Employee Awareness: T-Mobile

T-Mobile's requirement was for a dynamic, engaging video that could be shown to the staff of every retail outlet in the UK as a way of introducing significant technology changes being considered.

A script was put together during a single brainstorming session with T-Mobile and their consultants, Paul Mason Consulting, and shooting of key interviews took place at their HQ in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. It was decided that a member of store staff would be a good choice to present the video, in order to gain empathy with peers and a further day's shooting at a T-Mobile store in Basingstoke took place. In order to showcase some of the technologies being considered, short 'commercial break' segments were created, in conjunction with the solution vendors, and included in the finished production.

From commission to delivery, the project was blitzed in under two weeks, in order to meet a deadline for a store manager's conference.

Employee Training: New Look

New Look is a major UK fashion retailer, with around 600 stores nationwide. It aims to exploit technology to provide outstanding customer service and to improve efficiencies.

The brief, created jointly by the Operations Department and the IT Department, was to create a short (under 10 minutes) video to introduce their 10,000 store staff to new hand held terminals being brought into the business. On site training was ruled out for time, cost and logistical reasons.

vIT was commissioned to produce the video at very short notice and within a tight budget. Of paramount importance was that the video did not patronize the staff while remaining easy to understand and attractive to the viewer (the majority being females aged between 17 and 22). The New Look brand was to be carried through the piece, as was New Look’s sense of fun. 

One day of planning and storyboarding at New Look’s head office, followed by one day of filming on location at a New Look store was followed by four days of editing and graphics compositing (two days with the client and two days at vIT’s studio). The resulting piece was duplicated for distribution to every store location and the whole project was completed within two weeks of the initial enquiry, saving tens of thousands of pounds in on site training costs.

The video is now also being used by the handheld terminal software developers as a promotional piece.

Training Materials: The Co-op

Anglia Co-Op commissioned vIT to produce educational materials to enable rapid training of large numbers of remote users of their new ABSIT on-line ordering system.

Key requirements were for the materials to be easily understood by people for whom English was a second language; for it to easily be distributed through the corporate intranet; and for the production to merge video, still images, PowerPoint slides and HTML seamlessly into a coherent piece.

vIT employed Microsoft Producer software (now sadly discontinued) as the shell for the project. Microsoft Producer allows content of different types and from multiple sources to be synchronised and displayed through a browser, without the need for special back end server software. The ability to make the training non-linear was also a key factor in the decision to use Producer.

Live action footage, shot in a store in Ely, was captured over a period of two days and showed typical user scenarios. This was then edited and synchronised with the PowerPoint slides and other images to produce the structured piece. An HTML scene navigator was included to allow users to jump between training sections. Animations were created using Adobe After Effects compositing software.

The training was also made available on CD which was distributed to all stores.

Sales Promo: Coatek International

Coatek International is part of a Japanese group, specialising in technically advanced materials for use in the steel, cement and lime manufacturing industries.

Coatek's requirement was for a product demonstration video that would showcase the benefits of using their materials. The video was targeted at German-language customers and so had to be translated. vIT worked with a translator who also had experience of doing voiceovers, thereby saving time and cost in post-production. Included in the video were a number of complex animated 3D scenes that were all created by vIT.

The video was delivered on DVD to Coatek's network in Germany and Austria and has been used in presentations, exhibitions and conferences.