Lights, Camera, Candy!

I’ve spent the last month or so trying to figure which combinations of various bronzers, eyebrow waxing and manicures work best on camera.

Crystal Lindell

You see, while Candy Industry has been creating fantastic videos for quite some time, our offices have only recently created an amazing new video studio so now we can shoot videos in-house as often as we want.  

There’s a green screen (which everyone has already taken turns pretending to do weather and traffic in front of), lights hot enough to melt a box of chocolates in three seconds flat, and professional cameras on professional tripods. And, of course, what video studio would be complete without a teleprompter? Memorizing lines is for suckers, right Mr. President?

Visions of being the confectionery version of Oprah are already dancing in my head, but my editor-in-chief Bernie Pacyniak tempered those dreams and convinced me to start at a more manageable level with some shorter videos.

So, for our first act, we made a video about the Kid’s Choice Awards at the ECRM show in San Antonio. Specifically, we highlighted the event and the three products that won: The Sweetworks’ Chocolate Bear Pop for Best New Chocolate; Morris National’s Tangy Zangy Sour Wild Berry for Best New Non-Chocolate; and Bazooka’s Juicy Drop Taffy for Best New Novelty.  

While the video is just two minutes and  59 seconds, we literally spent about 5 hours practicing the shots we needed, and then another six hours filming the different angles.

I always figured the local news anchors had the easiest job in the world, just sitting there reading lines. But now I can fully understand how crazy hard it is to film something like that, and to do it well. Plus, I know it sounds diva-like to say the lights were really hot, but seriously, the lights were really hot.

After all that was done, we had to go through and figure out which shots to use for the final version, just as I imagine Martin Scorsese does with all of his films.

Our parent company, BNP Media, has an amazing video department in our corporate offices in Troy, Mich., so the next step was to send the whole thing to them, along with all the related photos. They then added a background to cover up the green screen, music, text and fairy dust to put the whole thing together and voilà, we had a video!

Next up, we’re working on some videos about products from the Sweets and Snacks Expo, and our goal is to eventually do a monthly video about products featured in each issue. We figure it’s a great way for everyone to get a better sense what the candy we write about is actually like. Of course,  it’s also a great incentive for companies to send us samples so they can be featured in the segments. Samples are my favorite.

We also hope to do some interviews with various confectionery professionals in the studio and maybe even some roundtable discussions. We’re also open to ideas from our readers, so if there’s anything you’d like to see us shoot, just let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

For now, this is Crystal Lindell, signing off. Have a sweet day