What is Facility Management? – About the development of a promotional film
Contact: Marie Hoffmann, Ulf Kordts
Supervisor: Prof. Jens Nävy
Students of Facility Management are used to answering questions concerning what exactly the job description of a facility manager includes. This commonly demonstrates the preconception that facility managers are janitors.
Indeed, in November 2008, some of our fellow students were quite upset that even SternTV (German TV program) referred to facility managers as janitors in a TV program . Therefore, we wrote a letter to SternTV to explain Facility Management based on DIN EN 15221. Unfortunately, we did not hear anything back from SternTV.
At that point, we had the idea to make a film about the subject and some initial ideas were written down. The goal was not only to educate people about the job description of a facility manager, but also to get future students interested in this degree program.
However, we still lacked the right partners for the technical implementation. As a result, the project was put on hold until the winter semester 2009/2010; however, we kept thinking about it. Finally, we were able to form a cooperation with students of Media Technology at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW). The promotional film project was ready to start. We were planning on a preparation phase from October 2009 to March 2010 with filming for April.
The first step was to develop a suitable storyboard. How should Facility Management be presented? And above all, in such a way that even a non-professional can understand?
A very exciting and creative process began, which was a lot of fun but not always easy. This process resulted in the idea of using a building to explain the tasks of a facility manager to help the audience understand better. However, we still needed a suitable building that could function as an appealing visual setting. We worked very hard until we were finally able to find a property owned by an educational institution to act as a filming location.
Unfortunately, the filmed images were not released as we had hoped since the most appealing architectural images were understandably already being used for advertising purposes. For this reason, we had to settle for what we had.
We found the actress and voice actor online via ads in so-called social networks.
On April 19, 2010, we finally started shooting the film. Some scenes were shot quickly, others had to be repeated dozens of times. By about 17:00, we had all the footage we needed.
The sound recordings followed the next day. We organized a recording studio at HAW, or so we thought. In fact, we were then told: You will have to make your recordings in a recording studio that is not so well-equipped and not so well noise insulated. And next door, a recording of an opera was being edited. We were lucky to finally get an hour of recording time in a real recording studio, which was enough for us thanks to our excellent voice actor.
And then the work for us FM students was done. The Media Technology students edited the recordings and got the most out of our material.
Since June, the film has been finished and is always available to watch at the University Information Day.
