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.

Week Seven. March 19th-23rd

Week seven began on Tuesday 20th March, as the Monday was a bank holiday (the St.Patricks Day national holiday). We had an early start, as Safefood 360 were hosting a seminar at the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Ashtown, Co. Dublin, on some new food safety regulations. We arrived at 8am to set up our cameras and sound equipment, to capture all the presentations. I set up my camera about half way up the conference room, to the side aisle, and Barry set up at the back of the room. I placed a zoom recorder, and my Olympus sound recorder on the podium so we would have good sound quality. The audience arrived at 9am. Lauren did the Welcome and Introductions to the days agenda, and Barry and I spent the day filming the event and also got some footage from the networking session.

About sixty people from different areas of the food industry turned up, which made the seminar very successful and worthwhile for Safefood 360 and everybody involved.

The Seminar Agenda

George

Ulrich Schraewer

Lauren

The event was over by about 3pm and we drove to the Safefood 360 office to spend the rest of the day off-loading the video footage from the cameras and the sound recorders. It hasn't been decided exactly what will be done with this footage yet, but it has been a great experience for us to get out and do the camera work and sound recording. 

Incidentally I was very disappointed with the Zoom recorder as it didn't have enough storage capacity to record the whole event. I am very glad that I used my Olympus sound recorder in conjunction with it because it had more than enough capacity to record the whole event, and at the same time produced a very high quality recording. As far as I can see the only advantage of the Zoom over the Olympus is that it records in stereo, but when the output from the Olympus is duplicated and put onto the timeline of the video it produces more or less the same result. I won't be running out to buy a Zoom recorder any time soon, knowing that my little Dictaphone can do the same job. The only real way to find out these things is to use them out in the field.

I continued to work on the food safety software for the rest of the week. This included changing the "around the world" Flash animation. It has been very useful to be able to construct transitions in Adobe Flash and Adobe Illustrator and then import them into the video via Final Cut Pro.

I finished the video on Friday 23rd and passed it over to George and Philip for upload.

Week Six March 12th-16th

We had an early start again on Monday 12th March for a trip to Celic Pure in County Monaghan. This time we are going to interview the owner of the business, Padraic McEneaney for a customer story video. Since we already filmed all the factory plant footage during week two, we will be able to merge the footage for a really nice production.

Barry and I, set up two cameras. One head on, and one side on in the interview room. We also set up a zoom H1N for the sound source. We waited for about two hours for Padraic to be ready for the interview. 

When he arrived, I set up my camera beside my chair at eye level, to have him looking at me but facing the camera. Barry set his camera for a side on view. I turned on the camera and voice recorder and began with an informal chat, then went straight into asking him the list of questions which George prepared. It can be difficult to interview someone, to achieve a good rapport and at the same time get answers to your questions, which are suitable to show on camera. 

The  interview took about an hour.  The main questions were about how he started Celtic Pure, the bottling process and future prospects for the company.

Padraic McEneaney

Padraic side on

I was very happy with the way the interview went, and felt that I had got the answers I wanted out of it.

 I feel that this customer story will look really good when combined with the bottling factory footage.

We returned to the Safefood office, after the interview to offload the video footage. This customer story video will not commence for a few weeks as we are very busy with our other work

  I spent the rest of this week working on the Food Safety Software video. It involved removing any of the safefood 360 logos from the graphics, and replacing them with the new ones which Barry designed. I also had to ask Lauren to re-record her narration with the changes. I then did the audio enhancement work on it. This project is almost complete, just a few tweaks to be done before I upload it to Safefood 360s' You tube account. It will then be uploaded to their Re-Seller Programme on the website.

Week Five March 5th-9th

At the start of this week I was editing the video and audio footage from Iman Casings. Although it was a very interesting visit, it's difficult to make it look exciting. The fact that the raw product is sheep's guts could put the viewer off. I want to try to make a slightly sickening process look interesting.

Final Cut Pro

When I am editing the process I have the Discovery Channel programme "How it's made" in my mind. The bottling factory was much more interesting, as there were lots of moving parts and different stages to film. We were spoiled with all that very interesting and diverse footage, so this factory is a real test.

I have been using two DAWs (digital audio workstations) to enhance the sound on these videos. For our first video for Safefood 360, I used Audacity.

Separating and labeling tracks

  It was a very handy tool in this situation because the narration was recorded all in one track. Audacity allows you to split it up into multiple tracks, and then export them individually in one go.

Exporting Multiple Tracks

 It also allows you to remove long pauses in sentences, thus allowing each sentence to flow better.

The other DAW I have been using is Reaper.
Reaper is very useful for removing echo from a speaking voice, and to remove background noise. I removed a low background hum from the narration with it's "VST, FFT EQ+Dynamics" effects manipulator.

