310MC Research & Development

For the last months myself and Sid have been waiting eagerly to get our teeth into this project. It was first offered to us at the start of the second year by module leader Steve Dawkins, but due to scheduling and aircraft engines being located and in the right place at the right time it has taken until November 2009 before we have finally been given the green light to start the corporate videos started. The project is to provide corporate video work based around the Rolls Royce aircraft engines, and to be more precise the RB211 aircraft engine, that will require us to work not only at the Rolls Royce plant in Ansty, Warwickshire but also at the Rolls Royce plants in Montreal, Canada and Ohio, America. When told by Steve that myself and Sid would be taking on the project i was delighted as it was another fantastic project to add to my establishing CV whilst also providing us with a professional contract that will see us be paid on a daily rate at professional corporate rates.

Wednesday 11th November 2009 – Initial Meeting and test shoot

Today was our first face to face meeting with the Rolls Royce training team, Tom Doyle and Bill Troman. Our first task of the day was to have a debrief meeting with the Rolls Royce team to find out exactly what they and we were looking to gain from this project. The basis to the project is simple, we have been asked to produce three separate films for the use on one DVD all surrounding the RB211 aircraft engine. One being a general walkthrough of the engine, the second being a video demonstrating how a borrowscope is set up, and the third being a video documenting footage captured by the borrowscope inside of the RB211 engine. These video’s are going to be used for training packages for new Rolls Royce engineers all over the world, the DVD we will be producing is being sent off to Brazil. After our initial meeting we were shown the training room where we will be based for all of the filming and then proceeded to conduct a test shoot and familiarize ourselves with the engine to see what issues needed to addressed with the location and to get a good understanding of the style we would choose to shoot the piece. The first thing that we noticed that could prove to be a huge problem was the large windows that we situated all around the training room. These will pose significant problems when we come to shoot the piece, as change in light will effect the overall appearance of the engine and video. After finding this initial problem myself and Sid discussed the different ways that we could counteract this issue by using other forms of lighting or simply blocking off the windows. We decided that the natural light, infat gave the engine more depth and presence on the screen so we felt that if we were just to use added lighting then the issue of the windows would be eradicated.