Inventing The Grammar Of 360 Video
Video pioneer Justin Johnson’s 360Buzz studio tackles a new medium’s technical and creative challenges
So much excitement behind 360 video comes from the opportunity for a new generation of directors and producers to reinvent both narrative and documentary filmmaking. Justin Johnson, whose production company 360Buzz is less than a year old, is as new to this medium as anyone — but his pedigree as a digital videomaker stretches all the way back to the late 1990s.
Known as “the Internet’s first videoblogger,” Johnson joined Next New Networks in 2007. Along the way, as that company was acquired by Google, Johnson co-created Indy Mogul and the Video Time Machine app, and became an early power user on Tumblr, with whose founder David Karp he shared a mentor, Fred Siebert.
At 360Buzz, Johnson works with brands from Sony Pictures Entertainment (he was the technical consultant for the innovative 360 trailer for Don’t Breathe, produced by Avatar Labs and Invincible Group) to Wired, while innovating the use of 360 for travel videos at locations from Palm Springs and Amsterdam. Johnson recently visited our offices to talk about the path that has led to his business and creative success in this challenging new medium.
There Is Only R: You founded two companies, Indy Mogul being the first.
Justin Johnson: I have been in the Internet creative space since I was in high school. I’ve always found myself drawn to technology that was also a puzzle, and that’s why in 1999, as a kid growing up in small-town Wisconsin, my two venues for getting my video work out there were public access — I had a show on public access — and my other option, which really wasn’t fleshed out for most people, was the Internet: how do you reach a wide audience?
And so obviously to get out of my small town, to reach a larger audience, the Internet was the way of doing it. I had to figure out, how do I just get video into my computer? How do I encode it? What codecs do I use? I needed to find an empty e-server that let me have unlimited bandwidth, because so many times if the video went viral, you’d get a bill not check in the mail. It was just a whole different world.
I’ve been doing this kind of creative stuff forever. I created an app that was the number one iPad app in America. I founded a bunch of websites. But the core of all the things that I do really goes back to video. And to maybe a lesser extent, storytelling. Going through all these sorts of technical ways of how do I get my content up, and being very, very early to the YouTube game, Organic Stew Networks, and founding Indy Mogul with my friend Eric, which was really rewarding because it was something that inspired a lot of other people.
I find the complications and the puzzle solving of the 360 space a very similar feeling as in 1999, where it was like, “Well, how in the hell do I get video from a camera into my computer and edit it? Then from there, how do I distribute it to an audience who’s willing to download a 15-meg file that’ll take an hour and they’ll watch a two-minute video?”
So that’s what really draws me to it, first of all as a puzzle. But secondly, my core is really documentary and documentary storytelling. I find that the 360 space really lends itself much better to documentary than it does narrative.
There’s so many things to solve in narrative: where do you put the crew, where do you put the lights? His vision is so much like if the camera’s the audience’s head and he’s just moving it, and shaking it and zooming it. It’s really a control freak’s dream, being a film director.
I’m more of a sponge. The idea of 360 is especially appealing beyond the technical side of it. It’s the fact that I can immerse an audience in a natural situation where they can expect to see me there and it’s not out of place and maybe feel a part of the experience that I’m having. That’s really what draws me to 360.
Tell me about that app.
I created an app called Video Time Machine. It started off as a website called YouTube Time Machine. And what we essentially did, it was me and two friends, and we categorized by hand about 25,000 videos from YouTube by the year that they were originally created.
YouTube has, of course, an insane amount of content, and that content is historical and it’s stuff like commercials from the ‘60s, or the first recorded sound, which is from 1860, which is on YouTube. It’s not a great sound, but there it is on YouTube.
I had this little handheld Pico projector. And I was up late one night just watching Michael Jordan videos from 1996, and it just brought me back to it. And I started watching commercials from 1996 and I was like wow, I just love 1996.
I was telling this dear friend of mine, I was like “YouTube — it’s like a time machine.” He said that should be a website, so we made the website, launched a beta version. Over the course of a weekend, I think we had 300,000 visitors. Roger Ebert tweeted about it and it was everywhere, so we built an app.
I was working at YouTube at the time, or it was that transition period of being at the startup [Next New Networks] acquired by YouTube.
Did you found that startup?
