Logo for new TV Short cooking pilot.
With good traffic going to my YouTube cooking videos, pilot TV segments for a 2-minute short to be called Hovey’s Survival Cooking were produced in 2013 with the hopes of selling the show to five national networks. The pilots were filmed by Tranter-Grey of Augusta, Georgia, and shot in my kitchen. Like most pilots, a number of things were tried with varying degrees of success as I cooked fried buffalo (the fish) and later Black Crappie. The marketing effort for the show was conducted by WebTalkRadio.net, the company that broadcast my radio show, Hovey’s Outdoor Adventures.
Shooting in a cramped kitchen required improvised placement of camera tripods, light stands and mike booms while the floor was covered in electric cables.
The concept of Hovey’s Survival Cooking is in keeping with the hunt-what-you-eat-and-eat-what-you-hunt theme of some of my books such as, Backyard Deer Hunting: Converting deer to dinner for pennies per pound, Crossbow Hunting and Practical Bowfishing. In these books I assume a zero-knowledge base and take the reader through all of the steps needed to find game, kill it and put it on the family’s dinner table. The TV series would be similar in that it would talk about basic cooking skills for wild game and locally foods that are sometimes available at little or no costs. Many are well-practiced in the art of eating food, but not in cooking it. It also appears that the younger the audience, the less likely that they have learned basic cooking methods from their older relatives. Other than heating something out of a box, many of today’s TV viewers are completely lost when it comes to cooking natural foods.
The color and sound qualities of this video was degraded during the file-conversion processes. For a look at a better version, go to my YouTube Channel wmhoveysmith and view it at: http://youtu.be/qj6vCzpplKg . Like all pilots, this is a snapshot of “a work in progress.” There are things seen here that would not be in the production version. Tranter-Grey’s Joe Mole did the filming and post-production work by combining shots from three video cameras and working them into the video. He also did the logo and photo overlays. An error crept into this version. Can you spot it? Many viewers and reviewers did not.
Hovey’s Survival Cooking Pilot
Taking the show from the Pilot to Production opens a number of possibilities, including installing a kitchen set in an unused room in my house that would provide many more production opportunities for camera angles and lighting, but would lose the down-home look of filming in my kitchen. Filming in the kitchen requires putting up lights, cameras, etc. and taking them down after each shoot. I am sure that many of you have seen similar short cooking segments on TV from several producers that use such sets. Are you ready for a cooking show where my dogs may occasionally come in and the equipment that is used is what your grandmother might have owned? If so, please make a comment to this post. If you want to see “my dogs at work” you can check out some of my cooking videos on the YouTube wmhoveysmithchannel, such as: http://youtu.be/nOfhw1ZqTIw where me and “hound dog” cook squirrel dumplings.