One of the highlights of 2011 was being selected as one of the winners of the YouTube Next Chef program.

The Next Chef program evolved out of YouTube’s NextUp Program. Basically, the idea is to cultivate the next wave of up and coming talent on YouTube. The original program was not focused on a specific content niche. The second wave focused on cooking and fitness. The goal of the program is to help content creators take things to the “next” level and ultimately make a full-time living via YouTube.

As part of the program, winners received $5,000 worth of gear, training sessions conducted via Google Hangout and $10,000 in YouTube advertising.

The eagerly awaited box of gear from YouTube

But, I was starting to get a little restless. After hanging out with some shooters for the Food Network (and ogling their gear), I really wanted to make the transition to shooting with DSLRs. When we heard that we would be getting $5,000 of gear from YouTube, I decided to just wait and see. The gear was selected by YouTube and we didn’t know what we would be getting until the boxes from B&H Photo arrived. My fingers were crossed that a DLSR would be in the mix.

Here’s an overview of what was in the first box to give you an idea of what YouTube apparently thinks is a good starter kit.

Some of their choices were kind of interesting.

Canon 60D. Strangely enough, this is exactly the camera I had decided to start saving up for. It took me a little while to get comfortable with the transition from a camcorder to a DSLR, but I love it now and can’t imagine going back. The downside to this camera for a lot of our fellow YouTube NextChefs is that there is no autofocus and many of them shoot their video themselves. This can make things kind of tricky and some of them have gone back to using camcorders and only use the 60D for still photos.

Canon EF 17-55mm f/2.8 IS. I love this lens and it’s quickly become our primary lens for just about everything.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.4. Another outstanding lens. I don’t use it much for video, but all the time for tabletop shots. It’s light years ahead of the thrifty/nifty fifty.

Manfrotto 701 HDV Tripod 701HDV head Nice and stable, incredibly smooth panning and tilting. We’d been using a lightweight tripod designed for still cameras until now, which meant we could never move the camera while filming. This is a nice change.

Rode VideoMic Pro. I’ve only used this a few times. For our particular show, the cheapo wired lavalier still performs better. If I’m running two cameras I will usually put this one the second camera, but rarely use any of the actual audio from it. For shooting cooking videos, I think some kind of lavalier set-up would have been a better choice for this package.

SanDisk Extreme 8GB Card. I’ve heard great things about these cards and have had absolutely zero problems with it. However, 8GB isn’t enough space and I ran out in the middle of a couple of shoots before remembering to buy additional cards.

Logitech HD Pro Webcam. This is still in the box as all our computers have built in cameras, but I guess this was a necessary inclusion since all the classes were conducted using Google Hangout.

MyStudio Tabletop Photo Studio Seamless Cyc Background. This is basically a huge white piece of plastic for doing tabletop photography. We use it for the close-ups of the finished and plated food. This has really come in handy, but it’s huge and doesn’t collapse down at all – so it’s taken up permanent residence in our living room.

Overall, it’s a pretty awesome kit. With the new gear we’ve been able to speed up our production and get a little closer to the look and feel we’re aiming for with the show. The plan from the very beginning has always been to produce new episodes on a consistent basis while incrementally increasing quality. So this gear has helped out a lot. Eventually, my plan is to add a Canon T3i as a second camera, a wireless lav and a few more lenses – but for now we are cranking along pretty well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about YouTube’s Starter Kit – as well as what kind of gear you’re currently using to produce your projects. Leave a comment below!

Next up: 7 Things We Learned from the YouTube Next Program.

We recently hit two important milestones with Hilah Cooking.

#1. We released Learn to Cook – our first digital book.

#2. We released our 100th episode. We’ve produced a new episode pretty much every Tuesday (except during our summer vacation).

With these two milestones, we’ve completed Phase one of our initial plan.

The Halloween episode in post-production.

Yes, there has actually been a plan all along.

When we decided to start this project, I felt like we needed at least 100 episodes to decide whether or not the project had serious potential. I knew it would start out as something that was just fun to do on weekends – but would eventually start to feel like a lot of hard work. So I was committed to produce and release 100 episodes no matter what – and after that we would step back, evaluate whether it was working or not and either stop doing it or figure out how to proceed.

The Basics

While most of the feedback we’ve received about Hilah Cooking has been staggeringly positive, the few complaints we’ve received have been along the lines of:

“Why are you doing a video about cooking scrambled eggs? It’s so easy! Nobody needs to watch a video about this stuff.”

or

“Don’t you know how to cook anything more advanced? A 12 year old could make all this stuff!”

Well, that was the point.

