Pro Moviemaker Autumn 2018

MOVIE MATTERS MAKING SENSE OF VR

VR consumers are still viewing content on their phones rather than the more immersive headsets, while technology is moving on all the time, and no-one can be totally sure how the future roadmap is going to pan out. “At the moment TV and cinema options for VR are not really there,” says Adam, “which means that most productions we work on revolve around a cause or brand awareness. With the latter it’s about featured content being used to put a specific image into a consumer’s mind, while the former is more NGO related and can be a very powerful way of putting a message across.” In the four years since Vision3 first moved into VR a lot has happened, particularly in terms of kit that’s available. “We’ve always been gear agnostic,” says Adam, “and so will work with whatever is the best kit at the time. We have a close relationship with manufacturers and choose the tools for the job depending on what we’re looking to shoot. Often people are planning their content to match the camera solutions they happen to have, but we felt that this was the wrong way to go about things and that it was better to find camera solutions that enabled you to shoot what you wanted. “So we’ve always worked with a number of different cameras depending on what shoot we’re on, and we’ll select the best gear for the job. We might build our own camera solutions or maybe adapt those that are already out there to come up with what we need.” It wasn’t until the start of 2016 that a ready-made camera in the form of the revolutionary Jaunt One arrived that potentially could offer an all-in-one professional grade VR and 360 solution. Designed specifically for the production of 360 and VR content, the Jaunt One featured

“We travelled to some really remote and challenging shooting locations in Kenya”

costs a mere £3596 by comparison and yet can deliver VR footage at up to 6K and 360 images up to 8K, easily enough to satisfy the most discerning professional clientele. “One of the big advantages for us is that the Insta360 Pro comes in a much smaller form factor,” says Adam, “meaning that it’s easier to take it out on location and also capable of surviving demanding situations that feature extreme heat and dust.” The device was used on a VR collaboration with Passion Planet produced for Conservation International, called My Africa , which focuses on a community that’s reknitting the bonds that have long enabled people and wildlife to coexist. The story follows the journey of a young Samburu woman named Naltwasha Leripe – her words narrated by Academy Award-winning and Kenyan- raised actress Lupita Nyong’o – as she takes viewers through her community’s daily life, tending livestock, digging ‘singing’ wells deep into dry riverbanks and rescuing a baby elephant orphaned by a poacher’s gun. “We travelled to some really remote and challenging shooting locations in Kenya,” says Adam, “using primarily the Insta360 Pro Camera Solution but also designing a number of bespoke Stereo 360 camera rigs for certain shots. Postproduction was carried out in London, with every shot treated as a Visual Effect so that the end result was clean with no sign of such things as the tripod or the camera’s shadows.

24 f/2.9 fixed aperture camera modules that were all synchronised to ensure they fired at the same time, and the combined unit utilised a single cable for power, avoiding the messy workarounds that had to be used in the past when multiple GoPros might have needed to be utilised. There was also support for 120fps capture and a live viewfinder. Having completed a number of high profile VR projects using the Jaunt One, including a production for Ben Ainslie’s America’s Cup team and a match day VR experience for Manchester City FC, Adam and the team at Vision3 moved on from a product that was on sale for a tidy $95,000 to one that’s on general sale for a fraction of that amount. The Insta360 Pro, consisting of six f/2.4 fisheye lenses,

IMAGES The team used a combination of the Insta360 Pro Camera Solution and their own bespoke camera rigs in some of the film’s challenging locations.

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PRO MOVIEMAKER AUTUMN 2018

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