Continuation after placement. May 24th

I recently got this reply from James via Philip.

This really goes to prove the old saying "Work for nothing and you'll never be idle". Even after the free advert, he has no qualms in pushing for more.

I wouldn't want there to be any bad feeling between the guys and this client, therefore I will make the changes for him. I won't however do it until I've completed the tasks I have to finish for this module.

I sent Philip an email to let him know.

Philip and George were very pleased with our work and asked us to do some more customer stories for them over the summer. We both agreed that we would be very happy to do this for them.

Continuation after Placement. May 2nd

I finished the video and sent it to the guys to forward to James.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UApPJInW9yU

Week Twelve April 23rd-27th

This is the last week of my placement. I'm both happy that I've learned so much during the last twelve weeks, and sad because I think I'll miss the people from Safefood 360.

My main work for this week is to complete the video, but I will also be helping Barry with some of his audio for the Celtic Pure Customer Story. Some of the interview audio has a background hum, and there are also a few coughs that have to be removed.
Barry has worked with Reaper, but I find that Audacity is easier to use for these corrections. I'll do some of the audio work for Barry and show him how to do it, then he will be able to rectify the other problems in the same way.

Audacity

I've been working on the ad for Iman casings. I could emulate the example almost exactly very quickly but I'd probably be sued for copyright ha ha.

I wanted to put the background into a light gray  Rather than have that pure white background.

I'll have the Iman logo appearing at several stages of the video.

Spinning Logo

Logo with drop shadow

narrow horizontal shot

I like the Narrow Horizontal Shot in the example video, so I think I've found the perfect footage to apply to that type of shot.

I will use multiple video screens like the example video,

Multiple Screen

Pan Overview

I have used the overview, panning footage, full-screen as a nice transition in the video.


There are some examples of the casing processing procedure in the example video, so I want to try to work a similar layout. I will highlight the stages of the process with some text.

I will use the logo again, before the credits, in the closing part of the video.

I didn't get to finish the video by the end of this week, but I will finish it over the next few days, or so.

Week Eleven April 16th-20th

I spent this week on the Seminar video. I decided that I would try to treat it like an advertisement, or an introduction to a film. I wanted to have the background black, and two screens at a time showing the speakers. I also wanted to have a text explanation of what each of the speakers did, and spoke about. I wanted the music to be fairly upbeat and I wanted each of the company logos to be highlighted in some way.

 I used key frames and had all the four logos shooting in from the corners. Firstly I had them cropped into rectangular shapes on a black background, but Barry said that it looked awful, and that it made the logos look cheap. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I had to agree with him that they looked much better on a white background. Barry had worked for a number of years as a graphic designer, so I really had to bow to his expertise. It's still hard to take criticism, even if it's constructive.

My Dad always used to say "The man who never took advice never took anything". That's okay but then I had to make the white background black again. A simple fade was adequate for this, and it fitted in with the sped up footage of the people arriving into the seminar room. This gave a good intro for the split screens. I found it a bit difficult to keep the same gap between the screens,and decided that I would do it with the positioning windows. That looked okay but then I thought that I would like a little more of a gap, without reducing the sizes of the screens, so I Just overlaid a black cropped slug in the centre of the screens, and this gave me the result I wanted. I got a high resolution graphic of the BRC Global Standard for food safety, and inserted it spinning into the start of the video, with the words "Issue 6" coming into the screen from bottom left to top right. I then wanted to include the Safefood 360 logo.
I ended the video with the words "We'll see you at the next Seminar".
I am pleased at the way it turned out. Here is the link to a copy of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqpQJ-TRmW0

Week Ten April 8th-13th

Since Philip and George came back from Germany, they have been very busy dealing with follow ups, and trying to do webinars on the software. A big problem with this has been trying to work out the various time zones for the countries. They have to make sure that it is a convenient time for both the clients and themselves whether the client is in India, Australia, The USA or wherever in the world. It's wonderful that they are branching out so quickly, but the time zones can be very confusing. Philip decided that they needed to get a world timezone map on the wall, and also some clocks to highlight some of the countries. He asked me if I would bring in some of my tools, and put them up for him. I was only too happy to do it for them as they are really nice people to work for. It has been a real pleasure to work with and for these three, honourable, respectable, respectful people.

Here is a picture of the map and the clocks. Philip will set them for their respective timezones and label them as soon as he gets a chance. We initially wanted to put the clocks over the map, and vertically over the timezones but we didn't have enough space.

This was a short week as Monday was a bank holiday (Easter Monday), however a lot of work was completed. The Reseller video was finished and on Friday I made a good start on the seminar video. This video is really just a brief synopsis of how the seminar went, and who spoke about what. The rest of the footage will just be left as is. Nobody wants to look at hours of footage of a seminar. The video will be an introduction of the seminars to follow.