I was not a founder, but I was the first creative hire. I found out later they hired me before they had secured funding for the company. We had a breakfast meeting with the four founders and Fred Siebert was like, “You’re hired, Justin.” And then only maybe two, three years ago I found out that after that meeting they were like, “How are you hiring this kid? We don’t even have money yet!”
What was the progression from Indy Mogul to what you’re doing now? Where did 360 first come into the picture as a professional thing, and not just an interest?
Indy Mogul has had a very interesting life. It was one of the many networks that we launched at Next New Networks. I really wanted to have a filmmaking network, so I created/pitched Indy Mogul and that became our filmmaking network. That’s almost a decade ago.
So from there, it was part of Next New Network and won the Webbies and all kinds of stuff. It was part of YouTube once YouTube acquired the company. And then recently about a year ago, we had the opportunity, essentially YouTube gave us the right to Indy Mogul back now. I haven’t worked there for five or six years and it was just kind of lying dormant, so they offered to give it back to us. It was really an awesome gesture.
But even before that, I started tinkering with 360 because I loved the idea of it. But for me, first thing, I really hate GoPros. So I saw these monstrous — I called them “GoPro orgies” — just these clusterfucks of GoPros. I just hate GoPro, so once the Ricoh Theta came out and it was something I could tinker with, it reminded me of having my first Pixelvision video camera. It was made by Fisher Price, and my dad bought it when I was seven or eight. It recorded these little weird modified audio tapes. It was this tiny little pixelated black-and-white image.
People have revived this technology.
Yeah, video art people are into it. It reminded me of being a kid, and all the sudden it’s like, Oh my god! I can film something and I’m going to try and make stop-motion, or I’m going to recreate scenes from The Empire Strikes Back with little Lego figures in the frozen Wisconsin tundra. When I got the Ricoh, it really gave me this sense of something novel, something new.
So that was the impetus for you to start your studio now?
I have a company called 360Buzz. We’ve done stuff with Loot Crate and Sony Pictures, collaborated with a lot of YouTube friends I have. That’s my professional 360-facing endeavor.
So for example, the Indy Mogul cart that we built [using a repurposed wheelchair for 360 video] was really a solution to a problem we were facing while we were producing this video for Sony Pictures, which was how do we move the camera? It’s the simplest and dumbest problem to have, and if you were a traditional filmmaker it wouldn’t really be an issue, but since you’re filming in 360, it just becomes a complete nightmare.
We just thought about every possible solution. Should we string a wire across the room? Should we put it on a drone? A drone can’t really fly inside, we need it to be in this cramped basement. The only way of figuring it out was having an idea and seeing similar things that were being talked about, but actually having built something that doesn’t exist yet.
I think that’s what good creative problem solving is: I need a thing that doesn’t exist, so how do I build it to solve my problem? And then it ends up solving other people’s problems.
This is now available?
We rented it out to people for other shoots. There are other systems that may be just about to come out, but they have their own limitations. So my production partner Eric, who built the 360 cart, did a shoot in Chicago, and he did a shoot in New York. He’s done several shoots in Los Angeles.
We’ve worked with most of the major 360 video creating companies and I think almost all the 360 cameras. The rig certainly found its niche because people who are trying to solve this problem didn’t really have any ready-made solutions.
How were other people solving it?
Most the time when people call us they have racked their brains over all the same types of solutions that we were trying to think of, and had come to the same sort of dead end. The only difference between them and us is that my business partner Eric was just a really fantastically talented builder technologically and was able to cobble together these parts that he found and based on some other devices that we had built before, create something new essentially from scratch.
Good creative problem solving is: I need a thing that doesn’t exist, so how do I build it to solve my problem? And then it ends up solving other people’s problems.
That was the real difference, the fact that we had someone who’s got some knowledge and technical know-how in building mechanical things. A lot of us are more on the creative end, or digitally-focused end. That particular skill set is what helped us solve the problem for the Sony Pictures project, and by virtue of creating the video tutorial, and Seth Porges’s article, it really brought the spotlight to us. When people are searching to solve this, they find us and desperately call us and try to figure it out.
So should you scale up and start producing them?
I could. I feel like when it comes to hardware, China will always be — and there’s already knockoffs that we’ve seen coming out. I’ve found there’s certain things I like doing and if I would be successful with starting a hardware company, that seems really boring and I don’t want to do that.
How did it change what you were able to do with the medium creatively, once you had that problem solved?
The big difference is that it allows some kind of basic directorial intent. Right now, we’re in this weird ugly duckling phase where there’s not really surround options, by whatever the audio term is, to direct an audience.
