How to film your plant without giving away your process

Marketing wants the floor on camera. Engineering hears the word camera and pictures a competitor pausing the video on your fixture.

Both are right. The floor is the best proof you have, and the way you run it took years to figure out. So a lot of plants never film it at all, and buyers never see the one thing that makes them different.

You can show the floor without showing how you do it. The difference is a plan your engineers approve before anyone rolls. Here is the one we use.

Why it matters

Federal law defines a trade secret to include processes, procedures, techniques and designs, however they are stored, and it names "photographically" in the list. That is 18 U.S.C. 1839.

The same definition comes with a condition. Information stays a trade secret only if "the owner thereof has taken reasonable measures to keep such information secret." Footage nobody reviewed before it went online is hard to call a reasonable measure.

This is not legal advice. Your counsel decides what counts as a secret. A good crew makes that decision easy to carry out on shoot day.

What buyers need, and what they don't

Buyers need to see that the equipment exists and runs, that the people know what they are doing, and that the parts come out right. They need scale, order and proof.

They do not need your setup sheets, your fixture designs, the parameters on a screen, or the sequence that took ten years to get right. A competitor needs exactly those things.

So the rule is simple. Show the result, not the recipe.

Before shoot day

Walk the floor with whoever owns the process. We walk a floor before shoot day whenever we can, because it changes what we film. Here it also shows us what a camera should never point at.

Write a no film list. Fixtures, programs on screens, whiteboards, travelers, drawings, and any machine or cell you would rather nobody saw. Put it in writing so everyone on the floor knows it.

Approve the shot list. Every shot, where it is, and what sits in the background. Engineering strikes anything on the no film list and signs the rest.

Ask about your customers. A part with a customer's name or design on it can fall under an agreement you signed with that customer. Ask before one lands in a frame.

On the day

Shoot wide on the process, close on the result. A wide shot of a cell running says capacity. A close shot of a finished part says quality. Neither one shows how you got there.

Use focus as a fence. Shallow focus turns a setup sheet behind an operator into a soft blur while the operator stays sharp.

Screens get checked before we roll. Anything showing a program, a customer name or a part number gets turned off, turned away or kept out of the frame.

Ask people why, not how. An operator explaining why a tolerance matters sells the shop. The same operator walking through the parameters gives it away. We plan the interview questions with you before shoot day.

Keep someone from your side on the floor. Someone who knows the no film list and can say stop, and a crew that stops.

After the shoot

Nothing is published without your approval. Engineering reviews every cut against the no film list, frame by frame if they want to.

Decide where the raw footage lives. Raw footage holds every frame we shot, including the ones that never made the cut. If you keep it, keep it where your other controlled files live. More on whether you get the raw footage.

Keep a record of the review. Who approved which cut, and when. It costs nothing to keep, and your counsel will know whether it helps.

What it looks like when it works

For Shield Security Doors, everything that makes the door worth the money is inside it. Steel, reinforcement, hardware. The proof was a SWAT team trying to break through on camera. Nobody watching learned how the door is built. Everybody watching saw what it did.

That is the whole idea. Your buyer does not want your recipe. They want to know you can deliver it.

Defense work has its own, stricter rules. Here is how filming works in an ITAR facility.