Rolls Royce Job
For extra experience, myself (with Blue Ridge Film Group members) took on a job given to us to film a training video for Rolls Royce. It was a 5 day shoot including a recce. The job was to film a team of Rolls Royce employes strip down a jet engine that is used to power turbines. The trainer and man overseeing the project was Tom, he would present the video, and explain each section of the engine and how to do the job.
This was an important job. Coventry University has been involved in producing videos for Rolls Royce for a few years now, and only a group of selected students get the chance to take on the job. So with that in mind, there was a little bit of pressure to live up to expectations, so i treated this job professionally from day 1.
On the first day, myself, along with Tim and Steve Ringrose, took a trip to Rolls Royce to meet Tom talk about the project, and also to do a recce. The room we were filming in was a workshop so there were potential filming issues, not to mention health and safety hazards. The first thing i noticed was the lighting in the room. It was kind of dark but changed as the natural light changed. This could have been an issue, so we were careful to monitor the light and white balance often when shooting. The second issue was the sound. As it was a workshop, the room itself had large echo and there were external noises coming from a boiler tank and people mowing the grass. We decided to use tie mics as this would reduce background noise, rather than a rifle mic which picks up more room sound.
Filming took four days and went smoothly. The only issue we had was on the morning of the first day, when we didn’t record notes. Realising this was a mistake, notes of timeline codes and sound clips were taken. This was a major learning curve as it would have been near impossible to edit the video if we hadn’t taken notes. The engine was far too technical for us simple film-makers to keep track of, so we were lost on what part of the engine was getting worked on straight away. It was important if we didn’t understand what was happening that we stopped and asked Tom, who was always willing to help us out.
The Rolls Royce job was another great experience with working for a client and being a professional media producer. Rolls Royce were impressed with our work and have asked us back to carry on more filming for the company. I’ve learnt that this is how work comes in, decent word of mouth. Hopefully the next project for Rolls Royce will be as successful as this one.
