Final 360 Film

Shoot and Edit

On our shoot day we took all the equipment we had booked out round to Nicole's house and began to set up in her Grandads studio.
We made sure the Go Pro rig was charged and had SD cards in and ready to go, and formatted them before we began. We attached the rig to a light stand and placed it in the center of the room. As for the room itself, it was well lit and needed very little doing to it. There were already really interesting objects in all corners, we simply laid out his sketchbooks so they were in view and that was it.
One of my favourite parts of the room was that the ceiling had loads of items hanging from it as well which was really great for us because of course, it's 360 so people can look everywhere.

Once we had imported our footage we had to colour grade it. As it was all filmed on the same camera at the same time we luckily didn't have to correct much of it, it was more of a making sure the lighting was okay, and that it looked good. We ended up have the doorway slightly over exposed but when we lowered the brightness then the rest of the room became too dark. We decided that the room was the most important part to have well lit so we kept the doorway a bit too bright in exchange for having the room well lit.

When we made our quick stitch, it worked quite well already and didn't need loads doing to it. There were however, a few bad stitch lines and so we used masking to fix them. We placed the mask points over those areas that were overlapping poorly and most of the time they got better. There was one stitch line however that was not very good and no matter what we did we couldn't get it to line up properly which was very frustrating.

We also used control points to help, and ours were all green from the start so there wasn't a lot for us to do. 

For our sound we had recorded Nicole's Grandad talking about the items in the room. The idea behind this was that it would direct the viewers gaze to areas around the room, so the could drag the camera around with it. 

We recorded a lot more of him talking than we needed and so we spent a lot of time cutting up the sound and making it run smoothly from one clip to the next. I had been holding a shot gun mic to record him, but on occasion he had moved away from the mic to quickly and so that section of the sound was quieter, so I had to play around with the volume of various clips so that the sound all matched up.

Research and Idea

For research I looked at really wide variety of 360 films on youtube. I found this rollercoaster film which I thought was great at first because one the one hand you can look at the view, and where the rollercoaster is going to go next, and on the other hand you can look the other direction, towards all the people who are screaming as they go over the drops.
I did find however that the movement was a bit too much and made me feel quite motion sick as I watched it so I decided that that wasn't something I wanted to incorporate into my piece if I could avoid it.



This next one I really liked because of how simple it was, and easy to execute. What made it interesting was the content. This is something I'm going to draw on in my own piece. When I first saw this film I thought it was CGI but the people who posted it have confirmed in the comments section that is is not digitally engineered.
It's got beautiful lighting and is really simple and minimalistic in its design (for want of a better word), as in its literally just grassland and sky. Plus elephants. Which is a pretty big part of it.



We were working in pairs for this project, and with my partner Nicole we came up with the idea of doing an observational 360 film.
We began running through various locations that we could use to shoot at, and Nicole suggested her Grandads art studio that he has at the back of his house. Talking it over and hearing about all the eccentric objects he stored in there was enough for us to decide that this would be a great place to make our film.
We would booked out the 360 equipment to take to Nicole's grandads house and set up in his studio. We would then let the camera run and add sound later on.

360 Practice Shoot and Workshops

Never having done 360 film before, this was a very new and exciting experience for me. Our tutor went through how to work a go pro and how to use the 360 rig which was tricky as it was very different to anything I had used before.
It was a simple enough design. It's cube shaped, and has six go pro cameras that fit into a slot of each side. These create a 360 view of their surroundings. When you have completed your filming you import the footage into a specialist software called Omni Importer. We also use Auto Pano Giga and Auto Pano Video.

We decided to do a practice shoot to see what we could do with the technology, and get a feel for the sort of thing we would be doing, with the advantage of having a tutor around to assist us. We used a handle to attach the 360 rig securely to a BMX bike and did a quick film where the bike was ridden down the road and filmed as it went. We then used the quick stitch that the Omni Importer allows and exported it. This was the final result.



If we had uploaded it to youtube we would have been able to click and drag to view it as if it was 360 rather than just look at it like this which is quite disorientating, and there were also some stitching problems as the subject was quite close up to the cameras.