No More Filters: A Creators Guide To 360 Degree Content

Jarrod Weise
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read

When you spend most of your day focused on digital behaviors, capturing the beauty of the physical world becomes pretty important. I’ve been working steadily with my SLR for three years now, and the Adobe Photography subscription has been a game changer for me. It’s also been a tremendous amount of fun to contribute some of my favorites to We Are Cisco. Then I realized it’s time to boldly go where few have gone before, 360-degree photos and video. It’s immersive, dynamic and completely unfiltered. In the Instagram age everything is carefully staged, filtered and posted in a way that creates an alternate reality that sits on an island, this is the opposite. You have no control over the scene, you have no control over the angle, and there are no more filters. Welcome to reality so take it all in and enjoy the ride.

Start Thinking 4th Dimensionally

Maybe one of the greatest movies of all time is Back To The Future. There is a scene in part 3 when Doc Brown and Marty McFly are deep into planning their return trip from the old west. They are looking at a bridge that is unfinished and Marty panics. Doc assures Marty that when they get back to 1985, the bridge will be there. What doc is referring to is the 4th dimension, time. When you shoot 360, you are now a point in space capturing height, width, and depth, but you are also moving through time. Time here is important for two very fundamental reasons. The first is these files are gigantic in size and storage can be an issue, in addition to working with the file itself. I shoot 2K resolution primarily to maintain the 30fps frame rate. With that said, 30 seconds can be too big to even send in Gmail. I work on the Samsung Gear 360 (2017) which means I have a 256GB card in it, but I have to wireless transfer to Samsung Galaxy S8+ for the software to stitch it all together. That can be a bit of a wait if you are in a hurry to get something up on social media. I may look into external storage shortly to be the bridge here. The second factor here is timing the scene itself. Since you have no real control over all the elements of a scene, you are at the mercy of time to get the job done. When you shoot a regular photo, you can change position for a different angle, move your subject, and rework this. When you shoot in 360, you can’t even move your body out of frame. Are you smiling while you are shooting? What are you wearing? Did you let the person you are sitting next to know they will be on camera? There are so many elements that you have to think very carefully your window of time. Sit down and plan before you shoot what moment you are trying to place audience inside. It’s as though you are holding a time machine and you have the ability to send people to that very place to that very moment. Find a great one but just know it will be unfiltered.

2D Doesn’t Always Translate to 3D

If you have ever gone to the movies and sat in a 3D movie that was just ok but not great you have felt this. If the content was not planned for 3D than doing it in 3D feels like a gimmick. It’s also a reason why not every modern movie is shot in IMAX. Aside from the cost and logistics of doing it, the big reason is you are capturing so much in a field of view. Sometimes it’s gravy, like an extreme wide angle view from the cockpit of a P-51 (which I’m going to see Thursday night). Other times it’s distracting or annoying. I sat in the social hub of Cisco Live Las Vegas this year and did a short 360 live stream and I realized that whatever I had to say was drowned out by the opportunity for people watching on the floor. The first is enhanced by wider field of view, the second you are actually competing against it. This comes down to the right tool for the right job. If I were smarter at the time, I would have rounded up 3 more people and did a circular panel discussion gathered around the camera. Next year.

New Audience Interactions and Limitations

Don’t under estimate the power of a new way to interact with your audience. I recorded the first 2 minutes of the Chuck Robbins keynote at Cisco Live this year and what I went back and saw in VR was breath taking. I shared it with a few family members who have no frame of reference to the event, and they speechless. It added a layer of immersion that was truly something to see. Far different than an elementary live stream on a website. The limitation comes from allowing a broader audience to enjoy that experience. Not everyone has a Gear VR headset or an equivalent model, and that can exclude certain audience segments. Of course, you can scroll around on a smartphone to look at the image, but it’s still a two-dimensional experience. From a journey perspective, it’s hard to say where the step is next from VR content like a video, to another visit on a web page, or other digital property. Where things get even more interesting is using VR in a blend of both content interaction and collaboration or social interaction like the demonstration at Enterprise Connect around Cisco Spark VR.

In the end, this is the final frontier for content creation and consumption, and while it seems to be for a select few now and mostly for entertainment purposes, the time has come to start experimenting. As Alan Kay said, “The only way, you can predict the future is to build it.” Time to get out there and build something.

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Written by

#ContentMarketing strategist @Cisco. I love to tell stories. Old #Millennial. Geek Dad // Golfer // Technologist // My tweets are my own

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