Personal Professional Practice: LIFF 360 Workshop Hosting

After being great technical help at LYFF earlier this year, I have been approached by the leaders of LIFF to possibly host a workshop to filmmakers on VR!

So excited at the opportunity and can't wait to get stuck in.

After a meeting it was decided that my workshop should take on a 360 film direction, teaching filmmakers about how to put together 360 footage, some principles behind filming 360 and how they can make it viewable in cardboard and other app, which sounds amazing.

My workshop will be 90mins long and It would be amazing to include a section where the filmmakers can go off and film their own 360 footage after being taught the technical, and at the end we can put their footage together however they wish, and at the end have created an awesome 360 video to put on Google Cardboard via Youtube or App, and show off to everyone!

I decided to brush up on my 360 film skills first of all.

Using the 360 footage I acquired from a friend at the VR Hackcess hackathon, I tested clipping and stitching of the clips in Adobe Premiere Pro, then exporting, then injecting spacial metadata, then uploading to Youtube;

And it worked great.

To render out equirectangular I needed to adjust some settings on the export, such as making the profile high, the level 5.1 and the frame rate 30, THEN in was able to adjust the aspect ratios to the custom size of the 360 footage.

I then tested some awesome 360 effects in Insta360;

These will be great to show people who want to make a video with 360 effects but not in 360... Such as the fisheye effect, little planet films etc, as little planets can't be exported out successfully into 360 images..

Here is an example of me keyframing some of these cool effects onto a video;

As you can see the video is no longer 360 viewable, which makes Insta360 great for cool video editing, photo effects and sharing your 360 videos on platforms which don't have 360 viewers.

So. done with the 360 editing. Now It would be great to show them some interactive film making using Unity! So I tested out a few techniques and decided that it would be great to show the process of dragging in 360 videos to unity, having a raycast pointer click on an object in that video and then BAM your into another 360 video, really simple and fun interaction which they can take away and elaborate on in future endeavors. This may take a while explaining as Unity is tricky for people who have never dealt with 3D software before, so I'm going to have to go really slow.

here is a video of a demo scene I made;

I feel this would engage and educate people in the workshop, though it might be a little heavy handed, its still amazing knowledge they will be inspired by.

Structure

10 min introduction to principles of VR filmmaking, to inspire them for when they start to film their own stuff.

10 min intro

10 min premiere stitching + Insta 360

20 min Unity

30 min filming session

20 min stitching films.

For the brochure of the workshop I created 2 possible thumbnails which I think advertise the nature of the workshop best, using my 360 camera.

I also created a pamphlet to hand out so people can take home and repeat the workshop with their 360 videos.

Here I am on the website for the event as well:

Cometh thee hour

All the prep for the workshop really paid off! I had a very successful day with my participants leaving happy and full of VR knowledge! It was a shame all 10 people couldn't make it, but the people I did have were perfect participants, eager to learn and passionate about VR, couldn't of hoped for better!

The technology behaved and everything went smoothly and according to plan! It was so enjoyable, teaching these professionals all about 360 film, and im so happy they had the most valuable experience. With there only being 5 people it meant they had more of a one to one session with me which they expressed they liked.

After my workshop in the afternoon Catherine Allen arrived for her talk. There was just enough time to catch a burrito with her: