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

Week three. Feb 20th-24th

At the beginning of this week we were involved in planning some video projects. The next video would be a customer story, rather than a promotional video. This footage would be taken at an industrial plant in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo. The customer is called Iman Casings. 

Iman Casings produce the outer skin of sausages (casings). Our job is to get some footage of the production process, and to do some interviews of representatives of the company.  

We hope to produce a few customer story videos for Safefood 360 to put on their website. This will showcase them as Safefood 360's  clients. This is a similar idea to projects on the "Mail Chimp" website. 

Both Barry and I will be doing the camera work for all the projects, and then we will take it in turn to edit the videos. 

Week Two. Feb 13th-17th

On Monday (13th February) we visited Celtic Pure in Monaghan to get video footage of the whole bottling operation. This footage will be used in two projects. The exhibition video for The Irish Times, and a customer story video for Celtic Pure.

We were required to wear shoe covers, a white coat overall and hair netting while we shot our video of the factory area of Celtic Pure, to comply with food & safety regulations.

We took video footage of all areas of the processing plant including equipment, employees at work plus some mood shots. The factory machinery was very impressive due to the shear amount of moving parts throughout the whole bottling process.  The factory had been recently refurbished with improved lighting, this greatly improved the quality of our footage.

We also took some footage of Celtic-Pures' safety officer using the Safefood 360 software on different platforms such as a windows computer and an apple ipad. This footage was taken in different areas of the factory and offices to show the flexibility of the software system.

Desktop Use

Using the i-pad

Week one Feb 6th-10th

For the rest of week one I was mostly involved in research for the video. Initially, Barry was to work only on the animation, but we suggested that we would get better results if we both worked on the video and the animation. We could use two cameras at a time for a better variation on footage, and we could bounce ideas off each other and expand our creativity.

This also gives me a chance to get involved in some of the animation. I am really happy to be involved in this project as it gives me the opportunity to expand on my experience and add to my portfolio at the same time.







On Wednesday myself and Barry moved all the office equipment to a bigger office space on he ground floor. This took us the full day.  On Thursday we were back to working on video research.

On the Friday we received information about an Exhibition which Safefood 360 will attend on the 17th February. We are to make a 2-minute  overview video of Safefood 360. This video has a one week deadline and will feature the footage we will take in Celtic Pure on Monday. We also intend to get footage of the new Safefood 360's office space for this video. We are heading to Celtic Pure in Monaghan on Monday, then on Tuesday we will film footage of the new office space, there are some discoloured tiles in the ceiling, and these should be replaced before we start to shoot our video.

Day one Induction Feb 6th

Today Philip gave us a fairly thorough demonstration of the Safefood360 software. I didn't realize how many safety checks and reports a food safety officer had to deal with. Before this software was developed by George and Philip, endless amounts of forms have had to be filled in, filed away and eventually retained in vast amounts of boxes. Eventually the paperwork takes up so much space that it costs a lot of money to store.
At the moment, most of the food industry are using a paper based system. The team at Safefood360 are in the process of introducing their software all over the world and revolutionizing the way food safety teams work and document their reports.

Part of my placement is to produce a number of testimonial videos from users of the Safefood360 software. We hope to get the first video footage from a spring water company in Monaghan called Celtic Pure.

 

The second part of the day was spent looking at explainer videos and testimonial videos, to get some ideas for our video. I also downloaded a 30 day trial version of some software called Camtasia, as we feel it could be useful for producing step by step instructional videos.

Safefood 360 Feb 5th

On Thursday 2nd February, I had an interview with Philip Gillen and George Howlett at the office of Safefood 360 in the ITB Linc building. The company produces software designed to keep food safety prominent in all aspects of the Food Industry.

Philip Gillen

Safefood 360 have won many awards for innovation, and in efforts to stay a step ahead, want to produce videos of some of their satisfied customers explaining how the software has been beneficial.

George Howlett

During the course of the interview, I showed a video which I produced for a Resource Centre in Dublin. They liked my video and both agreed that they were happy for me to produce some videos for them.

I will be given an Induction on Monday 6th February along with Barry McCaffrey who has been taken on to do some Flash Animation. I worked with Barry on my Project Management Module and really enjoyed working with him.

I am delighted to be involved in this project and am sure that I will gain some valuable experience in the process.
They also told me that a professional film crew will be on the premises on Tuesday, and that I could possibly make some connections and get some tips.