Heineken Best Practice Videos

We faced a few issues in the planning and delivery of this project. The first being that the filming was going to be taking place in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. Hence our first hurdle was the logistics of getting all filming equipment across safely.

Once we had all the filming equipment and ourselves safely transported, we then had to get from the airport to our hotel, and then to the Heineken brewery – in one piece!

Whilst logistics was our first challenge, the location was our second one. The noise levels proved to be a potential issue for standard audio and the numbers of people/teams who were contributing to the audio, compounded this issue.

Any factory floor is a noisy environment – particularly this one where there’s bottles and machinery thumping away 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As the dialogue between staff was key in convoying the message and sentiment of the Heineken Daily Control system, we had to make sure that the audio was crystal clear.

Other problems that we encountered were generally due to the nature of this project being in a process environment and having to capture what we needed to film without too much disruption to the process or staff work schedules.

Having worked with other major organisations on similar location-based projects, we planned the heck out of this trip and knew exactly what equipment would be required to overcome all of the location issues that we were likely to encounter.

As the filming was to take place over a few days and involved some VERY early starts, we hired a car. This also meant we weren’t relying on taxis and that we didn’t run late or miss any opportunities to film in certain locations, not to disrupt the work flow.

After organising the shooting schedule around the availabilities of the plant and the people, we set up appropriate lighting and audio for each scene.

We ensured our shooting schedule was thorough and well planned out. We took careful consideration into arranging interviews and sections with individuals to make sure we were as unobtrusive as possible.

We used a series of headset style microphones on each of the talents to get the microphone as close to their mouth as possible, as the only way to ensure the clearest audio is to get the microphone as close to the source of sound as possible. In many scenes we would have up to 5 people taking part in a meeting at any one time, so this meant at least 5 microphones were required, and all of which, needed to be synced up in the post production editing process.

We filmed the videos over a series of 2 days, starting at 7 in the morning and often finishing at 7 in the evening. Once we were back in the studio we started working on the editing process straight away. The rough edits were sent to the client, based on the storyboard.

We then held regular review meetings with the team. All of this ensured that a successful series of videos were delivered to the customer, all of which, exceeded their expectations.

The management teams have explicitly thanked for the quality of the final videos and were very complimentary in our professionalism and planning of this video production project. In particular, very appreciative in how flexible we had been in accommodating all of the staff availability during the filming period, taking into account the production timing and shift changes.