“Flavors of South America”– LATAM Airlines
Producing, directing, and editing a culinary travel video series for Green Team Global and LATAM Airlines.
The Client
Our storytelling agency was approached by the marketing agency Green Team Global to produce a culinary video series for LATAM Airlines, the largest airline in Latin America.
The Deliverables
The “Flavors of South America” project was a series of videos highlighting the gastronomic delights of Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil, and Ecuador through recipes prepared by world-class chefs from each country. The aim was to entice the audience to travel and experience the culinary magic for themselves.
Our deliverables for this project were five 10-minute videos, five 30-second teaser trailers, and five 2-minute highlight videos. We directed each shoot remotely via Zoom, except for the Colombian video, which we filmed in person. We also subtitled each video, designed and animated the graphics, and prepared a complete list of ingredients for each chef’s recipe.
Pre-Production
Since four of the five shoots were conducted remotely, part of our pre-production process involved preparing an exhaustive pre-production document for each chef. This document contained all the information they needed about lighting, filming angles, video and audio settings, framing, and transferring the completed material to our team for post-production. No stone was left unturned to ensure maximum efficiency and the best possible material for our client.
For our in-person shoot in Bogota, Colombia, we made the necessary arrangements with our protagonist, Luz Dary Cogollo, and sent two members of our video team to her home for the shoot.
Production and Protagonists
The five chefs were Luz Dary Cogollo from Colombia, Rodrigo Pacheco from Ecuador, Thiago Castanho from Brazil, Carolina Bazán from Chile, and Francesca Ferreyros from Peru. Each would be preparing their specialty recipe while narrating the preparation and ingredients for the viewers at home.
For the remote shoots, our team connected with four of the chefs via Zoom. They filmed themselves on smartphones, set up following our pre-production document brief. In addition, Thiago Castanho, who has a TV series in Brazil, had his video team recording him, following our directions. The exception was Luz Dary, who our video team filmed at her Bogota home.
Luz Dary Cogollo
Luz Dary was born in the Colombian Caribbean region but has lived in the capital city for over 14 years. She prepared a traditional ajiaco soup from the Bogota region. Her small restaurant in La Perseverancia marketplace is called ‘Casa de Mamá Luz.’ In 2019, Dary won the hotly-contested ‘Best Ajiaco in Bogota’ award. An appearance on Netflix’s ‘Street Food: Latin America’ cemented her reputation, and now there’s a line around the block most weekends to enjoy her traditional Colombian dishes.
Rodrigo Pacheco
Rodrigo Pacheco is the culinary visionary behind BocaValdivia, an ocean-front plot of land in Ecuador’s Manabí province that he has transformed into a destination for hospitality, gastronomy, biodiverse agriculture, ecosystem regeneration, social work, and sustainable lifestyle. His goal is to create “the biggest food forest on earth.” The in-house restaurant, also called BocaValdivia, specializes in sustainable and exclusive gastronomic experiences. For his video, Rodrigo prepared Aloe Vera Chicharrones.
Thiago Castanho
Brazilian chef Thiago Castanho chose to prepare a dish native to the Amazonian city of Belém; as he says in the video, 99% of the Belém diet consists of fish dishes, so he presented his recipe for Moqueca Paraense, a type of fish stew. Thiago has been called “one of the most innovative chefs in Brazil” by the New York Times and opened the restaurant Remanso do Bosque in his native Belém.
Carolina Bazán
Carolina Bazán was named the Best Female Chef in Latin America at the 50 Best Restaurants awards in 2019. She opened her first restaurant - Ambrosia - in the center of Santiago de Chile in 2003. In 2011, she decided to continue her culinary studies and moved to Paris, where she studied and worked under Chef Gregory Marchand. After returning to her native Chile and reopening Ambrosia in a new location in 2013, her career has gone from strength to strength. Carolina prepared a special dish entitled “Si Vas para Chile” (‘If you’re going to Chile’); a gastronomic journey through all of the country’s regions using fish, yellow chili sauce, pebre sauce, onions, Chilean spices, quinoa, and avocado, among other ingredients.
Francesca Ferreyros
Born to a Peruvian-Colombian father and a Peruvian-American mother, Francesca Ferreyros was born and raised in the USA but remained proud of her Latin roots. Her restaurant - Baan in San Isidro, Peru - is inspired by Asian cuisine with Peruvian touches. Peruvian food has close connections with Japanese cuisine, and Francesca explores that connection with her creative and exotic dishes. For her video, she prepared a mouthwatering crispy tropical ceviche dish.
Post-Production
Once all the footage was downloaded and transferred to our team by each chef, we edited the full-length videos, trailers, and shorter cuts in our Bogota post-production studio. Our animators added graphics, and our in-house audio designer crafted the sound.
The Results
The client was delighted with the final results, which were shared on LATAM’s Youtube channel, where they have been viewed by tens of thousands of culinarily curious viewers. They were also widely shared across LATAM’s social media channels.
Learn more about our Colombia-based Creative Studio + Film Production Company HERE.
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