2019 — 360 VR Production: Nurturing Nations School & Safehouse

Making a 360 VR campaign video to inspire donors without resorting to poverty porn

-Company: TribeXR (my company)
-Dates: June 2019
-Role: Executive Producer, Creative Director

Context:

Nurturing Nations is a non-profit focused on serving Ghanaian children through offering educational opportunities. Nurturing Nations raises minor contributions through its website, and sometimes receives major donations. One of their major donors was unable to travel to Ghana to meet the students and faculty for themselves, so the organization wanted us to create a 360VR video to give them as close an experience as possible to being there, as well as have a piece that could be used for their fund raising events and engagements.

Creative Decisions:

How can we make this 360 VR piece as genuine and raw as possible?

• No slow motion shots, keep it real and natural.
• No narrator overlay, we want the viewer to feel like they’re there, less of a voyeur and more as a listener and witness.
• No black and white footage. Color, we believe evokes life, light, and energy, where black and white footage evokes feelings of otherness, death, decay, everything opposite what these amazing people had to share.
• No hiring local ‘talent’, only use actual faculty members and students
• Originally the major donor mentioned something to the effect of, “I want a shot where I’m reaching down and pulling up one of these children.” At first this sounds like a great heroic shot, however, we objected and didn’t do this shot on practical grounds that this kind of shot was out of scope and budget for this production, but primarily on moral grounds that we don’t want to create a piece evoking any white savior kind of imagery.
• Make it look as great as possible: We filmed using an Insta360 Pro II, shooting in 8K
• Make use of subtitles for Youtube viewing (up to 4K viewing)
• Capture the life, beauty, and happiness of the children as much as possible. To do this we left the camera in their courtyard for 30 minutes and just captured everything that was happening, singing, kids whacking each other, playing soccer, dancing, it was beautiful and takes up the last half of the video.

Bonus

During this 10 day trip, we spent 5days filming, 1 day working putting on a health clinic in partnership with local doctors and nurses where we tested attendees for Malaria, glucose levels to test for diabetes, vision, and were able to help treat a lot of minor issues, 2 days on a safari in Mole National Park in the northern region, and 2 days traveling to and from Ghana.