Leicatex Project

Samuel Marketing Solutions asked us to make films for one of its companies: Leicatex, a plant on Exeter Road in London, Ontario that makes the small hardware holding the world’s pallets and straps together — more than 300 million seals and buckles a year, shipped around the world. In one day we shot for three product films and a compilation, each aimed at a different audience, and then cut a story film from the same footage for the company’s 50th year. Five pieces, one shoot, one crew.

That is the problem this job actually solves. A manufacturer whose product disappears into somebody else’s crate has nothing to photograph and nothing to show a customer, a new hire, or a buyer in a market it has not sold into yet. It needed the plant explained.

We spent one day inside it. Samuel Marketing Solutions asked for films aimed at different audiences, so the crew worked through a shot list: parts measured in the Mag area, the measurements entered at the computer, the QA lab and its pull tests, the vision system, the shadow graph, ejection-force tests, a pallet wrapped, a truck leaving the loading dock, the shipping computer. The people to be interviewed were named in advance — the general manager Jim Schornagel, Paul Marsden, Demetria Drakos and Darcy Walthers — and the client guided the questions, so the people who run the plant describe the plant.

Four of the pieces are product films, built one audience at a time: a buyer, a specifier, a customer who already runs the machines. The fifth is the story film, and it is the one embedded on this page — the plant, the people who run it, and fifty years of seals.

Same footage, four cuts, three audiences — and one company that has been making seals for fifty years, now shipping out of London to a warehouse in Germany.

PRODUCER | DIRECTOR | EDITOR