My final VR project of the semester was always going to be about my dream. Since September two fellow Syracuse University seniors and I have been growing our video production startup into a full fledged business. Our key distinguishing factor? We're going to live on a school bus when we graduate and drive around the country making short explainer videos for startups and small businesses to use for Kickstarter campaigns, business competitions, and on their company websites. We know a thing or two about crowdfunding campaigns too. Our Indiegogo campaign raised over $9500 and garnered us enough funding to buy our bus and start making our dreams a reality.

That's where my final project comes in. I wanted to use my newly acquired virtual reality skills to make something that brought all of our 140+ Indiegogo backers with us on our converted school bus. My first inclination was to use Unity to build a 3D model of the bus that people could walk onto and watch our video blogs inside of. That was my plan until one Mr. Dan Pacheco suggested a slightly more interesting and dynamic idea. Instead of a boring bus that people sat in, Dan's idea would be to put our backers in the shoes of giants. They would stand on a map of the USA and watch as our little bus toured the country, mapping out the path we will take when we get on the road in September. This was it. My awesome way of bringing all of our epic backers on our journey with us. I got to work.

I built the contiguous United States. I found an awesome replica of a school bus on the Unity asset store (it even had a special black hood, just like our bus). I began crafting my world. When I started adding the colliders and triggers that would put our bus into motion, however, I began to hit a road block. Then I hit a full on traffic jam. My bus still wouldn't move where I wanted it to, and the voice over tracks I'd recorded that would narrate the journey wouldn't play. The final nail in my dream was for some reason my FPS camera wouldn't show any video when I tested the files. I couldn't solve my problems and my back was against the wall. My failures hit me two days before the final due date. I needed a plan.

Unity is an amazingly powerful software and the things professional teams are putting together these days are downright stunning. I am not those professionals and I didn't have the team. I didn't have the time either. Instead of burying myself in work trying to figure out all of the issues with my Unity project, I scrapped the idea. I went back to what I know: videos. I run a video production company, and everyone who backed us knows that's what we do. An innovative, interesting, 360 degree video tour of how far our conversion has come would make for more than an interesting gift to the people who had brought us so far.

I managed to get my hands on a Ricoh Theta S, a 360 degree camera that largely avoids the hassle of stitching. With only two lenses and proprietary software, the stitching—my most hated, and usually the most difficult part of making a 360 video—was mostly avoided. This was great. I had only one day to get my project finished. Luckily for me, one of my cofounders had some Ricoh footage lying around that I could use to practice my editing skills. I tested making a basic 360 video. Then I tried adding in a cut and background music. Then I got a little full of myself and tried editing a 360 video completely from my iPhone. I wirelessly transferred the footage from the camera to my phone, and then used Youtube's mobile uploader to put my video on the web. I even threw on a cliché filter that Youtube suggested just for fun. What I forgot, however, was the meta data that would tell Youtube to treat the video as a 360 instead of a flat video. It was okay though. I would definitely use a computer to edit my real project.

With confidence I could finish the final edits by the due date at midnight, I took my camera and drove down to our bus. I filmed all day before having to retreat back to campus for an exam. Waiting in that room felt like it took forever, but as soon as I could I rushed out to edit my final masterpiece together. The workflow is a little long, but Ricoh's proprietary software made the "stitching" easy as pie. After that, Final Cut Pro X and "Spatial Media Metadata Injector" from Google got my video to a pristine final product. It was stressful. It was time consuming. It took multiple iterations, but eventually I did it. My final VR project was complete, and I had a shiny reward to show off to the backers who had helped me make my bus real.

Check out my final 360 degree tour on Youtube (the 8.2GB file exceeds Littlestar.com's 5GB limit).

Check out what my company (Out There Productions) is all about.

Don't miss our video blog that chronicles our adventures.

Stay connected with us going forward on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter.

Special thanks to The Gear Factory, Thrive Projects, and Ryan Pierson (check out his startup: Design to Table)!