Over the weekend, I listened to Brandon Zamel of Springbok entertainment speak on his thoughts around 360 Video. He was joined by the Galvanized soul crew at this event. Brandon took great effort in walking us through his thoughts around how he and his team put together the “New Generation 360 video” and also highlighted some of the technical nuances and the challenges that his team had to face while developing this video.

This is a nice example of 360 work and it shows how this technology can be used with music videos. As simple as this looks, it takes incredible amount of planning and development to get it right. The pre-production planning took several months compared to the shoot which was spread over a couple of days.

No Rule # 1

Do not cut corners with your pre-production planning activites. If you were to spend a dollar in production of a 360 Video, this is a step that should not be overlooked. In some instances 20 to 30 cents of the dollar may need to be spend here in order to save you heartaches as you move through the other steps. The sentiment was shared also by Patrick Eleazar, who runs Realidyne. We will be featuring a cover story on Realidyne and their exciting work in the coming weeks.

No Rule #2

Trying to create a 360 video in Stereo is a pain and is not fun. Furthermore, the distribution platforms that are out there do not yet support a good stereoscopic rendering. Sticking with Mono is the way to go for now. Using Stereo can also increase the postproduction processing costs. For the New Generation video, they used a 6-rig GoPro unit in Mono. Also remember that most existing mass distribution platforms do not support positional audio. Try not to overcomplicate the audio aspects.

No Rule # 3

Complexity of stitching is directly proportional to the number of cameras that you have in your 360 rig. This increases the costs with postproduction. There are only a handful of people and companies that are providing support for professional VR post processing work. Foundry is a company that is at the forefronts of this work with its product Nuke.

No Rule #4

Ask yourself the question. “Why am I shooting in 360?” When developing the storyboard, do you actually have interesting content associated with at least three of the four quadrants for your 360 plane. If not, ask yourself “Why am I really shooting in 360?”

No rule # 5

This is a brand new area and people are still trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. There are no best practices that are cast in stone yet. Your objective should be around how you can harness the different components of this exciting technology and create a compelling experience for the audience. Create your content, put it out there and move on!

There are no Rules yet. Have fun while you build out the creative!