Tag Archives: astronaut

Inside a Cookie/Cracker Factory

Astronaut is a full-service creative agency run by Stephen Lockwood in Winston-Salem, NC. Previously we had worked together on a shoot for a Southern Living planned community and a video about Hayward’s pool pumps. T&T operates as the production arm of the ad agency.

The video above was created on behalf of Dewey’s Bakery. The founder and owner of Astronaut, Stephen Lockwood, acted as the director and conducted all client relations. Dewey’s has been a longstanding client of Astronaut. See this link for their work. We were thankful to be brought on to help service this video need.

Dewey’s is famed for their Moravian cookies and bakes private label cookies and crackers for stores like Harris Teeter and Trader Joe’s. They also have a handful of storefronts selling Dewey’s labeled goods in the Winston-Salem area. They were to be exhibiting at the Summer Fancy Foods Show at the Javits Center in NYC and needed a video loop showing their clean and efficient facility. The booth was designed to look like the interior of one of the traditional old Dewey’s Bakery locations, but with a tv framed up in the center back wall.

We spent one day shooting at four locations to gather broll depicting the process of crackers and two different types of cookies being made and packaged. A lot of gimbal work was used as well as a drone indoors. We did whatever was necessary to get the shots. We supplemented with additional lighting, filmed in slow motion, put the camera in the oven at one point and let a GoPro ride the conveyor with cookies about to be baked.

This was a great field trip to a well-known and beloved North Carolina institution. Our hope is that the video served Dewey’s well at the exhibition and helped them to land additional contracts with supermarket chains etc.

UPDATE:

The Javits Center convention was a success. The factories are backlogged with cookie production orders.

We ended up returning to Dewey’s in late 2017 to update the video to show some packaging, displays and to shoot more footage of different parts of the factory. The new piece was used at an internal convention and on social media.

 

 

Automated Robotic System

Hayward by way of Astronaut had us back to their factory where we filmed a piece on the manufacture of the world’s number one selling pool pump. This time the video focused on the automation of robotics that create different plastic parts. The process is shown from start to finish and live narration was provided live at an internal company meeting.

The Super Pump

Hayward makes the world’s top selling pool pump. It is dependable and affordable. On behalf of Astronaut, a branding agency based in Winston-Salem, NC, we were tasked with production of a video that showcased the manufacture and assembly of the pump. The video also needed to show the lifestyle provided by the pump all in the same high-energy piece. The primary purpose and intended audience of the piece was sales representatives at a worldwide Hayward corporate meeting. These would be people that needed to be pumped up about the pumps they were selling! They may not have had any previous grasp on where the product came from or where they were assembled. The piece hopefully tied different branches of the company together a little tighter. Working with Astronaut was a pleasure. Stephen Lockwood, the creative director and founder served as the producer on this project. We concepted the piece with the client, coordinated logistics and saw that the piece stayed on-brand.

This was a fun piece to shoot. It took two days and had me attaching GoPros to gigantic robots, flying a drone inside a warehouse, riding a palette of pool pumps down a quarter mile conveyor belt and riding a hoverboard paired with a MOVI M5 for smooth factory floor moving shots.