Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Garage!
This is my studio in Midtown Manhattan. My name is Steve Giralt.
I'm a Visual Engineer, Director and DP.
And today, I'm going to show you five tips on how to shoot better beverages.
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So tip #1: The background.
A really important thing to consider when you're shooting beverages is what's behind a beverage.
Liquids, ice... They all reflect what is behind them.
And, if you have a dark background your your liquid is going to be dark.
if you have a bright background, your liquid's gonna be bright.
So, make sure you keep in mind what your background is doing. What kind of light gradation is happening on your background.
Because it is very likely, very heavily affecting the way your drink looks.
So, if you want to try to get that perfect Coca-Cola gradation within a drink,
your backgrounds are going to have to have some sort of gradation behind it.
But, we're also going to show you in one of the other tips how to get around that.
So tip #2.
For your drink to take on a different life of its own, separate from your background, the first thing to consider is diffusion.
So this is just your kind of standard diffusion you can get at B&H.
And you cut it up, and you make it fit the back of the glass just so you don't really see it on the edges,
but it covers enough of the background of your glass so that now you've diffused the back of your drink
The other option is what's called dulling spray,
which is basically spray-on frosting, you know, like glass frosting, basically.
They also make glass frosting sprays as well.
So, with this, you would actually tape the edge of your glass.
You would go outside. You'd spray it. Let it dry.
And now your glass is permanently diffused right where you want it to be.
So, our food stylist and beverage stylists spend a lot of time prepping glasses for us,
making sure they're, like, spotless spotless spotless.
That's also where a microfiber cloth comes in handy to make sure
because you'll see any little dot or dust in there when you go to shoot it.
So, diffusion is an important part of shooting beverages.
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Tip #3: Ice.
I mean, obviously, this doesn't go for every beverage doesn't have ice, like you're having a martini or something like that.
But, a lot of beverages you want that nice, cold, refreshing.
And you only get that with good ice. So, there's a few options.
A lot of people go to their store or their refrigerator and just get everyday ice.
Everyday ice isn't so clear.
It isn't so pretty. It floats. There's certain problems about real ice.
[fumbles over words]
It also starts getting the glass all foggy, which could be a good or bad thing,
but generally, we like to add that cold condensation ourselves.
So, real ice isn't always the best. The shape of this is like weird and round.
You know, but it's up to you. You could play with it and give it a try.
Most of the times, we shoot with acrylic ice, which is fake ice, we call it.
So, these cubes are hand-carved and polished.
I think these are, like, 30 or 60 dollars each. It's ridiculous.
But once again, if this is what you want to really do,
you need to pick up a few that match, different shapes, you know. This one's a little bigger than this one.
They have some that are, like, kind of shard shapes and all sorts of different types.
You could really go down a fake ice wormhole, if you get a little crazy.
But with the fake ice, also keep in mind though they don't move around very easily.
So that could actually be a hard thing if you're trying to make, like, a mojito
and fit, like, mint leaves around things or stuff like that.
They also don't float, so there's a certain fakeness to the drink when you do it
because, like, normally real ice will float. So, they're all things to keep in mind.
But, you know, once again, you'll see here that fake ice looks so much crisper
and more beautiful than the real ice does.
Tip #4. So once again, we've got our glass, we've got on our ice,
we've maybe put some diffusion on the back of it.
But now we need to kind of really amp up the light behind the drink.
So that's where using reflective cards kind of like this are a great idea.
You can see how reflective that is.
So, it's just a cheap card that has like kind of a mirrored surface on one side.
You could actually use a real mirror too, if you want to.
You could also put dulling spray on these to soften them a little bit.
You can go crazy on your cards.
And I have this which is a floral frog, I think it's called.
They put in the bottom of a flower arrangement to hold fake flowers up.
So, it has these little stabby bits, and it's really heavy--it's made of lead--so I put the cards into it.
And it holds them nice and straight, and then I could actually adjust the angle on the card as well, which is really fun.
So, that you're going to pick up whatever your your key light is and you're gonna reflect it right through the drink.
And, we'll show you some close-ups of this so you can see here,
that it really kind of puts the light and makes that little bright light right behind your drink and really brings it to life.
Um, as an upgrade version of that. Something that we do,
and is also pretty reasonable to do if you have a little electronic knowledge...
[laughs] We have a lot!
You could buy some LED strip.
It's kind of this stuff here... [stammers]
You know, they sell it for under cabinet lighting and other stuff. Ideally, you want something with a good, high CRI number.
And here, we put it through a little piece of frosted plexi
and run it through like a little power supply, so we could actually dim up that light up and down.
So once again, we put that behind the drink; we'll drill a hole in the surface for the wires to disappear behind it.
And with that, you could really make your drink come to life.
And by changing the amount of strips you use, you could really make a beautiful gradation.
It just gives you full control of the light coming through the drink.
without having to like try to fuss with the card. [unintelligible]
And actually, if my key light wanted to be somewhere else, it might be hard to scoop that light up and get it through the drink.
So, this is kind of really fun thing.
We're going to be covering this kind of stuff in The Garage Learning, our online platform, so you should check that out.
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And the 5th and final tip: condensation.
If you're gonna do this cold drink, and we discussed that, you know, real ice gets really foggy.
And fake ice is not foggy at all because it's super room temperature. It's not cold.
What we often do is add condensation to the drink.
These are those nice little beads on the side, and you get that sweat dripping down the drink.
That really kind of gives you that cold feeling.
One easy way to do this is, there's these, like, spray bottles of mist that you could buy like a CVS.
It's basically just considered, you know, facial spray, whatever it is, but it's just water in a can.
And you could get your drink and you could spray it on from far away a little bit and kind of play with how much you want.
And then you end up with this beautifully frosty, condensated glass.
If for some reason that's not making big enough water drop droplets for you,
you could pick up--also at your pharmacy or whatever--some glycerin.
So glycerin's a lot thicker. It kind of, you know, really sticks a lot more.
So, we'll put that in a little spray bottle kind of like a little just like [mimics spray sounds] mister.
And then those you'll see make these like nice big round blobs that you'll see on, like, Coke and Pepsi commercials,
where they, kind of, really are, like, larger-than-life water droplets.
You could also go 50/50. You could add a little water to the glycerin, and kind of come with something in the middle.
For us, we have amazing beverage stylists that help us with these things.
Although, during Covid, I was actually the beverage stylist on a few shoots
because we couldn't have that many people on set, so it's just a fun thing to know how to do,
and it's really not that hard, and you know, you could play with it yourself and make sure you get that perfect cold feeling.
One extra pro tip on that: realize that your condensation shouldn't go above where the ice is
because there's normally a line of where the liquid is, so there shouldn't be condensation necessarily above that line
because it wouldn't naturally be condensating.
So just keep that in mind, and try to stick to reality in some form when you're making this super fake beverage.
[chuckles]
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So, I think that's about it. Thanks so much for joining us.
I hope you learned 5 tips on how to make better beverages, if not more.
I try to actually pack as much I could in there for you!
Please leave some comments, leave some suggestions.
Any other things that you might think of, put them in the comments.
I'll be on there checking them out, and I'll write back to you.
If you want to find me in another way,
you could follow me @SteveGiralt on Instagram.
Also, our online platform we're about to launch is currently on kickstarter right now.
It's called The Garage Learning.
Check that out. There's way more tips coming there. It's going to be a full featured platform
that'll teach you this and more.
And, you know, also check us out.
Our production company itself is called The Garage. And that's the-garage.tv which shows all the client work we do.
So, thanks so much! I appreciate you you watching all this craziness, and I hope to see you soon.
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