I included visual cues that this coffee tasted bad. One of the most crucial of these cues was given to me just days before shooting. Someone was complaining to me about getting coffee grounds in the mug when using a single serve coffee maker. I too had had this problem in the past, and it became the highlight visual of bad coffee for this video. In the end, it looks like dirt in the bottom of the cup which subconsciously causes someone to want to avoid it.

As previously stated, color was also useful with making the bad coffee look unappetizing. When brewing, I attempted to for an ugly gold-yellow, this was highlighted further while color grading these shots. I also diluted this with water, causing a weaker, more translucent brew.

On the flip-side, the good coffee had to taste good, or at least look like it tastes good. I attempted to make even non-coffee drinkers crave it. In order to do this, I did the opposite of what I did for the bad coffee. I made sure this coffee was a strong dark brown color that was entirely opaque, like dark chocolate. As a bonus, both the good and bad coffees were actually brewed using their respective brewing methods shown in the video.