Experiments with Google’s Jump
The Happy Finish Interactive team were approached by Google’s Arts & Culture & Hamburg’s Elbpharmonie to produce a short 360 video with the creative brief: ‘A cultural landmark where all music meets’. The experience was commissioned to be the first video (experience) to allow guests VIP access to the brand new cultural landmark in Hamburg before the doors officially opened. Naturally we chose to shoot with The GoPro Odyssey Jump camera. The following article lists my experiences and learnings as VR Director of Photography.
Hang on a minute, What’s a VR Director of Photography?
Good question! A VR Director of Photography (VR DOP) is becoming more and more common across the developing VR / 360 video industry. Happy Finish has four VR DOPs. A VR DOP is a hybrid between a camera operator and a VFX coordinator / supervisor. Often a VR Director of Photography has a background in software, technology, editing, compositing and creative. On a live set shooting 360 video it can be a complicated juggling a lot composited frames (technically that’s what a 360 video is). A VR DOP effectively works on a project from pre production (assessing individual scenes from a technical perspective), all the way through to post production (working with the VFX dept stitching and compositing the shots together and finally grading the shot to match the desired look). It all depends on the budget of a project on how involved the VR DOP is but in essence you tend to find one throughout the entire life of a 360 video project.
10 things I wish I knew before shooting…
Below are 10 key things I found out whilst making this film. There are tonnes more but these stood out to be the most important ones.
- Don’t under schedule the shoot time (there’s never enough time)
- Bring a set of 4 spare batteries (and make sure they are charged)
- The 1st Camera Assistant is your best-friend (make sure you always have one! They don’t have to be super experienced just make sure they are good at hiding in the scene!
- Don’t shoot on a set with complicated patterns… Google Jump Stitcher doesn’t deal with complicated railings and banisters that great (but it seems to be getting better) ref: 01min 06secs
- The left and right eye sometimes comes out back to front from the Jump Stitcher!
- Spatial audio doesn’t need to be over kill — keep it simple. As this was a music video, to avoid the risk of over loading the user we kept the spatial mix simple; by just highlighting small areas within the scene and helping to guide them around the converging story lines.
- Keep it simple… Slow cuts…
- Stereo post is a f*#king b*^ch especially if it’s 8K!
- Explain the whole missing Zenith / Nadir thing first to the client!
- (Don’t) Go into post with(out) a workflow / pipeline…
Our Post Workflow… (I wish!)
Don’t ever go into post without a workflow / pipeline. It will guarantee bite you in the ass if you don’t! Going forward we are using the pipeline outlined (on the left). The key thing is managing proxies and onlines for your editor, VFX and grade team. Sound is also important. Make sure the sound engineer on the shoot hands you all the stems after the shoot for your editor or assistant editor to line them up otherwise your sound designer is going to be fishing for needles in a haystack when he eventually sees the EDL from the editor. Make sure all your creative work happens in proxies. Even the toughest most spec’d out PC is going to chug dealing with 4K / 8K uncompressed stereo latlongs.
A (kind of) Conclusion
Beware the VFX demigods! There’s still no ‘experts’ in the 360 video field (yet). It’s still a ‘MacGyver’ industry and people are still experimenting with the medium. There are a few more experienced at producing the content and there’s content now out in public domain that people reference as high technical achievement, but the more we experiment and share our highs and lows the more likely we are to cement the medium. Happy 360 filmmaking.
