360 video you should be watching
Welcome to Vimeo 360! Oh how we’ve wanted to share this new world with you!
360 video is breaking out in the film world in a meaningful way and we’re so excited to share some of our favorite work from Vimeo creators. The medium itself is already presenting so many new questions for audiences and creators alike. What does it mean to create a film when you can’t tell the audience where to look? How do you tell a story when you know the viewer might be missing part of a scene? As 360 filmmaker Greg Barth tells it, you have to “[think] about film in a completely new way, rebuilding it from the ground up.” Each of these immersive videos approach these questions in different ways and attempt to tackle them for with different executions. You’ll be transported inside of a 3D scanned metropolis, thrust back in time to dig up dinosaurs, discover instruments that don’t exist, meet people on the other side of the world, be thrust into the woods, and more. Follow our 360 channel to see more hand-curated cinematic videos.
Curator note: You can watch 360 video on desktop, mobile, or the Vimeo app. We strongly encourage you to seek out a headset for the optimal experience — our Android and iOS apps sync up with most headsets.
Before Zurich was a village, a town, or the largest city in Switzerland, it was dirt, trees, and rock. It emerged from all of these things, stitched together. In Dirk Koy’s mesmerizing 360 video “Zurich 2.0” he sets out to experience the city in a different way — by slowly building it from scratch using 3D scanned images (photogrammetry). As the warped images of greenery and urban life start to piece together, a makeshift uncanny valley forms around you, enveloping you in a familiar, yet alien landscape. Koy told me that the creation of visual worlds is a central part of his animation work. 360 film offered the possibility of making those worlds much more immersive. It’s mind-melting eye candy at its best. Take a trip to “Zurich 2.0” — you won’t regret it.
For the American Museum of Natural History’s first VR/360 production, they set out to create an immersive history and paleontology lesson from one of the museum’s most important Asiatic expeditions. As you experience the piece, you become part of a 1920s paleontology expedition with Roy Chapman Andrews, discovering dinosaurs, minerals, and rocks. You are transported back in time through an impressive array of archival black-and-white images, film stock, and maps. These are integrated with matte painting, 360 environments, and motion-graphics to build a virtual Gobi desert. As you learn more and more about what this expedition uncovered, you are finally transported into the museum’s archives to see the actual fossils and samples. This piece is the crème de la crème of the museum series Shelf Life, which explores “fantastic stories from far-away places where some of their 33 million specimens and artifacts were discovered.”
“The Future of Music” comes to us from six-time Staff Pick alum Greg Barth. This trippy mockumentary piece takes 360 video to the limits, breaking gravity and physics in the process, to explore the world of Carré Bleu, an artist and composer. With bizarre costumes, bright colors, and imaginative instruments Carré explains his unique musical production methods while simultaneously creating more of that sweet, weird, and surreal pop music. Barth said the film was “born out of wanting to experiment with how to tell a story in VR.” He crafted the dialogue and set design specifically for the medium in order to maximize its effect. You can watch an equally strange “making of” video here.
The world saw a lot of turmoil in 2016 (not that 2017 is shaping up to be any better), but there are still moments that show us the world cares about its people. One of those moments was when United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon traveled to the most distressed countries. Captured with unprecedented access to Ban and the citizens, this short from LIFE VR swells with emotion as you start to understand why VR is often called the “empathy machine.”
If you live in a city then, like me, you’re familiar with the incessant honks of cars, chatter of people, and banging of who the hell knows what. Some days getting out is all I can think about — escaping the hustle, the bustle, the noise. Marc Zimmerman must have known that feeling well, since he sat down (presumably in a city) and digitally rendered his stunning piece “Longing for Wilderness.” It captures that ineffable feeling of being lost/found in the woods, of being simply … in nature. You can learn more about Marc’s process here.
With immersive motion-graphics and haunting photographs and interviews, VR-directing duo Jason Drakeford and Thomas Nybo transport you into a true story: the escape of two 11-year-old girls from Syria and their fateful, serendipitous friendship after being threatened by ISIS. When I spoke with Jason about his process, he was intent on avoiding any 360-rig tech because of its current limitations, and instead he wanted to blend projection-mapping video art with abstract thought. To Jason, the most fascinating thing about 360 video and VR filmmaking is the merge between cinema and physical space. This piece is just an example of how he is shaking up the form. Check out more of his work here.
Follow the Vimeo 360 Cinema channel to watch even more immersive experiences.
Originally published at Vimeo.
