GREEN SOLUTIONS JATS SOLAR PANEL

THE SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

This was one of the biggest projects in the greater Amman area regarding solar panels, and definitely, the first to be implemented within the Queen Alia International Airport.

The project was estimated to costs over hundreds of thousands of Jordanian Dinars (JOD/JD), and yet save millions more in energy consumption. It was indeed ambitious, but in retrospect, worth it. Chief Operations Officer Omar Al-Sadi and his team of researchers, architects, and engineers estimated the project should be built in about a month and a half (not including the prior years of research and design).

It was surely a feasible plan. Soon, they assembled together a dedicated team of workers who would live on site for the duration of the projects. I soon became good acquaintances with the workers as I saw them on a regular basis.

I was hired to photograph and film the process of this one-of-a-kind massive project. At the pre-production meeting, Omar assured me there was no one more capable of handling this project, and that he would provide the financial and moral support along the way in order to make this video the best it can be.

Before the solar panels could go up, Green Solutions LLC had to conduct many tests and case studies regarding the environmental impact that the solar panels would have on the environment, as well as how much glare would be reflected off of the light during all times of day and throughout the year; and above all, if the investment worth it?

Omar Al-Sadi had an ambitious plan, To have the Jordanian Airline Training and Simulation (JATS) center running 100% on solar energy. About six months after the installation of the solar panels, the JATS facility was fully sustained by the solar panels.

I remember privately talking with Omar about the video we were going to produce in order to document the whole process, and he mentioned how absurdly expensive it was to run the new flight simulators. There were over four high tech simulators in the facilities I visited, not to mention the countless offices, libraries, electronic archives, gyms, and other training facilities.

I made a small promotional video of the amenities that students have access to while taking courses at JATS here.

THE LOCATION

JATS is located within the jurisdiction of the Queen Alia International Airport. Not only that, but JATS was fence to fence neighbors with a small patch of government intelligence offices. Needless to say, I and all my gear along with the rented car had to be certified, licensed, and approved by a host of intelligence officers in order for me to operate there.

Upon location scouting the area beforehand with Omar Al-Sadi and the architect for the whole project, we agreed on angles of where to place the two GoPro cameras. Electrical supply was needed to be running to both cameras 24/7 in order to have them continuously shoot timelapse for the duration of the project.

GEAR TALK

The Canon 5D Mark III was used for the primary shots on the ground and a GoPro Hero 3 was used for backup angles. The GoPro Hero 4 Silver Edition was set up on a tripod and placed on the top-most angled corner of a high building facing down towards the project build site.

The choice of using the GoPro for the primary time-lapse recording was due to several reasons; it had a wide lens built into it which was capable of capturing the entire landscape overlooking the main project work-site. In addition to that, the time-lapse was going to be shot as RAW image files which come out to be 5K per frame. This allows for the highest quality possible from GoPro’s sensor especially if transcoded later for Adobe Premiere Pro.

Memory storage was definitely an issue. How was I going to data wrangle this commercial when the cameras were scattered across all the roofs, each going at their own pace filling up memory cards at their own time interval? I had first started out with the use of 64 Gb cards which gave me about an 8-hour window every day to go change out the cards.

I decided to ask Omar to buy 128 GB micro SD Cards so I could have a 14-hour window every day instead. Basically, this meant every fourteen hours I would drive all the way to the JATS facility on the outskirts of Amman, climb up a a few buildings and take out the micro SD Cards and offload the footage onto the 7 pound ASUS ROG laptop which I carried with me.

Offloading the footage onto the computer took about a 45 minutes to an hour. Because of the funny way time works, sometimes I was required to be on location at around 3 or 4 am in the morning to go climb the sides of buildings and offload the footage.

I chose to shoot the GoPro footage all in GoPro Cineform in order to preserve as much detail as possible in the footage and be able to match it to the best of my ability to a Canon 5D Mark III.

POST PRODUCTION WORKFLOW

The post-production workflow was something else entirely, hectic, stressful, and extremely CPU and GPU intensive. I had to work with over 2 mIllion pictures, which made up almost 2 TB of data that I had to sort through and edit.

The choice in music was definitely something difficult to choose, it did come in the end as I could be limited to edit to the beat of a song when I had 2 Terabytes of footage to sift through. Eventually, we ended up buying a license for a song and used it. It was perfect, commercial and worked to the beat of the edit.

In the end, the project proved worth it. The grand opening was a joyous and proud event, as the JATS facility finally became 100% self-sustaining, a step in the right direction for Jordan’s ecosystem and overall environmental health.