 

Later in the week James from Iman casing sent us an email to let us know that he wanted a lot of changes to be made to the video. It seems that he understood that the video was an advertisement for Iman Casings. The video I was making was a customer story, to be put onto the Safefood 360 website, not an ad for Iman. Philip advised him of this and said that we would make changes if we had the time, but asked if he was happy to allow us to use this video on our website. He replied that it was okay for us to do that. He then sent us an example of an advertising video by their opposition, and asked if we could do something similar to that. I said that I will try, even though I feel that they are chancing their arm at getting a free advertising video.

Here is their oppositions advert. Click on the Corporate Video image to go to their website. It's on the right hand side of the page. Click it to play.

This video would have been shot with the final product in mind, The desks in the offices would have been cleared and cleaned, The staff would be wearing suits, the windows and glassware would have been cleaned and polished, the vehicles would have been cleaned, and the storage areas would have been tidied up.

I intend to continue with the Seminar video, and then try in not too similar a way, to emulate this video with the footage I have.

Week Nine. April 2nd-6th

Week nine began with a meeting about all that had happened last week in Germany and Dublin. I showed them my progress on the two videos and George and Philip were both happy with what had been done. They told us that there was a lot of interest in the software and that they would be busy over the next days and weeks with follow up calls to potential clients. They were also delighted about winning the Nokia Digital Media Award. Incidentally, Lauren sent them a text on the night of the awards so they already knew that they won.

I completed the Iman casings video and showed it to George and Philip. They were very happy with the end result, so uploaded it to their You Tube account, but kept it on private until they showed it to Iman's Management. They wanted to be sure that there wouldn't be anything in the video that should be kept private.

I then continued with the other Reseller Partners Programme video, mostly looking for some suitable, Royalty-Free music. As aforementioned, finding suitable music is a very time consuming aspect of the video making process. I feel that it is also a very important part of the process, as it can make or break the feel of a video. I spent many many hours this week trawling through music and will narrow them down and try them out individually. It is really good to be working with Barry as we can test out our projects on each other, before getting final opinions from Philip and George.

Reseller Programme

The Reseller Partners Programme is an incentive for food safety consultants to use the Safefood 360 software under their own brand or logo. It also allows them to manage multiple sites from anywhere there is a broadband network, thus allowing them a lot more flexibility. This makes it a very good reason why consultants would use the software, and it allows them to take on more clients. This makes it a win-win situation for everyone.

It turned out to be a bit of a mistake, not to use lighting in this video because, the computer monitor situated behind George was the brightest part of the video, and because of this, it darkened the rest of the scene, especially George's face.
Although it felt like a disaster, it made me find ways to darken the monitor area only, and then brighten the rest of the scene. I achieved this by using cropping and feathering, and using multiple layers to rectify the problem. Before I did my work experience, I never had any reason to do this, but neither would I have had the foggiest idea how to deal with it. This really is the right time to encounter these scenarios, and the right time to find out how to sort them out.

This video will be used on the website to explain how the programme can benefit everyone. It takes the potential customer through the reasons why they should become a partner.

Week Eight. March 26th-30th

 George and Philip were away this week in Germany at Food Safety Conference & Exhibition. 

Our Trade Stand

Trade stand setup

 Philip emailed these two images of their setup. It's really nice that they keep us in the loop as to what's going in with them. Philip wished us well for the Nokia Digital Media Awards, and hoped that we'd do well from the show. Safefood 360 are one of three finalists for a Cloud Based, Innovation Award. The other Finalists are "Sage" the accountancy software people, and "Ordnance Survey Ireland" the map people. It is a great achievement to be in the running with such well established and successful companies.





I have been working on the Iman casings video for the most part of this week. I am really enjoying getting to grips with filters in Final Cut Pro. It's amazing the difference filters can make to footage. Barry and I can see huge improvements as we are constantly working with video and graphics, but I showed some of the before and after footage to my family, only to realize that they couldn't see much difference. Either the experience has trained my eye, or I'm fooling myself ha ha, (I'm not fooling myself okay).

On Friday we all left the office at about 1pm so we could get ready for the Nokia Digital Media Awards. Barry and I had to collect our tuxedos and we were to meet up at the Convention Centre at 6.30pm. All in all it turned out to be a great night, and the icing on the cake was that we won the award, and I had the honour of accepting it with Lauren, on behalf of the company.

Announcement

Going Up To The Stage

Receiving the Award

This week was a really good experience for both myself and Barry, we helped each other out with our respective projects, and gave and received a lot of constructive criticism. It was also a first for both of us as neither of us had ever been to an awards ceremony of this magnitude before, let alone receive the award. Looking forward to seeing the lads next week. They'll be telling us how it went in Germany and we'll be telling them about the Digital Media Awards.