https://youtu.be/YjQcdx01LfA

Our group project was to document the Bell Masters of Crouse at work. During our first shoot of exterior shots, it seemed the project would run smoothly…then we went to editing. After strategically planning out four different viewpoints of Crouse from various parts of campus, only one clip ended up being stichable. One time, one of the cameras stopped recording halfway through so we lost that scene. Another time the times didn't match up and for the other scene, we still don’t know what happened with it, but when we tried to open the footage on QuickTime it said there was no content available. So it remains a mystery, but we got one solid scene from the day. Lesson learned to always take multiple shots throughout the day because half of them may not work out in post production.

Also, as a side note, I personally learned while editing to make sure your hard drive has a good connection to its port or else the computer may eject the hard drive while syncing or transferring files causing all your files to be lost. After the experiencing my first extended time waiting around for the videos to render, sync, export, inject and upload, I’d rather not have to go through it twice just because I had a poor hard drive connection.

The next shoot went really well! We had a separate tazcam to make sure the audio wouldn’t get blown out on the rig since we were getting up close to the bells. We made sure to get different shots, but I think the hardest part of the shoot was realizing how poor lighting would be up by the bells themselves. We didn’t anticipate it to be as dark as it was and with every minute that passed it got even darker. We switched to the low-resolution settings, but still in post it didn’t help. The clips by the top of the bells were unsalvageable. In hindsight, I wish we would have brought a lighting kit.

Other than the lighting problems, we didn’t run into any issues while shooting itself. Once we got to post we found out that the shot of Cass walking up the stairs had some ghosting issues. The other shots though turned out great.

I didn’t do the final round of editing, but after seeing the final product the only part that really sticks out to me is the nader spot. I would have liked to have seen if it could have been made a little smaller. Otherwise, I thought that it turned out really well. I would love to go back during the day and reshoot up by the bells; I think that would add a lot to the video.

As my first 360 video project, I thought it went a lot smoother than I anticipated. It was a lot of fun and I’d love to go out and try shooting different scenes and experimenting with story telling techniques.