Restaurant Video Production in Kansas City

We shoot food and restaurants in Kansas City — menu films, social verticals, and the room-and-crew pieces that make a place feel like somewhere instead of like a listing. Pricing starts at $2,000 and every number is published on this page.

Nobody decides where to eat by reading

Restaurant marketing is one of the few categories where the buying decision is almost entirely visual and almost entirely impulsive. Somebody is three blocks away, hungry, scrolling. They are not comparing your sourcing philosophy to the place next door. They are deciding whether the thing on the screen looks like something they want in the next twenty minutes.

Which is why the two most common restaurant videos both underperform. The first is the drone-and-jazz sizzle reel, beautiful and generic, shot so wide and so slow that you could swap the logo for any restaurant in the metro. The second is the phone video shot mid-rush under fluorescent light, which is honest and appetizing to nobody.

The version that works is close, warm, and short. Steam. A cut. Hands. The moment the cheese pulls. Then it is over.

What we make for restaurants

Menu and dish films

Six to twelve dishes shot in one morning, each cut into a short vertical. This is the highest-volume-per-dollar thing a restaurant can buy, because one shoot day fills a social calendar for months and each dish is a separate post.

The room and the people

What the place feels like at six on a Friday. The bartender, the line, the regulars, the light. This is the piece that gets somebody to choose you over a closer option, because it is selling an evening rather than a plate.

Owner and chef stories

Why this restaurant exists, in the owner's own words. Independent restaurants have something chains cannot buy and most of them never put it on camera.

New location and opening films

Shot in the two weeks before you open, when the space is finished but the chaos has not started. Openings are the one moment a restaurant gets free attention, and it is worth having something ready for it.

Hiring

Restaurant staffing is the hardest problem in the business. A sixty-second film about what the kitchen is actually like is a better recruiting tool than a sign in the window.

How we work around a restaurant

This part matters more than the creative, because a shoot that costs you a service has cost you more than the video.

• We shoot between services or before open. Usually nine to noon. We are out before the first ticket.
• Your kitchen plates it, we do not style it. No shellac, no glue, no fake ice. Food that has been styled for camera does not look like what arrives at the table, and that gap is a one-star review.
• Small footprint. Two people, lights that go where we are told, and we move when you need the pass.
• Shot vertical first. Most of this lives on a phone. We frame for vertical and pull the horizontal versions from it, not the other way around.

What you get

• A crew of two — the same two, every shoot.
• We come to you, anywhere in the metro, at no travel charge.
• Licensed music, color, sound mix and captions.
• Vertical cuts for social, a longer piece for the website and delivery apps, and stills pulled from the same shoot for menus and listings.
• Unlimited revisions. We work until you are happy, not until the hours run out.

What it costs

These are the published prices. They are the same whether you call in January or in October.

• The Short — $2,000. A morning in your kitchen and your dining room, cut to music with text on top. No interviews. For most single-location restaurants this is the right first purchase, and it produces the dish verticals.
• Story Film — $4,500. The above plus an interview — the owner or chef — cut into a single polished film with the shorts alongside it.
• Brand Package — $10,000. Multiple scenes across a shoot day: a hero film, a full run of dish verticals, cinematic b-roll and food photography. Right for a group, a new concept, or a restaurant that wants a year of content out of one morning.

Full pricing for everything we make is on our video production cost page. If you host private events or buyouts, our event video page covers that side.

Who we have worked with

We have produced work for Wendy's. Fast food is a different problem from an independent dining room — volume, consistency, a brand standard to hit — but the camera work is the same work: make the food look like the food, in the time you are allowed to be in the kitchen.

We are happy to walk you through what we made and what we would do differently for you. Ask on the call.

How it works

1. A call. Thirty minutes. You tell us what you want to fill — a social calendar, a website, a new location — and we tell you which package fits and what it costs.
2. A dish list. You pick what we shoot and in what order, so the kitchen can prep once.
3. The shoot. One morning, before service. We are gone before you open.
4. The cut. First versions back within a couple of weeks. You give notes. We revise until it is right.

Where we shoot

We film across the metro every week — Kansas City, Overland Park, Prairie Village, Lee's Summit, North Kansas City and everywhere between. There is no travel charge inside the metro.