What the moving rig allows is to direct the audience to say, hey, we’re going down this sort of a path. And because it’s on a wheeled cart, you can really use it on any surface, anywhere, versus having a track you’ve got to paint out, or a lot of circumstances where other rigs wouldn’t really work.
The New York Times had a 360 video about retaking Fallujah, where you get the motion because they put the camera on a tank.
If you’re using a 2-D 360 camera, because you’re in motion, it lets you get a better sense of scale of what’s around you. Whereas if you’re putting something on a tripod, because you don’t have that dynamic nature of moving towards something and being able to gauge distance by virtue of that — and most people are viewing just on their phones, which of course are 2-D. Even in headsets, most things are being captured in 2-D.
So it lets you give the audience more of a sense of scale and more of a sense of the space that you’re in, which I think is really important.
What we’ve found is really fast movements, it’s like driving fast in a car. You have a point of reference, so you can go at whatever speed you want, you’re not going to get motion sick. But the car makes you more of like a floating orb without that context of your surroundings, having something that you’re inside of to link to.
We found that moving really, really slow is actually the best way of doing it. But even that really, really slight movement still allows you to get a good sense of space without feeling too sick.
What are some of the big advances that you feel you’ve made as a filmmaker and a commercial maker? What have you learned since you got the Ricoh camera and started really working on this in earnest?
What’s been fun is really figuring out the best practices for filming in 360. As a director and a creator, I’ve really boiled down my life goals into two main points: I want to travel the world and meet interesting people.
So one of the first videos I did was with my wife and me, a video tour of Venice, CA, going to different restaurants. And we did an interview with a friend of mine who’s a 360 expert.
You discover little things that you don’t really think about. When I sat down to interview him, I just put the camera in the middle of the table and I was like, it’s getting everything so this is going to be great. But what’s being overused now is the idea of hey, we have 360 space, let’s use all of it and make this cacophony of action and motion.
But in reality you have to think of it, like most things, should happen like a stage — like it’s generally in front of you. When I was trying to watch this interview back on my phone or in the Oculus, I’m looking at who I’m talking to, and I’m looking at me, and I’m looking back and forth. It just is not a very pleasant viewer experience.
You have to think of the camera more like another person. If you are sitting at a table having dinner with someone and you want to have an audience member, you wouldn’t have them sit in the middle of the table. That’s just weird. You would have to sit off to the side.
So you really have to think of the camera more as, it’s a person. It’s not just a lens. It’s like, where would a person naturally want to be in this particular situation? Last week I filmed a bunch of 360 stuff all around Amsterdam, so I’m thinking I want the camera to generally be eye height because it’s like I’m taking someone on a tour with me.
That’s how I interact with the camera and how I treat it. So I’m not going to take that person and sit them in the middle of the table and force them to look back and forth. It just doesn’t make sense.
You know, if you’re watching a tennis match, you wouldn’t want to sit in the middle of the net and look — it already hurts your neck enough as it is, and especially in this time, you can’t really use 360 sound. Sound is going to be a real thing. Once recording 360 sound becomes more available and more readily easy to use, then I think that’s going to allow directors to have a lot more ways of directing the audience to look in a certain way.
You really have to think of the camera as a person. It’s not just a lens. It’s like where would a person naturally want to be in this particular situation.
Honestly, I think film directors are kind of the worst pedigree to have for 360 because you have to relinquish a lot of control. I think people more in the theater world who have directed plays — and honestly, even people that make haunted houses, things like that — those are the real kinds of instincts that we as 360 filmmakers should be looking to. Because that correlates more with a 360 video than traditional filmmaking, which is so controlled and it seems to me like a different piece.
Theater is a good analogy. We interviewed a team at NYU that’s producing Hamlet in VR. Is Sleep No More a reference for you?
Yeah, I think of Sleep No More as not only relevant to 360, but just what video games will be in the future — where it is immersive and not really super interactive, but you can travel around. Just the way that they build the stories is interesting.
Are there tangible examples in any of your projects where you can describe how 360 changes the way you tell the story you’re telling?
I’ve primarily focused on documentaries, but I think the best example is the Sony project we did for Don’t Breathe. The idea of the movie is that there are these teenagers and they’re going to go rob this blind guy because like he’s blind, he’s hopeless, he’s got all this valuable stuff in his house.
