Manufacturing Video in North Carolina: What a Plant Shoot Actually Needs

A plant shoot is not an office shoot with louder background noise. The building is running when you arrive and it has to keep running while you are there. The people you want on camera have targets to hit. The best shots are often in the places with the most rules. None of that makes manufacturing video hard to do well. It makes it hard to do well without a plan built around the plant rather than around the camera.

North Carolina makes a great deal, and a lot of our industrial work starts within a couple of hours of our Charlotte base. This post is about the practical side: what a manufacturing shoot needs before the crew walks in, and how to keep the day safe, on time and useful. If you are still working out what the film should say, start with what manufacturers get wrong about brand video, which covers the brief.

What makes a plant shoot different?

You are a guest in an operation that cannot stop for you. On a normal location, the production controls the space for the day. In a plant, the production borrows the space, and the line, the shift pattern and the safety rules all come first.

That changes the order of planning. On most shoots we pick the story, then the locations, then the schedule. In a plant the schedule often comes first, because what is running, when, and where we are allowed to stand decides which shots are possible at all. A shot list written before anyone has spoken to the plant is usually a wish list.

It also changes who the client is on the day. The marketing team commissions the film, but the plant manager and the safety lead run the building. A shoot goes well when both sides have agreed the plan before the date, and goes badly when the crew discovers the rules at the gate.

Who needs to be involved before the date is set?

More people than a marketing team usually expects. As a working list:

• The plant or operations manager, who knows what is running, when, and what can move.
• The safety or EHS lead, who sets the rules for visitors, protective equipment and restricted areas.
• Whoever owns the people on camera. Supervisors need to release staff for interviews, and anyone recognizable needs to sign a release.
• Legal or sales leadership if a customer’s product, a proprietary process or a customer visit could appear in frame.

Get them on one call early. It takes thirty minutes and it surfaces the things that otherwise turn up on the day: the area that needs two weeks of approval, the line that is down for maintenance that week, the product that cannot be shown.

What does safety mean for a film crew?

It means the crew follows the plant’s rules exactly, and the plan budgets time for that. Expect protective equipment for every person on the crew, a safety briefing before anyone films, escorts in some areas and areas nobody enters at all. All of that takes time out of the shoot day, so it belongs in the schedule rather than eating into it.

A film crew also brings its own risks into the building. Cables across walkways, light stands near moving equipment, people looking through a lens instead of at what is around them. A good crew keeps its footprint small on a working floor, with less gear and fewer people than a studio day, and a clear way of keeping walkways and exits free.

The safety lead is not an obstacle here. They are the person who can tell you where the interesting shots are possible, and they are much more helpful when they have been asked early. If your project is a safety training video rather than a brand film, the rules are the subject, and we cover that work in safety training video production.

How do you schedule a shoot around a running line?

By finding out what the plant is doing that day and building the shot list around it. The questions we ask are simple. Which lines will be running, and making what? When do shifts change? When is the floor quietest? Is anything happening that week that is worth being there for?

That last one can make a film. For Tritium Power Solutions, the EV charger manufacturer, we shot on the manufacturing floor of its Tennessee plant and timed the visit to overlap with a customer already touring the building. The plant was at its most active and most presentable, the people we interviewed were already in the frame of mind of explaining their work to an outsider, and we let the interviews run off the cuff rather than scripted. That plant is in Tennessee, not North Carolina, but the scheduling lesson is the same anywhere.

Noise is the other scheduling question. A running line is a great picture and a poor place to record an interview. We usually film interviews in a quieter room, or during a break in the noisiest work, and shoot the floor separately so both get the conditions they need.

What if the story is not on the plant floor?

Sometimes the best place to film a manufacturer is not the factory. Two of our projects show why.

TTI North America needed to attract engineering talent to its Charlotte office. The people it was hiring would work at desks and benches, not on a line, so we shot the TTI recruitment campaign on site at the Charlotte office, inside the real spaces where the engineering happens. Recruitment is a use case most industrial companies under-brief, and the earlier post on manufacturers covers why.

A national workwear brand we work with makes clothing for people who work in plants, garages and on job sites. What it needed was product photography and product demonstration video for its online store. That kind of work means showing the product the same way, at the same angles, many times over, and a controlled room does that faster and more consistently than any floor.

The question to ask is what the audience needs to see. If it is your people, your scale and your process, go to the floor. If it is the product itself, the studio is often the better choice.

What changes when the work happens across several sites?

The package has to travel light. Chesapeake Containment Systems is a Statesville company that installs the geosynthetic systems that keep waste contained, and its crews work outdoors on steep, uneven ground on sites across several states. For its brand story film we filmed real operations in natural light as they happened, with a RED Gemini, anamorphic lenses and a drone, a kit small enough to move across hillsides between sites.

Multi-site work also multiplies everything above. Each site has its own manager, its own rules and its own schedule, so each one needs its own short version of the planning call. Drones need the property owner’s agreement and an FAA-certified pilot, which we cover in filming in Charlotte: permits and locations. And travel between sites is shoot time you are not filming, so the order of the sites matters as much as the sites themselves.

What should you send your production partner first?

Five things, before anyone writes a shot list. What the film is for and who will watch it. Which sites are possible and who runs each one. The plant’s visitor and safety rules. The weeks that are good and bad for production. And anything that cannot appear on camera, from a customer’s product to a proprietary process.

With those, a production partner can tell you on the first call what the shoot looks like, how many days it needs and what the plant will be asked for. Most of our motion work lands between $50,000 and $125,000, though that is a range rather than a rule, and projects scope below and above it depending on what the work has to do. Plant shoots sit inside it like any other. The number of days and sites moves it more than the fact that it is a factory. For how industrial work fits into the wider picture of producing in this state, see our guide to video production in North Carolina.