I will be examining the genre conventions of GIF/Video recipes made popular by sources like Tasty. These pieces of media are usually less than three minutes and showcase at least one way to cook a dish, including visuals and text in the recipe. For me, The first necessary component is that the content is made up of at least some GIF or video content; it cannot exist as solely text, although text is an essential part of the genre. As it’s a recipe, the video or GIF must list all of the ingredients necessary for the dish, and the video or GIF should also include the proper proportions or measurements of those ingredients. It must show a clip, or at least a picture, of each step of the cooking process and generally show the dish coming together. For nearly all videos in this genre, most shots of the cooking process will come from the top down. Finally, the video or GIF will almost always show the dish in its completed form.

In my genre analysis, I will be writing about Tasty’s one minute long “Easy Butter Chicken” recipe, their most viewed recipe on YouTube, and Tastemade’s 35 second long video, “The Slacker Shake – a.k.a Best Milkshake Recipe EVER.” It is the most viewed video on Tastemade’s YouTube page.

Without getting too specific as to limit creativity and diversity within the genre, I think these conventions are what makes up a GIF/Video recipe (or a Tasty video, as it’s come to be known at this point). I know nearly everyone reading this has watched a video or GIF recipe before—what do you think defines the genre?