And he traps them in the basement and shuts off all the lights, and it’s like pitch black. And essentially they’re in the same boat as him, but of course, he’s better equipped to deal with pitch blackness in a place he knows, which is great conceit for a film.
So Avatar Labs and Sony Pictures really wanted a sense of movement. And how 360 also helped is that we had the actors who started off together, and the lights shut off and they’re in separate parts of the room, just walking around. We wanted the audience to be able to feel trapped in that space with them.
We did a lot of other kooky stuff like putting LED lights underneath and around the camera to give almost a night vision sort of effect that mimicked what happens in the film.
So what it allowed our director, Julian Higgins, to do is, it’s almost like a scary dream, like you’re slowly heading towards this exit and the bad character, the blind guy, is stalking around and you can follow him, or you can follow the girl character or the guy character. There’s a lot of repeat viewing.
The blind guy is the bad guy?
The blind guy is bad, yeah.
But he’s being robbed.
I guess that’s a good point. I mean, yeah.
The kids are trying to rob him!
Yeah, I guess you feel bad for the kids because he’s trying to murder them.
If we would’ve done this video in rectangular format it would’ve been just like the movie. What’s the difference? You’re just showing an audience the same kind of scene as the movie. So what [360] allowed us to do is create a new experience from the content of the film, but even more immersive, and allow the audience to follow several different stories and several different paths in the field, like you’re watching this blind guy stalk these kids through the basement.
Because you have the option to look wherever you want, it makes it a little more scary. Because you don’t know if you’re looking in the right direction.
A traditional horror film, you’re like something scary is going to happen because of this, and this and this. In 360, I think it makes it more scary because you’re being directed a little bit less and you don’t know what’s going to come around that corner.
That’s something I think we’re going to see a lot more of, where it’s taking like films that were shot rectangularly and making a 360 experience from them to immerse the audience in them.
Sounds like this was on a very fast turnaround. You haven’t had the company very long.
That’s the virtue of having a lot of contacts. For Sony, these were a lot of problems we solved. Just from a technical standpoint, the brand really, really wanted a moving camera. That was their goal from the beginning.
And we didn’t know if it was possible because there wasn’t a lot of ways of doing that. We really figured it out on the fly. I mean, we knew we could figure it out, but we weren’t sure exactly how we were going to figure it out.
So the cart was completed the day before the shoot. It was that level of intensity. Beyond that, our other option was using a GoPro rig that the agency provided. We were in a space where it was so small that we would have all kinds of issues with the stitch lines.
Not only that, if the camera is moving, it makes fixing all the stitch lines even more of a nightmare because cameras can shake in different ways and it just becomes a mess. They’re all kind of moving and they’re not super locked in — and I hate GoPro. And because it’s a confined space that we wanted to feel claustrophobic, the actors were very, very close to the camera. With the GoPro rig, you really don’t want anyone closer than three to five feet, and the ceiling was three feet above where the camera was, so the location that we took so long to find would have been impossible to use with the rig.
So I researched and found you could order a Gear 360 from Korea. That arrived like two days before the shoot. It was all these different really novel problems that in six months or even right now, they won’t be issues. They’ll just be products that you can buy easily, now that the Gear 360 is out in the US.
But it was that kind of super intense crunch-time creative problem-solving that made that project really fun — really difficult, but really fun — and I think helped to make us leaders in the space, in terms of especially the cart. And we get emails pretty frequently about people wanting us to either build them a cart, or sell them a cart, or renting the cart from us.
And for me personally, because I was so early to Internet video, I’m sort of known as the Internet’s first video blogger. I was posting videos of my life in like 2003 when that was scary, and weird and no one did that.
Can you talk about getting business in 360 when it’s such a new industry, and there aren’t the same players that there have been in traditional video? What’s it like to be kind of developing a new studio in this field that didn’t even exist a short time ago?
Well, it’s interesting. One thing that we found is that because we have good connections, projects do just kind of pop up. Right now, people aren’t spending a ton of money. But it’s fully starting to pick up, and I think as more headsets get out there and there’s more of an audience for it, that will continue.
For any project that I pitch, I’m always also trying to get a 360 supplementary content in there, until that becomes the primary content. Because people like Facebook or YouTube, there’s gonna be money that goes into creating content from the top down like that.
