Background
I created these facility tour videos to help our employees and customers learn about some of our growing list of facilities. As SJE continues to grow and acquire businesses, we have lots of facilities across the US and China with different specialties and capabilities. We were also limited on travel and guests during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so we were looking for alternate ways to give people a peek into our facilities.
Internally, our employees appreciated a look inside some of the other locations and how they do business. Detroit Lakes is our headquarters, with most of our office workers, and is home to many of our float switches and panel production. New Hope focuses exclusively on custom circuit boards for a range of applications, including firetrucks and lab equipment. Ashland is our newest facility, completed in 2019, where we conduct lots of customer trainings and make many of our large control panels.
Process
I worked with the leadership team to brainstorm what we wanted to feature and then wrote up scripts for each video. I filmed the Detroit Lakes video with our Panasonic GH5 on a Ronin S gimbal. The New Hope video I filmed on my Samsung S9+ with a DJI Osmo gimbal. The Ashland video was shot by an employee at that location. I did the editing and motion graphics for each video in Premiere Pro.
Highlights/Favorite Part
I enjoyed traveling to our New Hope location, which specializes in a very different area from the parts of the business I’m usually involved in. I also enjoyed learning to use the new gimbals for these projects, including some cool transition effects. The hardest part for the DSLR gimbal was definitely putting it together and balancing it…the actual shooting was easy!
Other videos I’ve made for SJE include: