Our group went through two different ideas before we settled on filming the swimming practice. The first idea we had was to film the Chinese New Year celebrations in New York City. Ariel was planning to go down there, so our plan was to have her take a 360 camera and film what she sees. She would then upload her footage onto Google Drive, and Yeagee and I would edit it. Ariel couldn’t rent a camera for the duration of the trip, so the plan fell through.

Plan B was to film the Totally Fabulous Drag Show. I rented a 360 camera and was going to film the show. Also, I would interview some of the performers. The reason this plan fell through was that we needed to get clearance from Pride Union to film the performance. We didn’t contact the group far enough in advance, so we weren’t able to film the show. This led us to our final idea: film a SU Swim Team practice session. Our plan for filming was to rent a 360 camera and get shots of the swimmers practicing. We would also record the president of the team talking about the team. This ended up succeeding.

My role in the project was ultimately to be a cinematographer. That was my job for when we were trying to film the drag show. I had a similar job when we were filming the swim practice. One of the things I did was help decide on where we would position the camera. Through this process, I learned some basic elements of using the Nikon camera, and of filming in 360 in general. The first thing I learned is that you need to find a place to hide when you are filming in 360. This way, you can stay out of the shot. For our shoot, we had to hide behind a corner. This led to a problem of not knowing what is happening when the camera is rolling. One reason for this is that when you are filming, the Nikon app won’t show any video. This means you won’t know how the shot went until you sit down to edit the footage. As a result, you have to let the camera run for plenty of time for a shot. Also, you need to film from multiple angles so you have a variety of shots to choose from. Despite the problems, the video ended up turning out pretty well.