Help with my photo project please ?

AndySwinden

AndySwinden

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Andy
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I have been asked by the guys at work to do some photos to document our move into new premises. Here is some background info :

-We are a manufacturing company (working with metal mainly)
- we currently have a 5 hectare site with 16 buildings
- some of the buildings are over 100 years old
- our company has been on these premises over 77 years
- we are moving to new site with an office building and a huge factory building (330k sq ft)
-the relocation project will take around 18 months, Ive been asked to capture the last year of us being at the current site, and the move into the new site
- the existing site will be demolished once we have moved out.

So, does anyone have any ideas as to how I could do about this ?

Some of my ideas so far include time lapse videos of one site empying and one site filling up, wide angle / fish eye shots from on high, showing the old buildings as the seasons change over the last year.....

All ideas / hints / tips welcome !

Thanks :)
 
Get the project plan/schedule for the move and work out which are the key elements, when critical kit is being moved, when cranes will be on site, when the MD/Chairman packs his desk.. I've never seen it done before, but it might be fun to get a shot of the last person to turn the lights out.
 
Sounds like an interesting project! Most of my industrial photography has been of abandoned industrial sites and industrial landscapes, but I was allowed into an active woollen mill (in Huddersfield, coincidentally) to photograph in there.

My advice would be, to try and capture the essence of the place, the things that make it unique, and different to a brand new faceless flatpack industrial box like the new place will probably be! I'd be thinking of capturing the workers, especially the long serving ones, at their workplaces, the strange idiosyncracies and customs that every workplace has, old machinery being moved or scapped, people clocking in for the first and last time (long exposures to capture movement maybe), and symbolic stuff like the sign being taken down, or the place being locked up. Capturing an empty factory can be difficult (I've done enough urbex to know there's an art to it!), but look for how window light can enter unlit spaces, odds and emds that have been left behind, before and after pictures of the new and old sites, e.g. Old place being full then being empty, and the new place going from empty to full etc.

I'd also recommend checking out the work of Ian Beesley, he's done quite a lot of industrial sites, including a couple that were closing down, and he was commissioned to capture the last few months. While not the same, there colud be parallels?
 
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