Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of “Liz and Bill’s Cosmic Adventures”? We just debuted Episode 4, and reviewing the final draft of the video reminded me how much of a pain it was to film one of the scenes. (Spoiler alert if you haven't yet watched it!)
Bill and I had the brilliant idea to film raisin bread rising while baking. (It’s one way to show some consequences of the expansion of the universe.) Well, it turns out making bread with yeast is a talent neither of us possesses. Not to mention that oven doors are reflective, and thus filming anything through said door is difficult.
So, over one weekend, Bill tried his hand at baking cinnamon raisin bread. When he brought it in the following Monday, the Astronomy magazine staff joked about how dense the bread was. Plus, the video camera didn’t work all too well, and our video production department would have had to piece together four separate clips.
Then it was my turn to prove how good I am at baking. Answer: only with basic foods. My bread turned out at least as dense as Bill’s, and I think the staff ate perhaps two or three slices. (It actually tasted OK, once you managed to get the knife to cut through the loaf.) And the video clip looked terrible.
(As a side note, while reviewing the video, I noticed a black reflection on the oven door. It turns out that my dog came into the kitchen to investigate the camera. You could even hear her sniffing at the video camera in the clip before the music was added. I thought this was hilarious, and thus had to share the clip with all of you.)
Third time’s the charm, especially when baking bread. But it had nothing to do with luck. Instead, we accepted reality: Instead of trying to bake yeast-based raisin bread, I decided to bake blueberry-lemon bread, thinking that the blueberries could look like raisins. And they sure do. The bread tasted better, too, and the staff ate the entire loaf.
So how did we fix the “filming through a reflective oven door” problem? Well, we need to keep some secrets, so watch the video at www.Astronomy.com/cosmicadventures.
Hope you enjoy the next episode!