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.

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.

So the film had to go where the work is. Parts measured in the Mag area, the numbers typed into the computer, the QA lab and its pull tests, the vision system, the shadow graph, ejection-force tests, a pallet wrapped and taped, a truck backing into the loading dock, the shipping computer. None of it is dramatic on its own. All of it is the reason a customer trusts the box that arrives.

The brief was not one film. Samuel asked for three product films, each written for a different audience, plus a compilation, plus a story film for the company’s fiftieth year. 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 in their own words.

We shot it in one day in June 2023. The preproduction document laid the day out in half-hour blocks and named the crew’s wardrobe — long sleeves, slacks, steel-toe shoes — because the floor is a working plant and the film was going to be shot on it. Bryan Bakker produced and directed, Derek Lamoureux was on camera, and Felipe Varela and Ilea Bakker worked the floor as production assistants. The client’s liaison, Sanjay Matadin, was there for the whole day and could stop a take while it was happening, which is a better way to work than fixing it in an edit. One crew, one location, one shot list agreed before anyone plugged anything in.

The delivery set was five films and a logo sequence, cut to open each of them. Four of the pieces run about two minutes. The story film runs four and a half, and the client published all five on its own channel — which is the outcome you want, because the films belong on the client’s channel, doing work, not buried on ours. The story film is the primary embed on this page.

What makes the job worth showing is that the films did different work. One had to open a new market. The others had to stand on the plant’s own name. A company that has been making seals for fifty years, in a building on Exeter Road, shipping out of London into a warehouse in Germany, does not need to be told it is interesting. It needs somebody to point a camera at the right forty metres of floor and let the work explain itself.

PRODUCER | DIRECTOR | EDITOR · BRYAN BAKKER