We did a project where we worked with a DP who specializes in 360 video. So it’s just by virtue of renting out the rig, and working on projects and connecting with people like that DP who has referred us to other projects. Because when he gets hired on, they say “we want a moving shot,” he calls us first.
It’s about creating those connections and working with other people who like working with you. Really, it’s the same as the traditional film industry — I get hired as a director, and I have a short list of DPs that I love working with. I worked with my friend Kyle yesterday because he’s an amazing steady cam operator and I’ve known him for 10 years. It’s about creating those really savvy connections early on, so when that DP gets hired, he’s going to refer us to be the technical solution to moving the camera and sometimes the operator of the camera.
Do you look ahead and say a year from now I’d really like to be specializing on x or y kind of project?
Absolutely. For me personally it’s the travel space, because 360 lends itself so well to that. I’m really excited about cameras. I believe it’s the Odyssey which uses the Jaunt system that Google is creating, where there are going to be more ready-made, easy to use, easy to stitch because it’s done in the cloud, 3-D 360 cameras. You convey a sense of space so well. I’m looking to create compelling travel videos that feature me in some way as like a host, and take place in interesting and beautiful parts of the world.
Sort of the 360 Anthony Bourdain.
Exactly, because there’s a lot of power in seeing someone in content and then having a meeting with them. If I get hired by some brand to do something, it doesn’t matter if I don’t appear in that video, but I really think there’s a lot of value, if you can be good on a camera, to be on camera. Because it really gives you a little more oomph in the meeting if someone’s like “Oh, I saw you in my office and we took a trip somewhere together.”
So the travel videos with my wife and I, we’re testing how do I package a 360 show. It’s not just one shot, it’s a show. It’s got motion graphics, music, voiceover. We did one around Venice, CA and we did one in Palm Springs, took the tram to the top of the mountain there.
Joshua Tree would be great for 360.
Anywhere beautiful and amazing. When I was in London I was filming a commercial about a cricket player for New Balance shoes. And what I shot yesterday was for Shure Microphones. It’s brands who want to convey authentic stories about real people who use their products.
The Internet is like, you need to be authentic. What I’m really good at is presenting an authentic story that brands like, and people like, and doesn’t come off as phony. If I can be hired to go out with a camera, again you can’t have a huge crew because they have to hide. Someone who can do a lot by themselves with one other person is what people are going to be looking for, and who has the right gear and equipment to do it in a very simple way.
If I’m being sent out to do something in a vineyard about a really amazing vineyard, and interview people who work there, those are the types of projects that I will be getting in, and that’s why I’m looking now to position myself smartly in that space.
Festivals actually and concerts also seem like a natural. I imagine 360 was all over Burning Man.
We actually shot official 360 video for Burning Man. They hired us to to go out to the playa and film all the art carts, and we got special access to film the man burning and all that stuff. They’ll put it up on their official channel. It’s like one of the many kind of gigs that just came through the pipeline.
You say it’s bad to have a background in traditional film to do 360, but some of the people you’re working with — and yourself — do have a long track record in traditional video. What happens when somebody who’s worked a long time traditionally is now in this medium? Is there something about the skill set that does transfer, or do you have to unlearn your old techniques?
I think it really comes down to more of a conceptual and the way you block how people move in the space. For a DP, you need to figure out smart ways of hiding the lights. It’s the same principles: you want things to look good. But you need to figure out how are we either going to hide the lights in postproduction some way, or figure out smart methods of rigging lights or using existing lights in smart ways?
So from the more technical standpoint, you can definitely use 90 percent of your core skills to make a video look really great. You just have to learn kind of those small rules that make the difference. How the camera use is and because it’s doing everything, obviously there’s challenges which can be painted out or fixed in post.
What I’m really good at is presenting an authentic story that brands like, and people like, and doesn’t come off as phony.
But I think it really comes down to more of the director sort of standpoint and position. It’s a different process working with actors, because you really have to think of it as a one-shot kind of thing. And even then it’s like right now you can’t do too much with how the camera is positioned.
I’m not a narrative director, but so much of what makes a great director great is that they have a very specific vision for the camera to create a sense of atmosphere and a sense of mood. So you can’t make cut fast — if you’re in a scene for less than 20 seconds, it’s way too fast. Even then, far less scenes are happening and the actors are going for far longer when they’re going.
So certainly I don’t think it’s impossible for a narrative director, but a narrative director who’s got a really specific vision, like David Lynch or something like that, I think it would be harder for him to do a 360 video.