Growing up, I never learned to cook and I wasn’t exposed to much cooking at home. I definitely wasn’t exposed to the type of cooking that we feature on the show. And I know I’m not alone in this. Through trial and error I eventually figured out how to cook for myself (on a very rudimentary level), but I felt like there were some fundamental building blocks that I was missing.

The truth is: Some people were never taught how to make scrambled eggs.

Those are the people that we set out to reach.

Phase One was always intended to be about learning to cook basic food using the best ingredients possible. We’ve now covered everything from seasoning a cast iron skillet to how to cook a steak. And we’ve received some of our most positive comments and highest views on the most basic videos.

The Book

We released Learn To Cook in June 2011. We worked incredibly hard on the book. Hilah wrote it. I designed it. Laurel styled it. Nadia shot the photos. James styled the hair. We called in just about every favor we could.

It clocks in at 230 pages (not counting the free bonuses) and features almost 150 recipes and 10 bonus videos. And since it’s a digital book, we were able to hyperlink to our videos where appropriate. It was designed to tie everything from the Phase One together and I think we pulled it off.

We  launched it fairly quietly with a video and an email to our mailing list. I will always remember launch day as one of my favorite days ever. Because it totally worked. The hard work was done and we were able to sit back and watch the sales come in.

To be honest, I was amazed.

And we continue to sell copies of the book even though we haven’t promoted it to anywhere near it’s full potential.

The Next Step 

During our first two years, we’ve turned down every offer from companies interested in direct advertising or sponsorships. There are a lot of reasons for this that I will go into in a future post. But the primary reason is that we have a long-term vision for this project. We wanted to build an audience and establish an actual relationship with our viewers and then figure out ways to create even more high quality content for that audience.

Our audience has continued to grow and has really exploded over the past few months – some of this is due to YouTube Next Chef but I think most of it is due to the fact that we have produced and released a TON of quality content on a consistent schedule.

We’re now producing two recipe videos a week along with a Q&A vlog. The amount of time we spend on this thing is getting kind of insane.

The good news is that it’s never stopped being fun. In fact, it’s more fun than ever.

But we’re also at the point where we have to take it more seriously and turn it into an actual business – without destroying what we’ve already built.

And that’s what Phase 2 will be all about.

We spent the New Years holiday on the beach at Port Aransas.

This was my first visit to the “Texas Riviera” and even though the weather was cool and mostly overcast, it did not disappoint. It may sound like a strange choice for a vacation destination, but we needed to get the hell out of town. We found a great condo with a kitchen right on the beach. And it was dog-friendly so we didn’t have to leave Daisy at home.

It was a very low-key few days – a rarity for us. We spent most of the time like total nerds – writing screenplays on the deck while drinking margaritas. We ate a lot of seafood and made a wicked beach fire, but spent New Years Eve itself watching TV with the dog. In fact, this is the first New Years Day I can remember that I wasn’t totally hung over. It was actually pretty awesome.

For me the trip was a complete mental “re-boot.”

2011 was a roller-coaster of a year filled with lots of emotional highs and lows, a relentless production schedule, the publication of a book, winning YouTube Next Chef, speaking gigs at conferences and too many other things to mention. There’s nothing like a few days of staring at the ocean to blow out the cobwebs in your brain.

I came back from the beach completely refocused and recharged.

With the ramp-up of Hilah Cooking and my other projects, I’ve completely neglected this site. I only published once in 2011. I am “re-booting” it as well. I did a lot of writing in 2011 that was intended for this site, but for a variety of reasons, I never pushed publish. Now it’s time.

As part of the reboot, I stripped the design down to the absolute basics. This is about as simple as it gets. I’ll be experimenting with it a lot as we go.

I also deleted almost all of the old posts. I kept four of them because they directly relate to the topics I’ll be focusing on for the coming year.

• Web Series Production. For as long as I can remember, filmmaking and publishing have been the things I’m most passionate about. Web Series really hit the sweet spot for me as far as combining the two things. I’ll be launching two new series in 2012 – one scripted, one unscripted. We’re also about to begin the second Phase of Hilah Cooking, which is going to be exciting. I’ll be detailing all the behind-the-scenes details here.
• Digital Content Strategies. I’ve learned a LOT since we launched Hilah Cooking and continue to learn more every day. I’m going to start posting about it here on a regular basis. It will get nerdy. I’ll be going into mind-numbing detail on everything from optimizing YouTube meta data to building web sites that actually work.
• Independent Publishing. I’ll be touching on both digital and print. I don’t believe that print is dead and I will be involved with both print and digital book projects in the coming year.

All the big articles will be here on the blog. Supplementary stuff (photos, videos, etc.) will be published via Tumblr and Google+.

Thanks for reading!