Dublin in the Dark, a VR documentary with the FT and Google
How shooting and finishing in sterescopic 3D is considerably more complicated than ‘traditional’ 360 video.
We’ve just finished one of our biggest projects to date — Dublin in the Dark, part of the FT’s Hidden Cities series. The latest VR documentary short takes you on a journey into the darker side of Dublin, the side that influences crime writers, like our narrator, the award-winning author Tana French. In this documentary we explore the emergence of a new kind of crime fiction to emerge from Dublin (and Ireland) in the wake of the 2008 recession — Emerald Noir.
We worked closely with Adam & Eve DDB and the FT on the development of the creative and the practicalities of bringing it to life. The look and feel of the film was to be moody and atmospheric, so we had to either shoot on cameras with great low light capability or arrange the scenes to suit us.
Our travels took us to many, off the beaten track areas of Dublin, from Poolbeg Power Station, an embalmers, a graveyard, right through to the elegant grandeur of Trinity College Library.
One of the main distinctions in this project was the fact that it was shot in 3D (with the exception of the drone shots). This had big ramifications in how we planned both the shoot and the post. Both shooting in 3D and post producing 3D content are considerably more complicated and involved than ‘traditional’ 360 video. We took two 3D rigs with us — our custom-built Johnny-Five and the Google Jump.
The resulting footage was uploaded to YouTube 360 as a 4k by 4k ProRes Mov, taking around 24hrs for the upload and processing. So if you’ve got a really good connection, and are on the Daydream platform, you can see it in all its 3D 360° glory!
Hidden Cities: Dublin launches in the UK and Europe 3rd December, you can find out more about this project on the Visualise website.
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