Red House Streaming Produces Voodoo Chef Underground Burger Competition

Red House Streaming is continuing to diversify its original programming for its RHStv Connecting Tampa Bay streaming channel with VooDoo Chef Underground, a competitive cooking series featuring nationally recognized culinary educator, chef and hospitality industry influencer Erik Youngs.

The program was produced on-location by Red House Streaming at Erwin Technical College where Youngs, a food industry celebrity known as VooDoo Chef, serves as the lead Culinary Arts Instructor. The competition, which brings eight high school teams with sixteen students in total together to compete for a full college tuition scholarship, is exclusively available to stream on demand at RHStv.com.

Youngs has been a culinary educator for the Hillsborough County Public Schools system in Tampa for 25 years. After 20 years teaching culinary at the high school level, he transitioned to Erwin Technical College, a vocational school associated with the district, due to his strong connection with his students and his commitment to the local Tampa community. Youngs also contributes to the national food industry through his non-profit VooDoo Chef Foundation. The Foundation, spawned from his line of VooDoo Chef Sauces and Seasonings,. has awarded over $250,000 in culinary scholarships to date and has committed to another $100,000 this year, $10,000 of which will go to the VooDoo Chef Underground burger competition winner.

Youngs also hosts his own audio podcast with a dedicated following, but wanted to bring more attention to his students participating in competition through video. He was introduced to the Red House Streaming team through friendships with on-air talent at RHStv Connecting Tampa Bay, and soon struck a deal with Red House Streaming to produce the event. Filmed in mid-April, Red House Streaming established a multi-camera production workflow to capture cooking teams working side-by-side as they battled to create 'Tampa's Best Burger'. The RHS production team hung GoPro Hero 11s above each of the two cooking stations for aerial angles, and provided full overviews of the chefs in action using Sony PXW-Z280 4K HDR handheld camcorders. Separately, RHS technicians attached a Sony Alpha 1 4K camera to a DJI Ronin RS3 video stabilizer to follow Youngs as he encouraged his students, with several microphones to capture isolated audio tracks of Youngs, his students, and the sounds of burgers sizzling on the grill.

Red House Streaming also handled all post-production work, including video editing and voiceovers. "We have three Adobe Premier Pro editing suites at the Red House Streaming Production Center, two of which are Windows-based and one which is Mac-based, along with a separate voiceover room," said Kurt Heitmann, CEO of CP Communications and Red House Streaming. "All suites are networked together via a near-editing storage solution to establish an efficient workflow between our editors. With these post-production capabilities, we could offer Erik a full end-to-end suite of production services to bring his vision to life. We are also proud to have the exclusive OTT streaming rights to this series on RHStv."

The first episode, 'VooDoo Underground Challenge Round One,',is now available in RHStv's VOD library and will be followed by additional episodes as the competition whittles down to the final two. Heitmann adds that Red House Streaming will also produce short segments for their “Collections” page, and all content will be available on RHStv’s and VooDoo Chef’s social feeds.

For Youngs, the competition is a source of pride for a visionary whose generosity is felt across Hillsborough Public Schools, the Tampa community, and the national food and hospitality industry.

"We formalized the VooDoo Chef Foundation when I left teaching at the high school level, and its mission is a natural extension of the one l live daily: to promote our community through food and education," said Youngs. "Students undergo their most profound changes in their high school years, and we recruit and educate students that want to learn the culinary trade in a way that gives them a sense of belonging. VooDoo Chef Underground will shine a light on the exceptional skillsets of these young students as they perform under pressure while judges observe the action. As Red House Streaming shares our mission to support the Tampa community, we were thrilled to use their professional services to consult, produce and deliver this series to the greater Tampa community and beyond."

RHStv Connecting Tampa Bay is a homegrown, advertising-supported streaming network with a growing lineup of original topic-driven programming. Available on the official RHStv.com website, a free RHStv app for iOS and Android devices, and Connected TV platforms such Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Google Play, and Roku, the FAST (free ad supported television) streaming networkempowers local voices through three linear channels and a large roster of shareable VOD programs. The Red House Streaming business also includes a professional studio and production center in St. Petersburg, Florida; and a live event business powered through production trucks, technicians, and RHS and third-party hardware and software solutions.

www.redhousestreaming.com