Smulders Projects UK
Brief
Smulders Projects UK is a steel construction company with a fabrication facility based in Wallsend, they have a vast experience in engineering for the renewable energy market. They wanted to commission a film capturing the immense work carried out in Newcastle to deliver structures to the Beatrice offshore wind installation in the North Sea.
Preproduction
This project required the yard to take delivery of the topside units from mainland Europe, creating the jackets on Tyneside, and mating them ready for load out. The CEO of Eiffage, Pierre Berger, was staying in Newcastle for a short while and commissioned this film around his visits, so this project had a pretty quick turnaround and the team was given the freedom to bring this process to life. The film shows the story of technical capability, the man hours, and the sheer scale of the project, to encapsulate what Smulders stands for, and why they’re seen as one of the most reliable companies in their field. We were amazed by just how you make a construction of this scale come to life and it was key to understand the processes involved as the huge Meccano sets on site become the completed jackets. We worked closely with the site management to get a feel for how they worked, which informed how we would tackle filming it.
Production
During shooting we used a lot of timelapse to show the extensive, time consuming process the crew at Smulders has to commit to when working on impressive projects like this. Some of the shots of the construction are shot from unique angles as the size and position of the structures allowed us to fill the frame in different way, sometimes showing a side people won’t have seen them from before. It’s attractive for a technical audience as there is so much detail in the construction, and as filmmakers focussing on the cinematography and the abstract shots we were able to really push some of our techniques. Our team took some awesome aerial shots showing the scale and size of the project, along with the impressive views downriver. We also focused a lot on shapes and lighting in this film, in the end, it’s not only about the finished product but the human commitment that makes it happen and we felt some of the people shots really added to the feel of the round-the-clock nature these projects often take on.
Postproduction
We used a sparse, building track with an undertone of drama for this film. We felt this added to the intensity of the process and highlighted the importance of each action, constantly reminding us that this is a process between people and machine to create these gigantic jackets. Using text to convey the message of the hard, complex work put into the construction allowed us to push the narrative on while being informative about the impressive stats behind the project. We used both still and moving shots to add diversity, but it also let the shots linger to allow a technical audience to focus on the details of the fabrication.
Results
Our film is live on the Smulders media page on their website and received over 8,000 views in a matter of weeks upon launch. Smulders are a company who demand quality across the board so the pressure was on us to deliver a high quality film in a short space of time, it was an amazing experience to be involved in a project that Smulders and Eiffage were so proud of delivering & it was a privilege to be able to bring our filmmaking approach to something that will have an enormous role to play for years to come.
