Filmmaking paradigm shift... going from 2D to 360.

Although I jumped into 360 video production fairly late in the game... December 2017, it's something I've been leading up to all my life. (For more on that, here's my Wikipedia page.) As Mac user I never had the hardware power to do it until December 2017 when the iMac Pro was released, but 3D immersive imagery has been a huge part of my career, from the mid 1980s when I spearheaded the development of Atari-based 3D animation systems, to the 1990s when I led the development of the most popular 3D content creation system in the world... Autodesk's 3ds Max. But my first love was always telling stories with film (initially 8mm movies in school) and photographs (my dad and I built a darkroom together when I was 11 years old). After I sold my company to Autodesk in the late 90s, I rekindled my love of analog image-making, first exploring digital photography and then graduating to storytelling with video. I built a successful career as a maker of short films, did the film festival circuit and won a bunch of awards. And in 2015 I bought a google cardboard unit and started to become amazed by some of the immersive content that was available. But I was jealous that I couldn't make any of these films on the Mac!

I'm now happily integrating all of the things I've learned over the past 40 years about how to tell stories in all sorts of dimensions, and enthusiastically learning as I go from the pioneers who've been doing the 360 thing for a few years now.

I'm in the process of bringing up a new blog (www.360filmmaking.com) as a way of sharing how I'm re-learning how to make films in this new style... 360 video is much more about choreography around the camera than cinematography and storytelling with the camera. I'm planning on launching the blog before the end of January 2018 and I'll be writing a meta blog about creating it here on Steemit as I build it out.

Here's my first experimental 360 video... the cast of a local theatrical company singing "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" directly to you. This style of 360 video is not so much about telling a story as it is about putting you into the center of the action. It's a simple technique and only needs a strong song and cast to pull it off.

The most interesting thing for me about this video is that, because the singers come right up to the camera in the 2nd half, I get a visceral feeling that they are singing directly to me. That, plus the content of the song, which is an instruction to the listener, makes it feel very immersive. The song choice was important and I was given a few options, finally choosing this one because it had a certain personal immediacy that I thought would work best. It was a good choice.

LESSONS LEARNED: 1) Have the lighting designer turn up all the lighting instruments. I was able to record this at a relatively low ISO200. 2) Instruct the performers that when they move into the camera at the end, they should pick a lens and stay in front of that lens as they get closer. Most of them followed this instruction, mitigating stitching artifacts on performers faces. 3) It's really important to make this visually interesting... the costumes go a long way towards that. (there's nothing like good props to help tell a story)

If you have a google cardboard viewer, use the YoutubeVR app to view it in your headset. If not, you can use Chrome to mouse around in the "magic view" 2D window.

Thanks for watching.

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