Fear of Heights? Of Angles in VR and Immersive Journalism
TL;DR: height and angle of view can be useful tools for storytelling. They convey a sense of direction and tell you where to look.
Many great posts have been written on Medium about shooting 360°/VR videos, about (fast-paced) editing, composition, engagement, etc.
As an addition, I’d like to share my thoughts on a topic that is, in my experience, less discussed: the height at which the camera is set up, and thus, the angle the scene will be watched from (not the journalistic angle).
I was reading Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University earlier today. It is a fascinating read, albeit it describes working conditions almost extinct in the industry. In a chapter, Jack Hart, former managing editor of The Oregonian offers a Storyteller’s Lexicon. One definition in particular caught my eye: Stance.
Stance: Where the writer places the tripod that holds the mental camera used for viewing the action. Typical journalistic distance is like a hanging balloon, in which the writer seems to be observing the action from a spot somewhere about twenty feet [that’s 6,1 meters for us rest of the world] over the character’s heads.
Now, the book was published in February 2007, four months before the first generation iPhone was unveiled, when modern VR was nothing but a distant dream. But it is hard not to notice the similarities between Hart’s definition and what we VR journalists and filmmakers do — with an actual camera, tripod and all: Choosing stances, to capture scenes after scenes.
What’s your stance on stances?
Here are a few stances my colleagues and I have experimented with, and what I think each can bring to VR storytelling.
- Shooting for a news organisation, one could have instinctively the idea to set up the camera at eye level with the person(s) in the scene. It works for flat videos, especially interviews, and often in photojournalism, so why not? It’s perfectly valid, and it is the most convenient and immersion-causing, plus it’s easy to know what the camera will capture: you just need to look around you. On the downside, I tend to think it is fairly neutral in terms of storytelling and could get bland if overused.
So what if we want to spice things up?
In a crowd/crowded place, you are going to need to elevate your camera, lest you want to film nothing but faces, ears, and back of heads. The higher vantage point will make the viewer further away from the people, but as he/she rises above, the scene captured makes a lot more sense. My colleague in Turkey was literally surrounded by a sea of flags, and setting the camera above the crowd’s head reinforced the sense of display of patriotism these anti-coup demonstrators hoped to achieve. You can also see the packed plaza and streets of Pamplona during the San Fermin festival here and realize how popular this event truly is.
Placing the camera (here a Samsung Gear 360) on a table, at the level of the hands of the persons in the scene helps, I think, to focus attention on what they are actually doing. It’s a busy, colorful workshop, but there’s a craftsman sewing hems on a curtain, and that’s all you want to look at. It could work for any manual activity, even reading. Here the camera picks the details of the fabric the curtains are made of, which adds a layer of texture in the video.
A variation on this is this shot, where Xavier, the owner of the workshop, was sitting down to use his sewing machine. The camera is somewhere between his eyes and hands. It feels like you are sitting in front of him and, even though his assistant is walking through the workshop, you tend to focus on the precise gesture of the artisan craftsman.
Hart talks about hanging balloons, which could feasible, or you can use drones if you feel adventurous, to go high. In this shoot, suspended by some strings from the ceiling the camera gives a nice bird’s eye view on the two persons working, without hampering their movements, which help the shoot to be more natural, less intrusive.
And when I mean high, I mean HIGH. Even if it means having to climb up a self-propelled telescopic platform to get a good angle of the place you are filming.
We must have been a good 15 meters (close to 50 feets) up in the air for that shot — with a Ricoh Theta S which explains the quality.
From there, you can see the entire property/crazy museum that is the Adobe of Chaos for up there, and the sleepy village surrounding as well. It set up the scene, and the tensions underlying, pretty well.
And keep experimenting. We recently put a camera on the floor mat of a gymnastics routine performed by some of France’s best young gymnasts.
I was a little scared they’d step on or kick the camera but it turned out pretty great. Jumps, handstands, pyramids…Action everywhere! And from this worm’s eye view, their stunts looks even more impressive.
Now, of course, none of this is an exact science, just my thoughts on the matter. Words of encouragement, if needed, for VR storytellers to try and mix things up when it comes to heights and angles. They have, I think, the potential to be good additions to our toolbox to add meaning and direction to our immersive experiences.
As ever, comments and feedback are more than welcome!
P.S. Do not miss my first post “What I learned making my first VR journalism video”.
P.P.S. I almost titled this post “So you think you can stance” or “Stancing with the stars”. I am glad I did not.
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