This project was a quick turnaround for ARC Energy, with just 2 hours of on-site video recording (with a crew of one!), and the remainder was editing the footage in Adobe Premiere. Thankfully I had had two key advantages. First, I was working with Rick, ARC’s CTO and a great on-camera personality who can simply “go” without a script and come up with usable material.

It’s also fortunate I had previously worked full-time at ARC, becoming a product expert in the relatively small field of industrial sapphire growth furnaces. We quickly roughed together an outline of topics to cover and Rick spoke to the camera just as if he was pitching a customer seeing these incredible sapphire furnaces for the first time.

Creating industrial sapphire sounds strange, keep in mind you likely have several pieces of such a product in your mobile phone, and any LED lights that are nearby. Sapphire is a core component to many high-brightness LED lights, and for the ultimate performance Apple chose sapphire for its iPhone camera lens covers, home buttons, and the faces for the high-end Apple Watches.

The products that manufacture such well-known consumer brands are often unknown, yet are no less innovative. This CHES 500 furnace is currently the world-record holder for the largest sapphire boule, weighing in at 660 pounds of pure industrial-grade sapphire. Watch the video below to see Rick tell the story of how this unique machine works.