The IKEA story

When Swedish furniture house, IKEA contracted video editor, Sven-Gunnar Lennartsson, to create a film on the firm's heritage, he had to work with a lot of archived footage that was stored in different formats. We look at why Lennartsson turned to the EDIUS for help.

Swedish company IKEA, which brought Scandinavian furniture design to the world, is now bringing its corporate history together in a series of videos with the help of Thomson GrassValley's EDIUS editing platform.

The first set of the series, which dates back to 1926 and covers the history of the company until 1986, is being created as a special end-of-year gift for the company's staff worldwide.

A second series is also being planned to bring the story up-to-date. The series is being created by Swedish freelance video editor, Sven-Gunnar Lennartsson.

The IKEA story began in 1926 with the birth of its founder, Ingvar Kamprad.

By the age of five, Kamprad is said to have been in business, selling matches to his neighbours. Before he turned 20, the young entrepreneur expanded into the furniture business and laid the foundation of the IKEA empire.

This film footage goes back to Kamprad's earliest years, and the archive has grown since then showing every innovation and development in the IKEA business.

"There was a lot of material available," commented Lennartsson, "but it was in all sorts of formats. Because there was so much material, we did not have time to transfer everything to a common format before starting the edit."

The solution lay in the EDIUS nonlinear video editor, which allows the end user to mix any combination of formats on a single timeline. "The EDIUS was perfect.