That said, the Mr. Robot 360 video that came out with the director of that — it was a little rough around the edges, but there were a lot of interesting novel concepts in that video. So I think that directors that are up and coming now, where their brains are still malleable, are going to have more success.
It kind of reminds of when Internet video was really starting to become a thing and you would hear a name director doing like, “Oh, I’m doing an Internet video.” They’d always be terrible because the director was like “I’m getting paid shit for this, I don’t really care, it’s for the Internet.”
So it’s the people who likely are younger or just embrace the technology, and are able to figure out new ways of getting their vision across because they are from that kind of more up and coming, more malleable...I think they’ll do well.
But someone with a theater background who’s used to directing actors, like a long scene, and used to dealing where you kind of set the mechanism, and then let it run and then tweak it from there — I think it will be simpler for them because essentially placing the camera is just like placing the audience. And the director knows how to place an audience, and then the theatrical sort of element knows how to place an audience naturally.
So I’m not saying it’s not impossible, but I definitely think it’ll be easier for people from that mindset. And I would like to see more things that come from people from that sort of background.
In the time you’ve been working, there’s been a lot of hype about 360. Do you have the perception that the audience is growing, that more people are able to see your work in the format it’s intended, not just on their phones, but on some kind of device?
Well, I certainly think it can’t be regressing. It reminds me of when I was doing Internet video in 2001. I had a friend that got 500 unique visitors to his site every day and I was like “that’s fucking crazy!” I had maybe 200 and was like “All right, 200 people are watching my stuff,” like that’s pretty good.
I do really think the phones are great. It’s still a viable way of viewing the content. What you lose is the sense of scale that I think really makes 360 video powerful when viewed in a headset. The more content you create, the headsets become better and lower profile, people want to go back and watch that content.
Same as like the HD, going from standard def to HD, when somebody gets an HD TV, they want to get all the HD things and watch all the HD things. It’s good to make content now.
It does feel like it’s growing. The problem is that you can’t really track, as far as I know. There’s no metric on Facebook that says you have a million views on your video and 20,000 were in Oculus. As a creator, you don’t know how it’s being consumed, versus x-amount of people watched on mobile, x-amount of people watched on desktop, like you can track that on YouTube. Maybe I’m totally wrong, I just don’t know.
If that does exist, I’d like to know about it and if it doesn’t exist, I’d like it to exist. Because that would allow you to say oh, a third of my audience is watching on their Oculus, or on their Gear VR or their Vive. Or to say wow, only 1% of my audience is watching and maybe you know, I shouldn’t be as concerned about that.
Do you ever get feedback?
One example is my friend Barry [Pousman] worked on a film called Clouds Over Sidra, which is a super powerful 360 video about a little girl living in a Syrian refugee camp. Before it was online, it was touring around at film festivals, so it was a controlled viewing experience. He knew that if people were going to watch, they were watching in a headset that’s being provided to them at whatever particular venue they’re at.
I watched and it was really powerful, you just feel so immersed in the scene, but anecdotally, people are crying in their headsets because it’s a powerful emotional piece. Right now, that’s really the primary way for a director to get that kind of reaction from an audience. The video we did for Sony, I’m guessing that 99 percent of people watched it on their phones. So the feedback we’re getting is from people on their phones.
There was someone doing an event for a brand. They wanted to put people on a hot air balloon ride. How do you use the event space? I was like there should be wind, we should have fans blow timed to an experience — you can add that extra kind of flavor to it, or a kind of snow that comes through.
You can really control the experience and you know they’re going to watch it in the headset, so you can film in something that’s stereoscopic and know they’re going to be able to actually see it, not just have it be on their phones.
Those are exciting sorts of events. Even though it’s entirely virtual, if you can watch people experience it in a live setting, almost like the joy of a film festival. I’ve had videos that’ve had millions of views, but when I did my feature film [Double Digits], the most powerful screening for me was watching it in an audience of 300 people in a beautiful old theater in Wichita, Kansas. And people coming up to me and saying “that was great.”
I found the experience of that was much more rewarding and powerful. As exciting as it is to ride the wave of having a video that’s going viral, having a dozen people — just the look on their faces and seeing in their eyes like they were moved by my documentary, that was more powerful than having there be a thousand comments.
So I would love to be able to watch content I create in that kind of circumstance with a live audience and see them kind of react while in the headset. I think I’d probably get the most out of that.