Reaper VVT Effects

The sound engineering module was really helpful, as the voices and music recordings were really unsuitable in their raw state. Before I began this work experience, I didn't really appreciate how important it is to get the sound right on a video. To be actually working on these projects, the demand for quality is high, which leads you to experiment more in an effort to improve your abilities.

On Wednesday, George asked me to leave this project for a while, and make a start on a re-make of the Safefood 360 video, with the Food Safety Software brand, rather than Safefood 360. The reason for this is that they want to push the re-seller programme.

I had some royalty-free music in mind, but George suggested that I use the original track.  I continued working on this project for the rest of the week.

Week Four Feb 27th- Mar 2nd

We had an early start on Monday to travel to Ballyhaunis, County Mayo for a customer stories video with Iman Casings. We arrived at the plant around 11.30am, where we were greeted by James Barrett, the food safety manager, and then were taken on a brief tour of the plant. Iman Casings produce the skin of sausages. To our surprise we were told that sausage casings sell for the same price as all the meat inside, so it's a very profitable niche of the butchers trade.

James Barrett

Firstly, we filmed an interview with James, with Philip asking the questions (off camera), then we took footage of the processing plant itself, with James talking us through the production process. 

Then we did an interview with the son of the owner of the plant. He gave us some information on how the business was set up.





James was telling me that he works part time as a hypnotist. He helps people give up smoking, or overeating, or with the anxieties in their lives. This could be fear of flying or other phobias. He asked if I would mind videoing him giving an introduction, for his website, www.hypnosisinmayo.ie
I certainly didn't mind, or maybe he hypnotized me into doing it :)
This is a piece of James' profile on the website. If you click anywhere on James' profile you will be linked to the video footage.

James Barrett is a Hypnotist with many years experience in this field. James worked with John Connolly in Athlone and in 2008 opened the first clinic in Claremorris, Co Mayo. Westport Leisure Centre was opened in 2009. James also has a degree in Food science from UCC.Testiment to the success of the techniques word of mouth referrals were the highest in Irish Hypnosis in 2010. The Claremorris clinic was ranked in the top 3 in the country.James specialised in smoking and weight loss initially and then worked on panic attacks and depression. James is well known for fears and phobias including driving test, fear of needles, public speaking, sports hypnosis and many more. Hypnosis is much more than just a job. James leaves no stone unturned in allowing people get the life that they want.

It generally takes a few hours to transfer the footage from the cameras to the hard drives, so the next morning was taken up doing this. I often wonder how anyone can make deadlines between the amount of time it takes to transfer footage, and then the time the clips take to render during the editing process, followed by the exportation of the final product. 

The next few days were taken up listening to royalty-free music, trying to find something suitable for this project.

you would expect that you could go online and find a piece of suitable music in ten minutes, but there are so many genres of music out there. Not only that, there is a lot of music that you think is right for your project, only to find that it completely changes pace, and doesn't fit at all.

 

Week three. Feb 20th-24th

Unfortunately our trip to the Iman Casings' plant in Ballyhaunis was cancelled due to an unexpected audit. We have re-scheduled for 27th February. We intend to now, use the time to make a video for Safefood 360 which focuses on reselling their software to food safety consultants, who will use the software under their own brand with the software showing the consultants logo.

Barry is involved in creating logos for Safefood 360, under a generic guise as Food Safety Software. If the reselling partners don't wish to have their own logo on the software, they will be using this one.

This video project will consist of an on-camera presentation by George Howlett, with Lauren Walsh doing a narration for some of our footage. We will be taking some footage of the new office showing extra staff dealing with the day to day running of the business.

Lauren Walsh

We both took video footage of the new office, using staff from other offices in the building to give the impression of a full office. I used the tripod to shoot slow-paced pan shots of the busy office while Barry focused on hand-held footage of close-up inserts.

 

On Thursday we did the interview with George in an upstairs meeting room,

 as we thought it would be a nice, quiet room to record in.

    We recorded the sound using a Zoom H1 Handy Recorder. I set up the large TV screen behind me, as I was videoing him face-on. The TV was to be used as an auto cue. I asked George to change the pronunciation of some of the words so they would be understood by people for whom English is not their first language. 

When we reviewed this footage we were not happy with it because the location which looked fine at the time, looked too disjointed from the Safefood 360 offices. We decided that these scenes should be taken again in the Safefood 360 offices where George Howlet is speaking from his office chair with his computer behind him and with the software on screen. We tested this location out with lighting and cameras to see how it would look. Firstly I got Barry to sit in George's chair to see how to frame this shot. Then I sat in the chair so Barry could take a look. We tried the shots with lighting and without lighting.

George's Desk

Barry at desk

Martin at desk

We recorded Lauren for some of the narration.

  We used a Zoom H1n Handy Recorder and an Olympus Digital Audio Recorder. This time Barry imported the sound files to Reaper so that he could choose the best takes,and enhance the sound.

Reaper Software