Chef of the Year since 2022, and the awards night
On the day
Photographs from the production.
Every film in this body of work
The brief
Cover the group's Chef of the Year final as it happens: a field of chefs cooking against the clock in a competition kitchen, judged on the day, and one film per edition that carries the event to everyone who was not in the room. From 2026 the awards evening is filmed too — the night the competition film is played to the room, and the one occasion the whole group is together.
What we ran
A multi-camera build in a working training kitchen, rigged around a competition that does not stop for you. Two cameras on fluid heads covering the pass and the ranges, a gimbal for the moving work between stations, and a boom operator on a separate recorder with radio mics on the chefs. Lighting is a single large softbox worked around the room rather than a fixed grid — a competition kitchen has its own traffic, and the light has to move with it. Chef portraits and the food were shot the same day, in the gaps.
Post
Underground Media's, not ours. Jake Lanning cuts the films; Flowspire shoots them. It is worth saying plainly rather than leaving a reader to assume a company lists everything it touched — the coverage, the sound and the stills on this page are Flowspire's, and the edit that turns a competition day into eight minutes is Jake's.
Scope
Deliverables
Result
Four editions filmed to the same shape — 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026. There was no 2024 competition. The same crew comes back each time, which is the whole economy of it: the second year costs less to plan than the first, and the fourth costs less than the second. In 2026 it grew a second night: the awards evening where the competition film is played, filmed and cut as a sixteen-minute highlights piece of its own.
The creative stays yours. The production becomes ours.
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